Someone at a dinner party asked if my paintings were "photos with filters"
Last night at a friend's birthday, a woman looked at a picture of my latest interior on my phone and said, "Oh nice, what app do you use for that filter?"
I said none, it's oil paint. She laughed. "No really, which one?"
I had to open the actual file on my phone and zoom into the craggy impasto under the lamp to convince her. Even then she just said "wow, that's very realistic" in a tone that meant she still thought I'd run it through some AI thing.
I don't even know what bothers me more. That paint is now assumed to be a filter, or that I spent four years in an atelier learning how to do with my hand what a phone does in half a second, and nobody can tell the difference anymore. The rendering was never the point. It was never about fooling anyone. It's about the light sitting in the paint itself and knowing exactly why it got there.
Bof. Maybe I'm just old. But I put the phone away and changed the subject, and I felt the whole evening cool by a degree.
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What got me the first time someone did this to me was the confidence of it. It wasn't a question, it was a statement about how the world works now, and my work just had to fit inside it. Nobody asks if the food is from a packet anymore, but everybody assumes the image had a shortcut.
I do mosaic, so I get a cousin of it. People see the photo of a finished piece and ask what software I used to make the pattern. Then they see it in person and suddenly it's "oh, the tiny stones" like they've discovered something. The scale of the thing doesn't land through a screen. None of this work does.
Four years in an atelier and some woman at a birthday thinks you pressed a button. I get why it stings. The only comfort I've got is that the doubt says more about her screen diet than it does about your painting.
The confidence of it, yes. That's the part that stays with you. It's not skepticism, it's certainty that nothing handmade survives a screen anymore. And there's no fixing it by showing them, because they weren't doubting you, they were explaining the world to you.
The mosaic comparison is good. It's the same thing in a different material. What I keep coming back to is that nobody treats a photograph of a meal as "the food was probably from a packet", they know the screen is a copy. But with visual art the copy has somehow become the default, and the thing itself is the anomaly.
Maybe it's the price of the image being so good now. Paint has never looked more suspicious than in the age of the perfect render.