The Night Shift

Painting continues to be relevant despite incredible technological changes over the past 200 years. From the earliest cave paintings in Spain and Africa, painting has had the honorable task of capturing historic events, trends, cultural viewpoint and the history-makers themselves. The invention of the camera throws all of this into question, yet through artists like Picasso and the Impressionists, painting found a new foothold and continued to be important for us. It is a wonderful thing to be able to go into one of our great museums, and to learn about the past through images. Studying these images, we not only learn about the history of the time period that the piece was painted, but we learn about the artist and why they chose or were made to paint what they painted and how they painted it. Some did it out of workmanship, others out of a desire to create, some to disturb, and some to comment.
Today, with the advent of AI technology, one might worry again for this art that has given us so much as a species. When AI with it's power of processing seemingly limitless amounts of data, can create the perfect images to play upon our sensibilities, some are concerned that it will disturb the painters work along with other pursuits. I believe that fundamentally, people will always want to take in an image that was painted by another. We want to look at what others have made to learn a little about a certain viewpoint, time in history, or just to know that we are not alone and another human being saw something that strikes a chord in us as well. No machine can accomplish that - simply because it's not human.