the woman at the dinner party who told me AI could paint my next portrait
It was at my brother-in-law's place in the 6th. Some woman I'd never met, nice enough, works in tech. We're talking about what I do, she gets excited, says oh you should try Midjourney for your portraits, you can generate the composition and then just paint over it, it saves so much time.
I said that's not really how I work. She said no but it's the same thing in the end, the image is what matters.
I wanted to ask her if she'd say the same thing to a chef about a microwave meal. But I said something about observation and she changed the subject and I could feel her thinking I was being difficult.
The thing is, I spent four years learning to see. Not to copy photographs. To see the actual fall of light across a real face in a real room. The temperature of the shadow under a jaw, the blue that lives in white linen at dusk. If I let a machine decide my compositions, what exactly did I learn?
I know we all use reference. I know photography changed painting forever. I'm not a purist. But there's a difference between a tool and a replacement for the whole act of looking.
Maybe I'm just old. Maybe in ten years every painter works this way and nobody cares. But I care. I like the slowness. I like being wrong for two hours and then something clicks.
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Well now. You were kinder than I might've been, honey. That woman don't know what she's talking about, and worse than that, she don't know what she's looking at.
I've been sewing and piecing quilts my whole life. My grandmother's hands taught mine. And I tell you, the image is never just the image. The time you spend looking, the wrong turns, the thread you pull out and re-do, the sitting with it till you know what it wants, that's all in the finished thing. You can't take a shortcut to that and end up with the same thing. You end up with something hollow.
She probably meant well. But meaning well don't make a person right. You keep on with your observation, baby. That's where the life is.
Your grandmother's hands. Yes. That's exactly it.
The thing people like her don't understand, they can't understand, because they've never done it, is that the looking IS the work. Half my time in front of a canvas is just looking. Waiting. Letting the light tell me something. That's not inefficiency. That's the whole practice.
And you're right about the wrong turns. I scraped a portrait down to raw linen three times last month before it started to breathe. You can't cut that out and have the same result. You just can't.
A quilt made that way, with your grandmother in your hands, that's a real thing. Not hollow at all.