Why We Still Paint at All Today

We live in a time when a machine spits out an image in a few seconds. A photo is taken in the blink of an eye, and software paints any motif in any style on command. So why does a person still sit down and painstakingly paint by hand? I hear this question again and again, and I have a very clear answer to it.

Painting means making visible

I paint in order to visualize. To make something that is in my head visible to others. I see this most beautifully in the professionals who still do it by hand. I follow a garden designer on Instagram whose drawn plans I simply find wonderful. Architects belong here too, for me. I will never forget how our own architect reached for tracing paper and simply began to draw. In that moment, a space appeared before our eyes that until then had existed only in his and my head.

I know this making-visible from myself as well. I drew the first design for our house and our garden with my own hand, and I've often been the one to put an idea on paper for the family.

It's the same with my flowers. Painting is my bridge between what I see and feel and what another person can look at in the end. Especially with the flowers, that is my real motivation. I don't want to depict what a bloom looks like, but to show how it feels to me.

No machine can take that over for me, because it isn't about the finished picture alone. It's about the path from the inside out.

The one place where I grow calm

And then there's something that goes much deeper. Painting is relaxation for me. Something I can otherwise barely do. My mind is essentially always in motion, full of thoughts and sensory impressions that are hard to switch off. But when I paint, they sort themselves out. I process what has poured in on me, and for a moment it grows quiet.

This calm is not a nice side effect, it is vital for me. I've written elsewhere about how my neurodivergence shapes the way I see and paint.

Why so many are painting again right now

What I find fascinating is that right now more and more people are drawn to the brush. I believe that has to do with a quiet shift.

In the younger generation, I see that many live more consciously. They look after themselves, don't overwork, want to move through their days in a healthier and more attentive way. Part of that is accepting yourself as you are, expressing yourself and being honest. That, to me, is an essential part of art.

The older generation is rediscovering painting too. Those who no longer have to work and suddenly have more time often take that time quite deliberately for themselves, to realize and express who they are. And then there was the pandemic, when we all had to learn to sit with ourselves. Many people picked up a brush for the first time during that quiet stretch and never put it down again.

The moment it proves worthwhile

When I paint, the process usually comes first. The relaxation is the welcome side effect, not the goal. Because of my neurodivergence, my picture then has to be finished and complete right away. Once it is, it's done for the moment, and the picture is allowed to rest.

Then I let it lie, perhaps until the next day, sometimes a little longer. And when I pick it up again later, I see it properly for the first time. Only then, with a little distance, do I like it. That is the moment when I realize it was worth it. Not while painting, but in that quiet reunion afterward.

Small gifts made by hand

Perhaps that's also why I so love to paint little things to give away. My Christmas cards, for example, I paint myself, and over the years that has become a lovely tradition. I hope that the people who receive such a card can feel that a piece of time and attention went into it. Something you can't quickly buy, but that came into being just for them.

No longer depicting, but something necessary

Anyone who considers painting a waste of time has a very technical and one-sided view of it. In the past, painting really was mainly a means of depicting something, of recording what a person, a place, a moment looked like. Painting handed that task over long ago, to photography and today to the machines.

And yet a hand-painted picture carries something no machine can reproduce. The time that went into it. The small irregularities that show a human hesitated and then decided. The paint that ran into the paper exactly where no one had planned it. You may not see straight away that a hand made a picture. But I'm convinced you can feel it.

For society, painting today may therefore most likely be a waste of time. But for the artist it is something else entirely. For the artist it is a necessity of life. That is exactly why I still paint by hand, and exactly why, I believe, people always will.