Why I Paint by Hand in an Over-AI’d World

Explore why Ritu Raj rejects AI-generated perfection for the raw, tactile creativity of painting by hand with twine, celebrating friction, flaws, and true artistic presence.

Flights of Shadow, 5 ft x 6 ft, 2025, Organic Movement

Sometimes I scroll through social media and wonder if art is still art—or if it has become another branch of algorithmic efficiency. Perfectly generated portraits, fractal landscapes, infinite variations on a single theme: AI can produce them in seconds. But here’s the question that gnaws at me: If a machine can generate it instantly, is it still art?

We live in an over-AI’d world. A world obsessed with frictionless creation, with infinite replication, with perfection. The marks are clean, the compositions mathematically balanced, and the colors digitally optimized. And yet… they feel hollow.

When I paint, it’s messy. Oil stains my hands. The twine drags paint in unpredictable arcs across the canvas. There are moments of frustration—when the string slips, when the paint smears, when what I imagined dissolves into something unrecognizable. But it is precisely this friction, this difficulty, that makes it meaningful.

Painting by hand is slow. It demands presence. Each movement carries intention, emotion, hesitation, conviction. AI doesn’t hesitate. AI doesn’t doubt. But as humans, doubt is part of our creative intelligence. It is what makes us feel our way through a work, rather than just executing an input prompt.

I do not deny the utility or beauty of AI-generated images. But I fear a world that replaces physical creativity with digital convenience. Where an artist’s hand, trained by years of seeing and failing and seeing again, is replaced by an algorithm trained on what is already known.

We need art that is flawed, awkward, personal, unoptimized. We need to remember that beauty is not perfection, but presence. We need reminders that our hands still know something our screens do not.

When I paint with twine, dragging pigment across wet canvas in sweeping organic gestures, I feel alive. I feel connected to forces larger than me—gravity, tension, resistance, flow. Each painting becomes a document of these moments. It could never be replicated, because the point is that it wasn’t easy.

In an over-AI’d world, perhaps choosing to create with your hands is the ultimate rebellion.