15/02/2026
It struck me the other day as I was finishing up a painting that my four year old grandson (who loves drawing) must think that “everyone” creates art. After all, he lives in a household where his mother paints and draws, his father draws and his grandmother paints and creates in a variety of different mediums.
How strange it will be for him, now that he has started school, to discover that not everyone creates art, or even WANTS to create art.
Almost on a daily basis we tell him what an amazing artist he is, constantly nurturing that part of him because we hope that in his future it will be a comfort to him. Something that as a very sensitive empathic child he will no doubt find solace in – like many of us have done for years.
But will he?
Will he still WANT to turn to his art in the future at the very least for self fulfilment? For therapy, like so many of us have done all our lives?
Art relaxes my busy brain. Takes me off into a zone where I no longer overthink and drive myself crazy. It IS my therapy. Without it I quickly become anxious and depressed. Am I addicted? You bet. It’s not my drug, but my medicine.
But how quickly has everything changed.
In the span of about four years AI has destroyed so much for artists ,and not just artists – (your turn is coming)….Artists just happened to be the tip of the iceberg.
If you go looking for an art group to join on Facebook for example, which USED to be a bustling place where tens of thousands of different art communities thrived, overflowing with eager participants who came together to connect, help each other, encourage and inspire one another… Now, these groups are literal online ghost towns.
You can almost hear the clack of your own typing, the crackle of your scrolling as you take a look around to find the odd post here and there with one or two likes, perhaps if you’re lucky a banal comment – “Love it.”
And worse, you are more likely to stumble into a group that is pretending to be an “Art” group, but really it’s just a bunch of AI prompters parading themselves as actual artists by participating in generative AI to make the billions of images that have now drowned out the REAL art of the world.
Artists are dying, and not a slow agonising death, but a swift and bitter one.
It honestly feels to me like artists online have retreated en masse.
I don’t blame them one bit. To have had all their art stolen from them and fed into “the machine” in order for AI to learn how to mash it up and spit it out at the direction of those masquerading now as the “New artists of the AI world.” Yeah, it’s not surprising that people have stopped posting.
I wonder also though if they have also stopped creating, or if creatives world wide are still furtively scribbling away in dark corners in their rooms just because “they have to” – because like me it is their medicine.
Do they, like me, peer out of their windows at two in the morning and with some reluctance put down the pen or pencil or brushes, with a sigh crawl in between the sheets knowing that sleep must come, that tomorrow brings the excitement of putting in those finishing touches…
I want my grandson to know those feelings. The “getting lost” in it. The excitement of seeing something in your head spill out onto the page. An intangible thing suddenly brought to life by your hand. The endless hours of staring at the thing, asking it what it needs, what it wants from you… The blur of the art being from you to the art being it’s own self. That mysterious journey you somehow take together.
I so want him to experience that!
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