You Should Start Painting. No Really, You Should
Painting is fun, fulling and relatively immune to AI disruption
You should start painting this year. No really, you should start painting and start soon. Call it a “resolution” if you must. There’s a lot of reasons to paint but the one I want to talk about today is painting’s durability. A lot of kinds of work have been or are in danger of being automated or augmented by AI—except painting. First, let me share with you my evolving thoughts on image-generators, AI and painting. Then I’ll return to some reason why you should hit the art supply store as soon as you’re finished reading this.
Like a lot of creatively inclined nerds, I tried an early version of Dall-E, the image generating software from the company OpenAI, now famous for ChatGTP. Upon seeing the first few sets of images it conjured I was excited. Then I was terrified. After all, I have devoted much of my life to making images through sometimes slow and painstaking processes. If anyone can now make compelling images from just a few simple lines of text, what will become of the visual arts? Of painting? But even before the contours of this conversation were clearly defined there came along another novel technology, AI text generators.
Because research universities like the one where I work specialize in generating knowledge that often gets assembled and disseminated in the form of text, digital generation of coherent text is already a big challenge to university pedagogy. These technologies are particularly annoying to professors who require essays and other kinds of writing. As anyone on a college campus today knows, students (and professors) are using text generators to, well, generate all kinds of text. A skeptic of a liberal arts education might even say that “generating text” and lots of it is the essential task that college students today are asked to do. And so, universities are in a complicated arms race to figure out new ways of working against — or occasionally with — generative text AI platforms to ensure that learning continues to happen in college classrooms. In less than a couple years generative AI has gone from nascent niche toy of the tech-obsessed to a global phenomenon. Today, many people engaged with jobs that require writing already have a ChatGTP open in their browsers almost all the time.
Image generators, by contrast, a year later are still seen as something of a novelty, even for most art students and art professors who are engaged daily with “generating” and “reading” images. While AI-generated images online continue to proliferate and improve at amazing rates, they have not disrupted college art classrooms the way that text-generators have disrupted other disciplines. As it turns out, much of my initial fears about AI images and their impact on the visual arts seem to have been unfounded, at least for now.
The omnipresence of digital images of questionable provenance is nothing new. When Adobe’s Photoshop image-editing software first became popular there was a brief outcry about the coming impossibility of trusting images. And then it seems that the impact of digitally altered images was not so dramatic, or at least not as dramatic as many at the time predicted. And then years later when social media began flooding the internet with poor-quality digital images of unknown provenance, again images remained relatively (and miraculously it seems) trustworthy. And of course, painters continued to paint. AI will undoubtedly continue to generate weird images but I am skeptical that the impact of those images will be any different than the digital images that already flood our lives.
Here’s the thing. People paint not because they want to make images but because they want to paint! Art students and artists may ultimately record and share images of their paintings on social media or through some other digital mechanism but for most creators the initial appeal of painting and drawing is that they are physical practices that involve the human hand.
A lot of people believe AI will be as disruptive as the industrial revolution. I am skeptical of these claims, but I am open to the possibility. Generative AI technologies may change the world so dramatically that humans may find themselves want for something to do, or some way to communicate their unique human value to other humans. But perhaps just as likely is the outcome that just as the industrial revolution required new jobs, the AI revolution will create new jobs as well. Capitalism has been great so far at making sure people continue to work. Either way — whether everyone suddenly has a lot more leisure time (unlikely in a capitalist society) or whether there new bullshit jobs continue to proliferate — art-making and in particular painting will be one of the few things left to do. Yes, it sounds a little strange. But consider how strange it must have seemed to workers just one hundred years ago that so many people would be sitting around all day gazing into tiny glowing screens, typing, texting and calling it “work”. If typing text is the main way humans work today, what happens when we no longer have to?
Here’s Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, the company that shook artists with Dall-E and then everyone else with ChatGTP, discussing “handmade products” on the New York Times podcast Hardfork with Kevin Roose:
Kevin Roose: And there’s going to be something valuable in their, sort of — I don’t know — non-AI-assisted work?
Sam Altman: I expect, like — I expect that if we look forward to the future, things — everything that — things that we want to be cheap can get much cheaper, and things that we want to be expensive are going to be astronomically expensive.
Kevin Roose: Like what?
Sam Altman: Real estate, handmade goods, art. And so totally, like, there will be a huge premium on things like that. And there will be many people who really — there’s always been a — even when machine-made products have been much better, there has always been a premium on handmade products. And I’d expect that to intensify.
New York Times Hard Fork Podcast
Painting is of course a “handmade product” and art and despite the starving artist stereotype, plenty of artists do already make a living selling paintings. Some artists and galleries already sell paintings for astronomical sums of money. So making money could be one reason to begin painting. But even if you aren’t motivated by capitalist or entrepreneurial goals (few actual artists are) and never sell a single work, painting can is a highly rewarding activity.
I have for a long time tried to maintain a somewhat egalitarian view of the visual arts. That is, I don’t think painting is any better than other media such as sculpture or video. I have also been fortunate to work across a variety of media including music and net art. Even now my paintings often combine or incorporate other objects or practices. Part of my reluctance to fully embrace and advocate for the awesomeness of painting is that painting history as it is commonly taught is centered on European and American histories. But lately, I’ve come to believe that the best way to solve biases and structural problems with the way painting is commonly understood and taught is simply to get more people and a greater diversity of people painting. And then celebrate those people for their work. Additionally, as screens and algorithms and AI engulfs the world I have come to an even greater appreciation of painting’s distinctness and its particular kind of physicality, and I have seen many others recognize this specialness.
In the art department where I teach, drawing and painting classes continue attracting students from across disciplines and majors. Students often tell me they have enrolled in painting precisely because they want to get away from screens, algorithms and AI. They want to have a direct relationship with image-making by using their hands and their human vision. They often draw and paint “from life” (while looking at objects or figures in the room in front of them) with no screen required. Day after day I witness students enthralled with the process of conjuring an image (abstract or representational) from a blank canvas or a sheet of paper, happy to be away from digital technology for even a few hours, and often delighted with the fruits of their efforts.
People are desperate for reasons to get off their devices, and it is difficult to find solutions. A hike in the woods becomes an opportunity to snap a few photographs for social media. Reading a book becomes an opportunity to Google unknown words or record thoughts and share them with others — on social media. Exercising is an opportunity to track and record and share online, or to scroll or listen to other “content” while you’re at it. Even the most basic human activities such as cooking dinner provide opportunities to look up recipes online (after scrolling through advertisements) and then maybe read all the comments in the comment section and then forget to turn the burner off. But while you are painting it is uniquely difficult to also be online. Applying paint to canvas demands a kind of physical and mental presence from the painter that is exceedingly rare for humans in the 21st century.
And painting is not just helpful in directing your own fragmented attention. Painting is also a temporary bulwark against surveillance, particularly when compared to other forms of creativity that utilize digital tools. When you are painting, you are not being surveilled, and the particular knowledge of the direction and width of your brushstrokes are yours and yours alone. This sense of agency and privacy is almost impossible in our dystopian media ecosystem where every phone movement, keystroke and swipe is an opportunity to track and sell data. The exact location of your paintbrush in your own studio is unknowable. In the 21st century, painting is a subversive act. Painting means denying prying corporate eyes and systems the possibility of knowing something personal about you, a shield against the eye of Sauron that is the modern internet.
It is true that beginning painting is more difficult than beginning TikTok, but it will be far more enriching. Although many people think of oil painting as some kind of arcane and obscure medium, compared to other kinds of art-making working with oils can be relatively easy, especially today. For thousands of years humans innovations have made painting faster and easier. As I wrote recently in a post about putting the oil in oil paint, for starters, artists no longer have to carry pigment around in pig bladders or grind their own dusty toxic powders into paint. We are the beneficiaries of centuries of innovation in convenience. The addition of oil so that pigments slide around and dry slower means you can take your time (before the 14th century tempera paints dried immediately, stroke by stroke). Compared to previous generations of would-be painters, we have got it made. Painting is in fact a contemporary technology.
Now here I confess that my invitation for you to paint is more philosophical in nature than practical. For practical advice there are plenty of YouTube instructors that are more entertaining and knowledgable than I am (and of course there’s Bob Ross). Still, let me close this with a few practical reassurances.
”But I haven’t had any formal training!” You may be saying. Fear not. It’s easier than it’s ever been to paint, and you can learn in a matter of weeks, as many of my students would attest. You only need a few materials to get started. While it’s true that like any discipline, the deeper you go the more particular you get about materials and techniques, the basic materials you’ll need are few. Oil painting requires a few tubes of paint, brushes, and some mineral spirits. You can use a piece of wax paper or a piece of glass from an old picture frame for a palette and you can paint on almost anything you have on hand. Just prime a piece of canvas fabric or an old DVD player or a box and you’re off. The best way to begin is to find a few paintings you like and copy them stroke for stroke until you can make similar paintings yourself. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel at first, and you don’t have to be intimidated by not knowing everything — nobody does.
Anyone can paint and begin at anytime. I didn’t begin painting consistently until I was 27 — the same age as Van Gogh, and I have taken long breaks here and there. Other people, from dabblers to some who became renowned artists began much later in life. Grandma Moses (Anna Mary Robertson Moses) famously began painting at 78!
Increasingly, perhaps the best reason to draw or paint today is simply that these processes and other forms of physical creation provide experiences that are not mediated by screens. Time painting may be some of the only time in a day that I have that’s not subject to corporate surveillance or algorithmic manipulation. It is precious and unique, and we should all work to try and make more space for those kinds of minutes and hours in our lives.
Painting has existed since the first humans scrawled out some marks and handprints in caves 40,000 years ago. Painting is the ultimate expression of human experience, the oldest and most enduring communicative media technology. The most creative and meaningful way of making images. The most direct way to experience a connection between body and surface. Its endurance is evidence that just maybe, painting is the unlikeliest technology to be disrupted or destroyed by an artificially intelligent future.