IN the PAINT

One of the most CLASSICAL FORMS of ART-MAKING, PAINTING has assumed a new CURRENCY in the age of AI and DIGITAL MEDIA. We spoke with SEVEN WOMEN ARTISTS who are REIMAGINING its TRADITIONS and RESHAPING them in their OWN IMAGE.

- Story by SASHA BONÉT Photographs by JESSICA MADAVO

A few years ago, during a moment of extraordinary political uncertainty and collective mourning, I had a conversation with an artist known largely for digital and multimedia work. They told me that they were returning to painting. When I asked why, the artist said, "I'm going home."

For many artists, painting is a practice intimately intertwined with their earliest experiences of art—one as old as art itself. It's a physical process, an attempt to make meaning through the hand-through labor, through matter itself—that engages the body through imagination and imagination through the body. Anyone who has ever stood before a painting and felt it rearrange something inside them can attest to this.

For some, painting is an escape; for others, it marks a kind of return. In an age of digital tools and AI, when the making and experiencing of art can feel very virtual or ephemeral, it also represents something else; to paint is to insist on presence.

Each day, we are bombarded with images that shape our individual and collective consciousnesses. These images are not neutral; they coax us toward different perspectives and push us toward singular standards of language and thought. Our digital selves bleed into the material world. In some ways, they even form our conception of it. To paint today is not merely nostalgic; it's an embodied refusal to let art exist without the traces of being.