As I worked on my “Revisions Of Johanna” project, I generated a lot of images I really liked, but which didn’t fit into the final project. I decided the best of them deserved their own gallery.

This page is a work in progress, I just kind of threw it up to get me started. I have plenty more images to sort through from this, plus I need to pare down these already posted ones to just the most interesting ones. But, still, you can get a good sense of what went on behind the scenes here, and hopefully, an understanding of why I didn’t just want these putative rejects to sit unused forever on my hard drive.

One additional note about the content of these images in the context of social awareness: For anyone interested, I addressed some thoughts about sexism and bias in AI-generated images on this site, in “About The Uneven Distribution Of Nudity In AI Images On This Site“. Anyone interested in that topic, please read that.

I. Ain’t it just like the night…

Initially, before I made what turned out to actually be the poor decision to use cats as a visual motif, I started just experimenting with phantasmagorical illustrations of the song’s lyrics, modeled on Dylan himself. And for Louise—who else but Gilligan’s Island’s “Ginger”, Tina Louise? This idea survived through to the final project with Dylan’s likeness appearing in just one image in the series, and Louise being represented in the final by an orange tabby.

And for the Vision—because the song is about the “visions” and not about the real Johanna, as the lyrics make it explicit, “concise and too clear, that Johanna’s not here”—call me morbid, but for what Dylan himself depicted as nothing but a mental image accompanied by a sense of longing, I saw a pale, unmoving beauty, owing as much in its representation of idealized love to Millais’s painting of “Ophelia” and the Decadent horror of Baudelaire’s “On Beauty” as to Dylan’s lyrics. This eventually morphed in the finished set, perhaps a little more appropriately to a surface reading of the song’s lyrics, into the form of the Vision simply being a pure being, depicted in my final rendition as a self-possessed white cat.

Click any image to enlarge

II. “Wild Johanna”

A few of the results that serendipitously arose during these sessions sparked some later prompt engineering experiments while working on a featured image idea for the “Local Color: Report On My Weekend” bit of fun, which eventually led to the gallery “Wild California Studies“. In these below images you can see the beginnings that series emerged from.

More to come. Man, I didn’t realize how many images I had socked away working on this one. To be continued…