Without getting too existential, because painting for me is deeply existential (I’d be dead without it), the answer became clearer in context when YouTube began flooding the world with craft on canvas that purported to be art, and a mass misleading of what oil painting techniques actually are.
There is simply no substitute for knowing the full range of techniques and using them.
Then it became clearer again with the rush to this problematic addiction to so-called AI.
While I enjoyed YouTube establishing worldwide the notion that anyone with an internet connection can be a creator, in the field of video, no less, which until then was the domain of broadcast TV and unimaginable in reach for most people, the misinformation that YouTube engendered and promoted is depressing. Precious clarity, so scarce in the field of oil painting and art let alone in the wider public realm, was suddenly lost. In its place, at best, heavy fog. All those people who could now express themselves began learning to do so from the unlearned. The good work of YouTube undone by its mass success.
Now, AI presents a whole new dimension and severity of fine art fog.
Therefore creative clarity would be one reason for painting as I do. Of course this is just to skim the surface of determinative reasoning, yet it leads to another important reason: the world is made so much richer because of it. Who’s world? Well, mine. Yet caught on canvas one lives in hope this rich life that dives a little deeper into the wonders and magic of our world can continue to be enjoyed by others.
Even just the paint surface, so complex and interesting, provides this richness:
These are close ups of an area created with advanced techniques no large than a few centimetres. A seemingly unimportant area of the painting as it is predominantly green. Yet the painting would not thrill with visual vitality and complexity if every square speck wasn’t a rich experience of itself. Here are some more of these areas that in other paintings are simply a single colour and flat in texture:
