What AI Can't Make: On Original Oil Painting and the Value of the Object

Every few months someone sends me a prompt-generated image and asks what I think. Usually it's flattering in some way — the colors are good, the light looks right, there's a cowboy in there with paint texture that almost passes. And I always think the same thing: that's a fine composition. It's also not a painting.

The AI art conversation has been going since 2022 and it's only gotten louder as Chat GPT and other LLM's have vastly improved their image generation abilities. Tools are better, outputs are wilder, and the discourse tends to collapse into one of two camps: "this kills art" or "this is just a new medium, relax." I don't think either camp is actually looking at the right thing.

The thing worth looking at is the object itself.

What a Painting Is, Physically

When you buy an original oil painting, you're getting a specific kind of thing. There is paint on a surface. It built up over hours or days. Every layer dried (or didn't, depending on what I was doing), every brushstroke left something behind. The texture you can see in a photograph is nothing compared to what you see when light rakes across the canvas at an angle.

That's not a sentimental point. It's just a fact about what the object is. A pixel grid rendered by a model is a different kind of thing, even if it depicts the same subject. Both are images. Only one of them has physical presence.

I painted Cowboy Study quickly — alla prima, wet into wet, finished in one sitting. The goal was a specific quality of light on a specific face: warm from one side, cool shadow cutting in from the other. There are places in that painting where I changed my mind mid-stroke and you can see it, where the paint is heavier and the color shifts. That record of indecision is part of what the painting is. You can't generate that. You could generate something that looks similar, but the object wouldn't carry the same history, emotion, or most of all, humanity.

The Case Against Panic

I don't think AI ends painting. I don't think photography ended painting either, and that was a more direct threat — same subject, same output type, radically more efficient. What happened instead is that painters stopped trying to compete with photography on its own terms and started doing things photography couldn't. Impressionism and Abstraction showed up. The medium clarified what it actually was for.

Something similar is probably happening now. If you can generate a competent image instantly, then a painting stops being about competence and becomes about something else: the process, the singular object, the fact that someone's hand made every mark and that there is one of it in the world.

That's a harder thing to talk about on a product page, but it's the thing people are actually responding to when they choose a painting over a print.

What This Means for the Work

I think about this mostly in terms of subject matter and approach. The subjects that pull at me — the cowboy, the California light, the still figure — aren't interesting because they photograph well. They're interesting because there's something in them that painting can get at that other mediums can't quite reach. The quality of golden-hour light on the coast is a feeling before it's an image. I'm trying to catch the feeling. The image is just where it lives.

When someone hangs an original painting in their house, they're not putting up a decoration. They're putting up a particular moment — the hour I spent on that piece, the decisions I made, the thing I was after. That context doesn't make the painting better automatically. But it does make it different. And right now, different matters more than ever.

AI is going to keep getting better at images. It won't get better at being an object made by hand (that is, until the robots take over which is a different conversation entirely!). That's the thing worth protecting — not the image, but the act of making it, and the thing that act produces.

Cowboy Study is available as a reproduction poster if you want to live with the image. If you want the original, commissions are open.