Waterknot's Creative Process

How I Make the Work

I’m Josh Nusbaum, the founder, primary artist, designer and creative director behind Waterknot.

I’ve been drawing, painting, printmaking and generally making things for nearly 50 years. I studied Studio Art and Environmental Studies in college, where my senior project took me into the Grand Canyon and Sierra Nevada to paint landscapes. In the years that followed, I continued working in traditional media, including oil painting and hand-carved block printing, and showed that work in solo gallery and restaurant exhibitions.

More than 15 years ago, I started Waterknot with a hundred-year-old letterpress that I rehabbed and operated by foot. Over time, handset type and photopolymer plates gave way to commercial printing, and pencils, paint and carving tools were joined by scanners, Photoshop, tablets and other digital tools.
Today, my practice is largely digital and includes generative AI.

My process today

Every Waterknot design is conceived, directed and completed by me. I develop the concepts, determine the creative direction, handle the design and typography, and make all final decisions about what becomes a Waterknot piece. Most of the imagery is developed through my own creative process, while a smaller portion incorporates artwork licensed from other artists, who are credited on those individual designs.
For my own work, creation is a process of experimentation and iteration. I might begin with an idea, a phrase, a sketch or simply something I want a card to communicate. I use a range of tools to develop the imagery and composition, making choices, rejecting what doesn’t work, changing direction and refining along the way.

Generative image-making can be an important part of that process and can produce imagery that becomes a significant component of the finished work. That imagery then goes through further hands-on design and refinement—which can include painting, color and texture work, compositional changes, editing and post-production.

The technology doesn’t decide what Waterknot should say, which direction is worth pursuing, what belongs in the collection or when something finally works. My methods have changed considerably over a lifetime of making things, but I’m still the person developing the ideas, steering the creative direction, making the choices and deciding when the work is finished.

The complicated part

I understand why these technologies make many artists and customers uncomfortable. I share some of those concerns. There are important questions about how these technologies are developed and trained, consent and compensation for creators, their effect on creative livelihoods, and the energy and resources required to operate them.

Those concerns influence the tools I choose. As these questions have become clearer, I’ve chosen to use image-generation models trained on licensed and public-domain content. Where licensed contributor content is used for training, the creators are compensated.

That choice doesn’t resolve every question surrounding these technologies. But how these tools are developed, how creators are treated and what impact they have all matter to me. As one small part of that effort, Waterknot supports the Mozilla Foundation, whose work includes advancing more open, accountable and human-centered approaches to technology.

I don’t believe there is one correct way for every artist to navigate this moment, and I respect artists who choose not to use these technologies. For my own creative life, I’ve chosen different boundaries for different kinds of work: I use these tools in my commercial visual-art practice. I don’t use them in my music or in my personal or literary writing.

The tools will undoubtedly keep changing. I expect my practice will too.

I still seem to be here to make marks.