What is painting? What is art? Part I.

Two of the different ways I express ideas in my studio.

It's often said that painting is dead, and as a way to capture an image  this is certainly true. There really is no point in executing a portrait, landscape or still-life, except as a 'technical exercise'; when the camera can do it so much more accurately. However that phrase, 'technical exercise' is the key, and saviour of painting, and indeed of all art.

​Since the invention of photography painting, and by extension all art,  has been recognised for what it always has been, a 'technical exercise. Art is a  technical exercise which allows an artist to interpret and express an idea via paint or various other media. In other words, abstraction. If we happen to translate that abstraction into an image, that is where apophenia enters the equation; this is not more true now than it always has been. I would maintain that all painting, indeed all art is abstract. Art is, and always has been a way to express ideas, not to simply render an accurate 'image'.