Hold On To Your Brushes

Is the Painting medium finished or burnt-out and at the end of a cul-de-sac of originality? No! That would be folly. Demotion by TATT ironically put Painting in an inadvertent path to the avant-garde of Art today! Digital and tech Art in general has only been subjected to a drone culture of cheap but very well-connected derivative visual and sensorial interaction with bling! But could Painting bring back Art beyond the elitism of Art Collages' dictatorship of patronizing Art or lectures of the AI 'threat to tech Art' but not to Painting! Perhaps the struggle to not join the sensorial art-race that offers an alternative that is not tech centric -the human eye to the human hand to brush, to paint to canvas to the human response or reaction from the viewer, that allows the merit to being able to self-validate all of visual ingenuity as well as a celebration of humanities imperfections! So are we the departure, the renewal, the resistance, and the diaspora medium in the 21st century. We don't care for redaction or rendition of Painting but we're the multiverse of demographics, classes backgrounds, creeds, values, and ethics that makes it a valuable exercise in questioning the woke, and anti-woke generics, critical of both at a time when it remains a binary and adversarial era. Why? Because we live in an epoch that barely accepts its proclivity to the episodic or pendulumic swings of charismatic authoritarianism that needs us to make it accountable, open to non-sectarian Art Gaze that has to be a reversal of the much resented 'male gaze' to be the reclamation of our powers of scrutiny amidst the social mind fog and ideological hybrid status quo! We're not the herd or the word but the canvas of risk! Paradoxically our Painting qualities that have been rejected by TATT puts us in the prime position to expose our visual struggle of Painterly revelation. Painting now explores our capacity to always be the struggle on canvas under your nose and in front of your eyes! You don't get more metaphysical than that! But here we accept failure that is more likely than success, but we take on the carpe diem challenge.... even if we 'f' it up more than we get it right. But in every social communication, expect it not to run smoothly!

So have we stared TATT in the face and personify incomplete versions of our lives and experiences because we represent all the internal and external human bonding with our environment and our location in our human story despite living in a 'take-away' society of the obsession of the 'now' culture and narrative where we compete with visual AI programming whilst we survey visually the CCTV world of little and big brother? Yes! Indeed, perhaps we could add TATT to the cultural surveillance of our world that we resist?!! These ideological boundaries of the Cold War and Post Cold War no longer afflict us, but they have taken the form of hybrids of 2 systems or multisystem of the past, present and future that threaten our pre, present and post democracies today. But we are a in situ community of self-transformation, but do not subscribe to the production or consumption of Art by third party of trickle-down Art economics!

Painting practitioners are replacing the new army of the unemployed rendered so by AI take over. Unlike the many who suffer from 'AI induced psychosis' hands on and not chat bots who deconstruct individuals that are often detrimental to all our collective mental health, we instead offer to reclaim by a mass practitioner, mass appreciator and mass self-educator Art for their community of rebels and resistors as well as those written off because (this may affect third world sweatshop workers too) the global economy may render people as too expensive to run!?! Perhaps the ‘overhead budget'' allows for robotics to replace people that struggle even with 2 jobs without any days off etc who struggle with the very basic cost of living!!?!! So our contribution to AI ortgeist of Art will be an advocate for human and not replication or the plethora of programming AI or the see-saw over-production of minimalist or maximalist ‘mind-field' of Art by suffocation, up to the 1980s that just missed the point let alone the paint! As for the post-Cold War of changing Art by Dulux or by Conceptual Art (much even a Painter really admired??!!)... that's between you and me, right?

But the medium of demotion seems to be ironic, because the flip side is 'revelation that was banished for 40 years actually gave us 40 years of re-charging our batteries that has allowed us new forms of visual access and helped the narrative of TATT actually being the 'Fossil fuel medium' (metaphorically), that eponymously spelled out for me, what Art power politics could be when exposed to the full glare of competition by Paint by visualization,, and let's face it,, Art in general placed in our own hands! In other words, you don't have to put on white gloves (just to sell 19th and 20th century Painting at an over respected Art Auction House! ) but could get Paint between your thoughts and your own individual human fingerprint of imperfection, rather than the gloss of those brochures before someone puts a rare Painting in their vaults to make millions of profit when a millionaire feels like it! We are Painting today, many of us modernist Painters of the 21st century trying to extricate from the 1920s,30s and 40s cliches that TATT may be over exposed to, Sorry, but it may make the Auction houses profit but relegating the 20th century Modernist Painting movements to a bygone past begins to remind me of TATT's demotion and stigmatizing of the medium of Painting in the last 40 years!! Stalinsim. fascism, the Iron curtain, South Africa's Apartheid, Islamic extremism and Isis, global economic meltdowns, the rise of AI and the changing focus of orientation from the West to the new superpowers of Brazil, China, India, and South Africa are already here today!!?! Indeed, we live in a new era of Tariffs and counter tariffs, wars in most continents including Europe in our brave new world that is a devotee of Capitalism, even in Communist China??! So, has there been nothing more for the medium of Painters to struggle with? It's rhetorical????!!! Perhaps we need to go all multi-party involvement in space travel etc..... Aren't our lives altered at all by mobile phones etc, mass emigration because people want to leave the developing countries and the shadow of being not able to make their countries accountable because of foreign investment and over development and they seek more agency over their own lives etc Are you sure that can't be represented by non-realistic ways to express emotions, feelings spiritual identification? IT'S RHETORICAL ! is it not ironic that the Painting movement is both diasporic and a movement strictly still on the canvas ?