I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Wednesday Website, I explore and plan for some improvement to my website.
With the start of the new year, I’m back in my studio, painting every chance I get (when I’m not writing, that is). I have a couple new series in the works, both of which I’m very excited about.
I”m wondering how best to market my work for sale. Should I promote it on an art marketplace like Saatchi Art? Should I set up a store here on my own personal website? Market it through brick-and-mortar venues, through shows, galleries, festivals?
Last year, I participated in a number of group juried and unjuried shows. It wasn’t a total bust: I won one honorable mention and sold one painting. I found I didn’t really enjoy my participation. I liked the people I met, but having my work shared in a setting where it appeared strange and out-of-place didn’t feel sustaining or like it was a realistic route to success.
I am not just an abstract artist; I identify as a conceptual artist. Conceptual art starts with meaning. Its goal is to make the viewer think in a way they haven’t thought before. It is only secondarily or maybe not at all about producing aesthetically pleasing artwork.
I considered applying to summer art festivals as an alternative to group shows, but that setting, like shows, emphasizes the aesthetic element of my work. I want to emphasize the conceptual. This requires writing to go along with my art. So a natural way to promote it is online, via my own writing.
I recently saw a spike in views on my Snow Bound page, in which I share the painting and photo pairings I created at the end of 2024. Snow Bound is a conceptual art project that used abstract paintings to inspire digitally modified photos of ski landscapes and scenes. The abstract paintings were created without thought of skiing, but I noticed that they made me think of skiing; that their imagery felt like ski memories to me. The surprising aspect of this project is that the photos did not suggest the paintings but rather the reverse.
People found this work through a Substack article I wrote, Why I’m Seeking Boredom in 2026. That showed me that my writing can indeed build an audience for my art. I don’t have any way to purchase the art other than using the contact me page. And at any rate this was probably the first time most viewers were exposed to my art. So I didn’t see any conversion to sales. But it suggested that I can use my writing to gain attention for my art.
I’m thinking of writing an article about conceptual art and artificial intelligence for my occasional AI newsletter Incantata AI. AI is very good at making aesthetically pleasing images that masquerade as art. But it’s bad at making art that is built up in layers, with intuitive marks and shapes, and disharmonious color palettes.
And, I hypothesize, AI cannot create conceptual art. At least not yet, not based on the paradigm it uses right now. Large language and image models are designed to produce what is statistically likely, but conceptual art must produce what is statistically unlikely but still meaningful. Conceptual art introduces a kind of wrongness into a viewer’s mind, but it has to be a kind of wrongness that ultimately leads to something insightful about the world.
Meret Oppenheim’s 1936 sculpture presents a china teacup, saucer, and spoon completely covered in Chinese gazelle fur. This piece creates a clash of expectations. The teacup set’s usefulness has been destroyed. It brings together what should be clean and human-made (the teacup set) with what is organic, tactile, disgusting even. There is a further gendered aspect to it. Tea service suggests feminity, politeness, and proper etiquette. Fur is sensual, wild, animal.
Oppenheim’s piece was a great success, eventually being acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City where it was selected as the “quintessential Surrealist object.” This success paradoxically hindered Oppenheim’s advancement as an artist. She felt blocked and lost some of her joy in creating art.
AI cannot do conceptual art, at least not well, and the other thing it cannot do that a human artist can do is create an artwork over time, especially those like I create: intuitive, abstract, layered, unresolved. An AI artwork can suggest the appearance of complexity, texture, and evidence of an artistic process, but those things are an illusion only. In an actual layered acrylic painting, there are applications of paint that are later entirely covered over by later layers. A digital image generated by an AI shows only the final result, and doesn’t include what’s underneath. It can be suggested via shadows of texture or modified colors. But it’s not really there.
When I ask an AI to produce an image that looks “painterly,” what I get is some visible brushstrokes (often very even and consistent), consistent texture, and resolved tension. It doesn’t produce anything ugly or unfinished. It doesn’t do anything that could reflect a lack of artistic skill or a failure of materials (as when I scribble on a painting and it raggedly takes up earlier layers in what looks like a mistake).
An example of an artwork that AI could not generate is Willem De Kooning’s Woman I. It took him two years and many revisions in which he scraped, and repainted, erased, and reintroduced elements.
In a digital reproduction, Woman I may look graphic, bold, and cartoonish. In person, you will see buried figures, color decisions that don’t seem right, and violent edits that were never fully smoothed out. It contains visible indecision, but an AI never feels indecisive.
One reason an AI would have a difficult to impossible time producing digital art that is as complicated as captures of real-world art is that most images online aren’t high resolution. They don’t capture the detail of the real-world piece. Large image models are trained, for the most part, on web data, and the web contains many, many more low-resolution images than high-res.
Thinking about what AI can’t do in creating art has clarified something for me, something practical and personal.
Conceptual art depends on authorship, context, and risk. Intuitive abstract painting depends on time, hesitation, revision, and the residue of decisions made without a clear plan. In both cases, the work isn’t just an image. It’s a record of attention and action extended over time.
That’s why it doesn’t make much sense, at least not yet, to sell this work as if it were a mass-produced object.
My writing has been doing something important without my quite realizing it. Pieces like Why I’m Seeking Boredom in 2026 give readers a way into my artwork. They provide the context that makes projects like Snow Bound legible as conceptual art not just pretty paintings and photos. By the time someone arrives on that page, they’ve already been introduced to the premise.
So for now, I’m planning to keep my sales conversations one on one and human. I’ll make my paintings available directly through my site, with clear pricing and practical information about framing and shipping, but without a one-click checkout that bypasses interaction and relationship building. If someone wants to acquire a piece, we’ll talk (or email!) We’ll sort out logistics. I’ll know where the work is going and they’ll know where it came from.
That feels aligned with the work itself. It honors the time and human care embedded in each piece. It resists the frictionless statistical logic of AI.
Selling this way will be slow (but couldn’t possibly be slower than what I did in 2025, selling one piece through numerous group shows!) It is yet another way I am saying that artmaking is fundamentally human, that it unfolds over time, and that artworks carry traces of how they came to be.