With time on his hands in New York about a decade ago, artist Roger Mortimer began playing about with a digital notepad.
In the "Big Apple" as part of his prize for winning the Wallace Art Awards with Otago Harbour in 2014, Mortimer soon realised he had a lot of down time where painting was not possible, so he took up a stylus and began creating images on the notepad and then asking a translator app to convert them into English.
"So you'd get a funny thing — you'd draw a bird and the script would say ‘you're moving forward in life’ or something. You know, really kind of weird stuff."
When he returned to New Zealand he kept the practice up, but finding the logarithms kept improving he began to screenshot video camera footage from popular surf spots and run it through various programs. He ended up with poetry or language which he would then manipulate in a tool turning the text back into an image.
"It sounds complicated, but I then put that image back to overlap on to the surf footage."
He then posted the images on Instagram under "Morts Report" (a keen surfer, his nickname is Morts).
"There's hundreds of thousands. I've done lots and lots of posts. But you can sort of see a kind of a general fascination with the technology."
"Rather than even go through the process of creating a text, because the text identification became so good, it wouldn't have anything to do with the image any more. So I gave that away."
In his late 30s, Mortimer got sick with Crohn’s disease, so made the decision to go to art school rather than study psychology, as he did not have the energy to work with people. He then began to put objects into the scene.
"I sort of had the idea about how do I begin to merge the painting practice that I'm sort of known for with this other side project?"
So he started to use the visual language, especially the vignettes, based on a similar Dante’s mythology that he creates for his paintings and put it into the AI generated landscapes.
"I sort of wanted to just muck with things, make it look a little bit documentary, a little bit like reality."
The idea for the vignettes, which he first used in his paintings, came from a manuscript in the British Library.
"There are these people, these little activities going on within a map or a map landscape type environment. And that language, those characters, I sort of continue to sort of play with them a bit and mix them up a bit and change them around. To use them as prompts to create new vignettes based on the same Dante's mythology within a much more literal landscape."
"So there's this sort of fascination between the sea and the land and very broadly speaking, my own relationship with myself or my own psyche. And so I'm a part of the culture, so I don't see it as being fully personal."
While he started out on a notepad, today he often does the work on his phone when he gets bored watching television, following the prompts he gets, although he finds they are often quite bad, so he moves to Photoshop.
"I can start manipulating and start improving, say the hands. I'm very familiar with Photoshop as well, so I can make some adjustments, shall we say, that I'm not happy with."
But the crowning glory of the whole process is creating an analogue print in silver gelatin which reflects "something of an inner reality". Mortimer was able to process the prints in his photographer son’s darkroom.
"It really appeals to my sense of humour, [and] also appeals to that sort of journey between the object and this whole virtual world."
A small group of "faithful friends" appreciate the images, but most people find them disturbing or do not like them at all, he says. Mortimer was chuffed that Milford Gallery liked the works and they will be exhibited for the first time in a gallery.
"That was good for me because I actually really liked it. I wouldn’t do them if I wasn’t interested. I find it satisfying for some reason."
"I was good at maths at school. I even did some engineering for a while, like I studied it but didn’t become an engineer. I think there’s a sensibility towards pattern and number, and I don’t know how that interacts with technology."
While he fully appreciates the threat to the arts from AI, he is also fascinated with it as a tool and by how it improves its responses so quickly.
"I feel like the jury's still out. I think we're learning about it. We're not able to reflect on this period of time for maybe hundreds of years, but I have a feeling that whatever's going on, it's very epic in terms of the human civilisation."
That AI is using material without paying for it is unfair, but then he also says artists "are always stealing" when they look at someone else’s art and take on board an idea from it.
"That’s how culture works, you know. It's partly survival, it's partly curiosity, but we just adapt, and you can just adapt so fast."
He has been using technology in his works for years. His large-scale tapestries are created digitally.
"That's a sort of a combination of the painting and a digital project. I like doing that because the translation between the draft or the drawing and the painting is interesting to me. It's a bit like being a potter and making a pot and glazing it and then throwing it in the kiln. You get some really interesting variations and surprises."
The tapestries came about as a direct correlation to the medieval nature of his work as well as his need to have a distraction from painting from time to time.
"You can be a bit dissatisfied with the paintings. That's out of scale. Why didn't I do that? Or how can I do this? And so the Photoshop enables me to develop that image in another medium. And that's quite fun. It is expensive and frustrating at times."
Despite his forays into other genres, Mortimer still considers himself a painter and he spends most days in his studio painting.
Maps are still central to that work and have been since he began writing "stuff" on to paintings which led to his love of calligraphy. Then he had the idea to illuminate (the technique of decorating manuscripts, books or texts) his sickness benefit form.
"It appealed to my sense of humour. And so I pursued the illuminating of documents like tax forms, water bills and anything that was in the letterbox. And that started the relationship between the calligraphy and its origins, medieval origins."
So he began to access digital files of manuscripts and medieval imagery and calligraphy from museums and libraries around the world.
Back then he struggled to work out what image he would put in a document and then he got a book of New Zealand maps.
"I always thought there was something amazing about scientific drawings. The drawings had an element of beauty in them. That kind of coalesced two fields for me and I started drawing maps."
So with a huge database of maps downloaded then he had to work out what to put on them. So he dove into his database of medieval imagery.
Mortimer decided to put the database into storage and in the process came across a book at the British Library on Dante’s Divine Comedy.
"It wasn't even particularly well drawn. It was actually quite average. And that sort of appealed to my sense of humour too. I'll make it simple."
So he downloaded all of the images from the book and decided to work with that.
"That was about 12 or 15 years ago. I just decided to focus on that imagery and that became the language of my recent practice."
To Mortimer, each of his practices are different and how he feels about them depends on his mood.
"In the right context, displayed the right way in the right building, it becomes a bit of a package. So if you've got beautiful architecture, beautiful light, beautiful space, and my painting's on the wall and it looks good, that's great. It sort of feels like it's a great home for good work. And that's very satisfying because it means that people get to see it and I get to appreciate it fully, fully resolved."
TO SEE
Roger Mortimer, in Heaven vs Hell with Daniel McAuley, Clark Roworth, Antony Densham and George Savill, Milford Gallery, Dunedin until January 25, 2026. (Milford Gallery is closed December 20 to January 12).
