{"id":294574,"date":"2025-12-02T09:01:23","date_gmt":"2025-12-02T09:01:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/294574\/"},"modified":"2025-12-02T09:01:23","modified_gmt":"2025-12-02T09:01:23","slug":"7-women-artists-on-the-act-of-painting-in-the-age-of-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/294574\/","title":{"rendered":"7 Women Artists on the Act of Painting in the Age of AI"},"content":{"rendered":"

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, \u201cI\u2019m going home.\u201d<\/p>\n

For many artists, painting is a practice intimately intertwined with their earliest experiences of art\u2014one as old as art itself. It\u2019s a physical process, an attempt to make meaning through the hand\u2014through labor, through matter itself\u2014that 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.<\/p>\n

\"annaPhoto by Jessica Madavo; ARTWORK: \u00a9 ANNA WEYANT, COURTESY GAGOSIAN<\/p>\n

Anna Weyant in her New York workspace.<\/p>\n

\"anna\u00a9 ANNA WEYANT, COURTESY GAGOSIAN, PHOTO BY MARIS HUTCHINSON<\/p>\n

Anna Weyant, Girl in Window (2024)<\/p>\n

\"anna\u00a9 ANNA WEYANT, COURTESY GAGOSIAN, PHOTO BY OWEN CONWAY<\/p>\n

Anna Weyant, Geraldine (2024)<\/p>\n

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.
<\/p>\n

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\u2019s an embodied refusal to let art exist without the traces of being.<\/p>\n

\"christinaPHOTO BY JESSICA MADAVO; ARTWORK: \u00a9 CHRISTINA QUARLES, COURTESY THE ARTIST, HAUSER & WIRTH, AND PILAR CORRIAS, LONDON<\/p>\n

Christina Quarles in her Los Angeles studio with Magic Hour (2016\/2021)<\/p>\n

\"christina\u00a9 CHRISTINA QUARLES, COURTESY THE ARTIST, HAUSER & WIRTH, AND PILAR CORRIAS, LONDON, PHOTO BY KEITH LUBOW<\/p>\n

Christina Quarles, Living in the Wake (2025)<\/p>\n

\"christina\"\u00a9 CHRISTINA QUARLES, COURTESY THE ARTIST, HAUSER & WIRTH, AND PILAR CORRIAS, LONDON, PHOTO BY JEFF McLANE<\/p>\n

Christina Quarles, Yull Always Be a Part of Me (2025)<\/p>\n

For women painters, who have long been excluded from many of the canons and institutions of a tradition that has historically rendered them less maker than muse, this insistence on visibility is about much more than art. It\u2019s about what Simone de Beauvoir once referred to as the struggle to \u201cbecome\u201d\u2014to define and not be defined by the identities and narratives that have been imposed on them, to create a tangible record of their presence.<\/p>\n

I spoke with seven women artists who make vastly different work informed by vastly different projects, perspectives, experiences, and histories. But they have each used the language of painting, formally and thematically, to engage with subjects like identity, gender, and expression and explore new modes of seeing.<\/p>\n

\"quarles\"PHOTO BY JESSICA MADAVO; ARTWORK \u00a9 CHRISTINA QUARLES, COURTESY THE ARTIST, HAUSER & WIRTH, AND PILAR CORRIAS, LONDON<\/p>\n

Quarles working on a painting in preparation for a forthcoming show at Hauser & Wirth.<\/p>\n

In her Brooklyn studio, Jenna Gribbon, 46, works on a large portrait of her wife, musician Mackenzie Scott, in blue hues that evoke a seductive memory. Gribbon suggests that we\u2019ve forgotten how to see. Our eyes are fatigued by screens, skimming over beauty. She considers herself a documentarian. She is deeply influenced by the filmmaker Agn\u00e8s Varda and interested in the reciprocal relationship between subject and observer.<\/p>\n

Gribbon\u2019s process begins with taking iPhone photos of Scott in candid, often intimate poses. \u201cSometimes,\u201d Gribbon says, Scott \u201cwill see a finished painting and say, \u2018I\u2019ve never seen anything that looked more like me.\u2019\u2009\u201d For others, she explains, Scott will say, \u201cI don\u2019t know who that is. Is that you?\u201d<\/p>\n

Gribbon has been painting Scott for eight years and says she\u2019s nowhere near done; she wants to continue painting her as they both age. Maybe there\u2019s something about love that demands a witness. We all yearn to be seen, though we fear the cost. \u201cWhen you see someone every day,\u201d Gribbon says, \u201cyou overlook things.\u201d
<\/p>\n

\"sashaPHOTO BY JESSICA MADAVO; ARTWORK: \u00a9 SASHA GORDON, COURTESY THE ARTIST AND DAVID ZWIRNER, NEW YORK<\/p>\n

Sasha Gordon with Whores in the Attic (2024)<\/p>\n

\"sasha\u00a9 SASHA GORDON, COURTESY THE ARTIST AND DAVID ZWIRNER, NEW YORK<\/p>\n

Sasha Gordon, It Was Still Far Away (2024)<\/p>\n

\"sasha\u00a9 SASHA GORDON, COURTESY THE ARTIST AND DAVID ZWIRNER, NEW YORK<\/p>\n

Sasha Gordon, Flame Like Blush (2024)<\/p>\n

Sasha Gordon\u2019s first solo show at the David Zwirner gallery in New York this fall included a room filled with a series of self-portraits depicting chaos and how it manifests in our bodies. In one work, It Was Still Far Away (2024), Gordon, 27, paints herself clipping her toenails with headphones on while an explosion erupts behind her\u2014a nod to our collective obliviousness and unabashed self-indulgence. In Whores in the Attic (2024), she paints herself nude, with cellulite and a cigarette, wearing pointy-toed mules.<\/p>\n

Because Gordon often presents herself in her paintings, her work is frequently labeled as being about identity or body positivity. But for her, it\u2019s more about the language of embodiment and the porous line between vulnerability and force. \u201cThis is about disassociating and going in and out of consciousness,\u201d she says. \u201cI just want the figures to be pure and not affected by the current social norm,\u201d she says\u2014not innocent but immune.<\/p>\n

Born to a Jewish Polish-American father and a Korean mother, Gordon grew up in Somers, New York, and studied at the Rhode Island School of Design. Her earliest lesson in looking came from her mother. \u201cIt maybe sounds like an insult, but she told me my friends were pretty, but they\u2019re conventional,\u201d Gordon says. \u201cShe told me I had something different that was more memorable.\u201d That beautiful off-centeredness is the seam she keeps tugging at in her work: \u201cIt\u2019s important to have something uncanny.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"jennaPHOTO BY JESSICA MADAVO; ARTWORK: \u00a9 JENNA GRIBBON, COURTESY DAVID KORDANSKY GALLERY<\/p>\n

Jenna Gribbon in her Brooklyn studio with Projecting myself onto M (2025)<\/p>\n

\"jenna\u00a9 JENNA GRIBBON, COURTESY DAVID KORDANSKY GALLERY, PHOTO BY Phoebe d\u2019Heurle<\/p>\n

Jenna Gribbon, A Reflection Held (2024)<\/p>\n

\"jenna\u00a9 JENNA GRIBBON, COURTESY DAVID KORDANSKY GALLERY, PHOTO BY DARIO LASAGNI<\/p>\n

Jenna Gribbon, Popcorn painting (2023)<\/p>\n

You can practically hear Jad\u00e9 Fadojutimi\u2019s paintings. Her large-scale abstractions are symphonies of color. The artist, 32, who lives and works in London, is speaking with me from Japan, where she visits often. She recalls spending many hours as a child watching Kyoto Animation anime, which is known for its soft, seductive use of color to communicate feeling. \u201cWhen I\u2019m in Japan, my use of color flourishes,\u201d she says. \u201cThe sky is different here; the color sensibility leans toward pastels that might seem feminine in the U.K. but here feels universal.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fadojutimi grew up in a British-Nigerian household. Her paintings reflect states of longing and dislocation\u2014not any fixed identity but the instability of the very concept. These themes surface through lush, volatile palettes that behave like weather systems; feeling arrives chromatically first and only afterward allows itself to be understood. She is a conductor, in the spirit of Italian maestro Riccardo Muti: one who guides rather than commands. \u201cWhen you\u2019re working with color, compositions form naturally through tone, temperature, depth, perspective, and theory,\u201d she says. \u201cI think worlds begin to shape themselves through the notion that they aren\u2019t destinations that are predecided.\u201d
<\/p>\n

\"jade\"Photo by Jessica Madavo; ALL ARTWORK: \u00a9 JAD\u00c9 FADOJUTIMI, COURTESY THE ARTIST<\/p>\n

Jad\u00e9 Fadojutimi in her London studio.<\/p>\n

\"jad\u00e9\u00a9 JAD\u00c9 FADOJUTIMI, COURTESY THE ARTIST, PHOTO BY MARK BLOWER<\/p>\n

Jad\u00e9\u00a0Fadojutimi,\u00a0Untitled\u00a0(2025)<\/p>\n

\"jad\u00e9\u00a9 JAD\u00c9 FADOJUTIMI, COURTESY THE ARTIST, PHOTO BY MARK BLOWER<\/p>\n

Jad\u00e9\u00a0Fadojutimi,\u00a0Untitled\u00a0(2025)<\/p>\n

Much like the figures in her works, Anna Weyant, 30, projects a disarming innocence that belies her wisdom. She understands the power of perception. Social media has played a role in her practice, both in content and process\u2014the former because her figures can seem posed and framed like Instagram images, the latter because she gained early attention via the platform. Her paintings sometimes feel like moments lifted from feeds, depicting young women with ambiguous expressions set against neutral backgrounds, all rendered with classical Dutch Golden Age and baroque techniques attentive to surface, texture, and studied stillness. The result is a kind of portraiture caught between eras, where intimacy is at once a performance and a spell. \u201cMy figures are posed, but I think of the images as more like film stills,\u201d Weyant says. \u201cSomething choreographed, paused.\u201d<\/p>\n

When I visit Weyant\u2019s studio in New York, an unfinished canvas shows the lower half of a woman looking over a terrace, her exposed backside at its edge. She tells me she often imagines a man in the room with her figures, just beyond the frame. They know they are being watched. They play with the gaze, offering stonelike beauty, then undermine it with an eerie humor, challenging the concept of assumptions versus reality. \u201cIt is really a reflection of my own experience,\u201d she says. \u201cI don\u2019t feel qualified to paint from anyone else\u2019s gaze.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"studio\"Photo by Jessica Madavo; ALL ARTWORK: \u00a9 JAD\u00c9 FADOJUTIMI, COURTESY THE ARTIST<\/p>\n

Fadojutimi\u2019s studio.<\/p>\n

Sahara Longe, 31, tends to find inspiration everywhere: in historical Instagram accounts, while people-watching in the park, in a painting of saints she spotted at the National Museum in Oslo, Norway. Recently, she became captivated by Doris Lessing\u2019s 1962 novel, The Golden Notebook, in which the protagonist searches her past for meaning in her postwar English life as a woman condemned to freedom, lamenting \u201cthe thinning of language against the density of our experience.\u201d Longe paints from the spaces where language fails.<\/p>\n

The eldest of four girls, the London-based Longe grew up on a farm in Suffolk, England; her father is British, her mother Sierra Leonean. Her semi-abstract figurative paintings are potent\u2014emotional and intimate\u2014but leave room for the viewer to complete them. She works with Canada balsam, thickened linseed oil, rabbit-skin glue, gesso, and turpentine, summoning the weight of history in her materials. Her paintings carry the hush of the old masters, but turned inward, the subjects claiming the frame not as ornament or offering but as ground of self\u2014as bodies that refuse to be read except on their own terms.
<\/p>\n

\"modelPHOTO BY JESSICA MADAVO; ARTWORK: \u00a9 LUCY BULL, COURTESY DAVID KORDANSKY GALLERY<\/p>\n

Lucy Bull in her Los Angeles\u2013area studio.<\/p>\n

\"lucy\u00a9 LUCY BULL, COURTESY DAVID KORDANSKY GALLERY, PHOTO BY CHRISTOPHER STACH<\/p>\n

Lucy Bull, 16:55 (2025)<\/p>\n

\"lucy\u00a9 LUCY BULL, COURTESY DAVID KORDANSKY GALLERY, PHOTO BY JEFF McLANE<\/p>\n

Lucy Bull, 15:17 (2024)<\/p>\n

Longe says her approach to painting is born in part of an ethos she picked up while studying at the Charles H. Cecil Studios in Florence. \u201cThe mantra of the school was to take something in real life and make it more beautiful on the canvas, and I always try to do that,\u201d she says. She becomes endearingly giddy when speaking about the moment she finds something that will lead to new work. \u201cYou\u2019re just emptying yourself and watching until something comes,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s a kind of evangelical feeling of \u2018Oh! I\u2019ve discovered something.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Lucy Bull\u2019s L.A. studio sits discreetly in the middle of a commercial strip in San Gabriel. Her walls are lined with layered canvases in various stages of production. The artist, 35, isn\u2019t precious about where she paints\u2014sometimes in an alley, sometimes in a backyard. She prefers to work outside in the elements.<\/p>\n

\"lucyPHOTO BY JESSICA MADAVO; ARTWORK: \u00a9 LUCY BULL, COURTESY DAVID KORDANSKY GALLERY<\/p>\n

Paint brushes and supplies in Bull\u2019s studio.<\/p>\n

Bull\u2019s paintings pulse with an inner rhythm that feels both alive and otherworldly. Her layered strokes carry traces of her intensive labor; each surface seems to breathe. \u201cI\u2019m constantly trying to use color and mark-making as visual bait, suspending the viewer\u2019s attention,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019m creating a scenario where they\u2019re pulled into the landscape of marks.\u201d
<\/p>\n

Bull grew up in New York and studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she developed an intuitive, process-driven practice rooted in repetition and endurance. Her ambition is to teach the viewer how to roam again. \u201cI\u2019m trying to conjure associations,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Christina Quarles, her wife, producer and screenwriter Alyssa Polk, and their daughter lost everything in the Altadena fire in L.A. last January. The devastation delayed but did not derail her practice, which merges the technical with the spiritual. Quarles\u2019s paintings feature figures bent and contorted to fit into dynamic, futuristic spaces; they twist and collapse into one another, revealing fluid, layered textures that carry the weight of history and memory.<\/p>\n

\"saharaPHOTO BY JESSICA MADAVO; ALL ARTWORK: \u00a9 SAHARA LONGE, COURTESY THE ARTIST AND TIMOTHY TAYLOR<\/p>\n

Sahara Longe in her London studio.<\/p>\n

\"sahara\u00a9 SAHARA LONGE, COURTESY THE ARTIST AND TIMOTHY TAYLOR<\/p>\n

Sahara Longe, School Girls (2025)<\/p>\n

\"sahara\u00a9 SAHARA LONGE, COURTESY THE ARTIST AND TIMOTHY TAYLOR<\/p>\n

Sahara Longe, Looking Back (2025)<\/p>\n

Like a lot of only children raised by single mothers, Quarles, 40, learned early in life how imagination can be a shelter. She also has a knowingness and instinct that come from understanding how to absorb without instruction. \u201cI think of making art as a formal practice that you learn,\u201d she says. \u201cYou have to learn all these skills at first, and when you are learning them, they\u2019re all you can think about,\u201d she explains. \u201cBut eventually it becomes so familiar that it distracts the thinking brain and allows this sort of deeper subconscious to flow through you.\u201d <\/p>\n

Quarles is currently completing work for a forthcoming show at Hauser & Wirth in L.A. She says she knows a painting is complete when she is no longer compelled toward action\u2014when she becomes, like us, a viewer and finds herself observing and asking questions. \u201cIt\u2019s really this back and forth between intention and actuality and trying to honor that actuality with a new set of intentions,\u201d she says. \u201cThis is the moment of ultimate freedom.\u201d<\/p>\n

Painting provides us with a sense of belonging: a reminder that everything that makes us feel like islands in our suffering has been felt by another. That we are in fact more alike than we are different. Perhaps, ultimately, a painter\u2019s job is to take us home. <\/p>\n

Related Stories<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A few years ago, during a moment of extraordinary political uncertainty and collective mourning, I had a conversation…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":294575,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[6225,6485,6486,9262,119067,1120,12497,96,380,119066,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-294574","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-content-type-feature","tag-contentid-4c416844-8426-4f27-90a8-fb66140dd99d","tag-design","tag-displaytype-long-form-article","tag-entertainment","tag-locale-us","tag-shorttitle-the-women-reimagining-painting-for-the-digital-age","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294574","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=294574"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294574\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/294575"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=294574"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=294574"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=294574"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}