What is a Painting?

The Crisis

A little context.

As a young kid, I made sketches and paintings, and relished appreciation from people around. I was driven towards realism in art. I aspired to be able to realistically depict the beauty of the world. I used to practice drawing from comic and art books, photographs etc. With time and effort, my skill at realism improved.

And then, I left art.

I had hit what I would call an artistic existential crisis.

In my initial years learning art when I endeavoured to realistically capture nature’s beauty, I did not know why exactly I was doing art in the first place. My focus was in building my skill. It was not until I had achieved some level of expertise that I started reflecting on what I was actually doing.

The camera was better artist than me! It could capture nature’s beauty to a degree I would never be able to, and that within the split of a second. How could I be a better artist than a Camera? What is a painting?

Well, one can argue that a camera can only copy nature. It cannot interpret it. An artist, in his imperfection, when he tries to capture nature through his brush strokes, will end up interpreting nature.

But this is a misunderstanding. A camera assisted by an AI can also do something more than just copying nature. The AI can also alter the image in artistic ways. For example, an AI can convert someone’s photo into a pencil sketch in a way you would not be able to tell whether it was done by a human or not. Perhaps such software is not available today, but I am sure that it can be built with present day technology.

So, I hit an existential crisis analogous to what chess or go players may have experienced when they first came to realise that an engine can consistently beat the best of the human players.

What is a painting? Why bother? What is a painter?

I left art. I had lost my motivation. I saw no point. An activity that I had once relished was gone, leaving behind a vacuum.

It took me several years before I was finally able resolve this existential crisis and pick up the brush again.

What is art?

Let me first define art. Art is a means to store and express thoughts. To create a map between the inner world and the outer world.

People have found different ways to create this map. Painting, photography, literature, music, acting, songs, poetry, cinema etc.

It is interesting to note how each form of art can achieve something that the other cannot even begin to. I mean, music can achieve what literature cannot, and vice versa. In the landscape of expressions, each art form can take you places where the others cannot. In this sense, each art form is special and important.

A side remark. Note how although each artform is so distinct, in some sense, they are all equivalent. A trivial way to see this is- each artform, from painting, to music, to cinema, can be stored on a computer in terms of 0’s and 1’s. Hence, in this sense, there actually exists a map between these art forms, however complicated.

That is, a painting can be perfectly encoded inside a musical piece, and a movie can be perfectly encoded in a book!

So, since these art forms are not inherently different, the question is about efficiency. Human beings cannot appreciate beauty in 0’s and 1’s. But they can appreciate the beauty when they see a movie, painting, photograph; or listen to a musical piece; or read familiar words in a literary piece. This human limitation is not a bug but a feature. Not all sequences of 0’s and 1’s have social or psychological relevance. We have developed a more efficient system to recognise those that do have, in terms of colours, auditory signals and common dictionary words, etc.

The resolution.

When we reconsider my artistic existential crisis in the light of the above discussion, we find that the conflict comes from the possibility that photography, as a form of art, may serve as a more efficient tool than painting and hence threatens to replace it.

There is some truth in this claim. Before photography, a painting was the best tool to record the beauty of the external world for centuries to come. But now, photography can do the same in the split of a second. So why waste so much skill, paint and days to do what a camera can do in the split of a second?

So, Photography can indeed take us places in the expression landscape where it is relatively difficult for paintings to reach. But can paintings take us places where it is difficult for photography to reach?

Yes. Because a Camera cannot take a picture of my thoughts. So when a painting expresses the artist’s thoughts, it quickly becomes the more efficient form of art as compared with photography.

What fascinates me most about paintings right now is how I can use it to put my inner world on canvas. Art is a very powerful medium for this purpose.