Without the work...

With the invention of photography in 1840, Paul Delaroche, was on record as exclaiming ‘Now, painting is dead!’ which is more than a little ironic, seeing as he was famous for painting historical scenes in the High Victorian style, like his portrayal of the Execution of Lady Jane Grey, which could never have been photographed by virtue of happening nearly four hundred years before he painted it. 

The proceeding two hundred years has gone out of its way to prove him wrong in almost every way possible, as not only did a huge number of art movements flourish, but the act of painting itself has become widely democratised. When Delaroche was banging out giant canvases with their mournful and historically inaccurate scenes (leaving aside the sublime excellence of his brush work, he renders all his characters as essentially Victorian) it was only the fortunate few who could afford to paint, and even fewer who might be recognised as artists. To be an artist then, as it often has, took a huge leap of faith and sheer nerve, as without the regular income meagre employment might provide and no welfare state, it was very much a gamble of life or death. The starving artist was a cliche based on an indefatigable truth - unless your art or your face fitted, you were unlikely to survive. We will never know what thousands of shop girls, housemaids, miners and piece workers might have created had they been given the chance, or the vision they might have given us of their world. However we lie to think that hasn’t changed, it is at least now possible to pick up a bio and a smartphone and gain notice, if not a fortune.

Thing have changed as I said before, we have slowly, and then with increasing rapidity, moved to almost the opposite scenario. Art materials and art education, however painfully rudimentary in most schools, is now accessible to nearly all of us, even if still relatively few make it as artists, however you define that success.

There are still a huge number of gatekeepers, people who tell children if their work is ‘good’ or ‘not good,’ and then tell them that there’s no money in art and they should get a proper job, while daily enjoying the fruits of artistic creativity in the clothes they wear, the TV they watch, how they decorate their homes and the vital information they absorb, carefully and clearly explained to them by illustrators. There are institutions who, despite all their well meaning efforts, succeed in turning more people away than they admit, there is intense snobbery, even if these days it would be Lady Jane Grey’s theatrical demise that would have noses turning up, in favour of whatever is deemed to be the latest sensation. One could even argue that it is not really photography which has killed painting, but art. 

Of course, I have come across people arguing that Ai is the final, greatest democratising of art, like this gentleman here: 

Arguing that as it removes the need to work tirelessly at your craft for years to gain fluency, that it does away with the need to have anything more than pure ideas, it is the final and best iteration of creativity.

If you think at this point I am going to completely disagree with him, I’m going to shock you by saying he’s not wrong….but neither is he right. I have a feeling that if you have a Victorian shop worker an Ai program to play with, they’d probably have a great time, once they’d got over the extreme culture shock of understanding it. Likewise, a lot of people are having a lot of fun putting ideas into Mid journey and the rest, with it’s bank of images illegally stolen from real people who put at least something on the line to create them - but is it Art?

No, it’s not, because the hard work is the bloody point. I hate to break it to Ai bros, but art is not valuable because it exists, because it is, but because it was brought into being and that took work. My eyes can slide over a Victorian Masterpiece as an image on a screen, but go see it in the flesh. Get up close if you can, and look at the way the paint has dried, the moments when you can see the change of one pigment to the next. Imagine how the brush might feel in your hand, imagine knowing which combination of ivory white and rose madder you need to render that slightly flush on Lady Jane’s lip as she gasps, as she, blindfolded and utterly alone, gropes for the block as if it were her anchor, rather than the last thing she will ever know, impact, fear and oblivion. 

I believe that we absolutely should empower everyone to express themselves creativity, that one of the greatest sins in our world is still that millions of people are denied any chance to have the time and space to create, to learn, to push ideas and build their skill base, but the biggest part of that sin is not actually what they might produce is not produced, but that they are denied to time to try and produce something. Ai is just stealing from those who have fought for that time in their lives.

In a culture where you are given that time, you don’t deserve to be an artist if you haven’t worked for it, put things on the line, worried, stressed, worked out how, with the limited fragments of skill you have gathered, you can get your ideas out there. If you haven’t interrogated your ideas with hard work, your ideas will suck, because they haven’t earned their place in the world. If you haven’t failed 100 times, you do not deserved to succeed. 

In July I’m exhibiting at The Untitled Arts Fair in Chelsea Town Hall, with a completely new body of work which is barely painting and more sculpture than drawing. Am I terrified? Yes! Will I fail, will no one get it? Probably! Will I stop trying? Never. 

I have come too far to be scared of an algorithm.