Aboriginal Art and AI - Why One Lives, and the Other Cannot

There is a particular feeling that arrives when you stand in front of a painting made by a real person.

Not a print, not a reproduction, not an image on a screen - a painting whose surface still carries the touch of the hand that painted it.

You can see where the artist hesitated. Where the lines and dots steadied. Where a colour was used more thickly because the moment called for it. The painting holds time inside itself. The artist's time, the time it took to make, and now your time as you look at it.

This feeling is becoming rare, and it is becoming valuable, because the world is filling up with images that have no person or life behind them.

We have been thinking about this a lot at Art by Farquhar - the relationship between Aboriginal art and the rise of AI-generated images.

It would be easy to write a piece arguing that AI art is bad and real art is good. We don't think the conversation is that simple, and we don't think collectors are well-served by simple answers. The more honest question is: what is each kind of image-making actually for? And what does a buyer actually receive when they bring one home?

AI lives in the past. Humans live in the present.

An AI image generator is, structurally, a backward-looking system. Whatever it produces is composed from patterns it learned from images created before its training was complete. It cannot make something new in the way a human brain creates something new, because it has no present moment to make from. It generates outputs from a frozen archive, purely stuck in the past.

A painter painting today is producing the present. Janice Stanley sitting in our gallery this month, working on a Pantu canvas - that painting reflects who she is today. The colours representing the mood she is in. The conversation she had with her family last night. The way the light fell in the gallery this afternoon. The seven sisters story she has been carrying for her whole life and the way it feels to her in this particular week of her painting life.

The painting is alive in the moment of its making. When it leaves her hands, that moment becomes permanent on the canvas. The viewer engaging with the work years from now is meeting a real moment that actually happened in a real life.

AI cannot make a moment. It does not have moments. It is purely training data and outputs.

This is the first and most fundamental difference. Everything else follows from it.

The hand of the maker

A painting carries the body of the person who made it. Janice pours and manipulates paint and medium differently across the canvas than Debra Nangala McDonald, who uses a unique red ochre background behind all of her works. Maureen Nampijinpa Hudson layers dots in sequence and confidence in a pattern that is unique to her.  The decisions, the way pressure changes through a single brushstroke or dot, the breath of the painter as she works - all of this is stayed in the surface of the canvas. None of it is intentional in the way we usually use that word. It is what happens when a particular person, in a particular body, makes a particular painting at a particular time.

You cannot reproduce this kind of art by algorithm. You can reproduce the look. You cannot reproduce the strokes. You cannot reproduce the texture. You cannot produce the life.

When a collector spends real time with a Maureen Hudson painting, they begin to notice things they did not see at first. The variation in her dot work. The way her colour fields settle next to each other. The subtle changes in rhythm across the canvas. These are not random. They are the marks of an artist concentrating, present, alive to the work in front of her. The painting rewards close attention because the close attention is reciprocated by the close attention that made it. AI imagery does not reveal new things on the tenth viewing, because there was nothing to reveal. The image was produced - it was not lived through. It lacks life and soul.

The artists we see have lives that change

Janice Stanley has been visiting our gallery for years now. We watch her work evolve. We see the days she is energised and the days she is quiet. We see the influence of her family - her son, her partner Isaac, her aunties - who carry the seven sisters story. We have watched her paint pieces that are clearly continuous with what she made five years ago and pieces that mark a new direction and flow. She is forever evolving. 

Debra Nangala McDonald, when she paints with us, brings her country into the room. Her Women's Body Painting series carries the weight of decades of ceremonial knowledge, past from senior Papunya artists. The work she makes today is not the work she made when she began painting; it is the work of a woman who has been painting these stories for a long time and is still finding new depth and movement in them. There is a trajectory there. A life unfolding in paint.

Maureen Nampijinpa Hudson paints with the authority of a senior woman of her country. Her work sits in a lineage. It is informed by everything she has seen, every story she has been taught and taught herself, every painting she has made before. When she completes a new piece, it joins a body of work that has been developing for decades.

AI has no body of work in this sense. It has versions. Each version is a new compression of more past data. The model does not develop in the way a real artist develops. It does not surprise itself. It does not have an off year and a recovery. It does not learn something hard and bring that lesson into the next painting.

When you buy a painting by Janice Stanley or a Debra McDonald or a Maureen Hudson, you are buying a particular point on a real trajectory. You can place the painting in the artist's career and life. You can understand it as part of who she was at the moment of its making, and you can watch her continue to make work afterward. The painting on your wall is one moment in a life that is still happening.

The past becomes the future through a living person

Aboriginal art does something that Western art often does not. It bridges enormous spans of time through the act of a living person painting now.

The story Janice paints - Pantu (Salt Lakes) - the seven sisters creation story from the APY Lands. They date back to the creation period. They were taught to her by her mother and her family in the APY Lands. When she paints today, she is not illustrating something old. She is continuing a transmission that has been alive for far longer than any of us can imagine. The painting is the meeting point between deep Australian heritage and the present moment of her hand and brush over the canvas.

The same is true for Debra and Maureen.

Debra carries the stories of her grandfather Shorty Lungkata Tjungurrayi - a founding member of the Papunya Tula painting movement and a senior Pintupi man whose country lay around Lake MacDonald. She paints alongside the legacy of her mother Martha McDonald and her aunties Linda Syddick Napaltjarri and Wentja Napaltjarri. Through her marriage, she became the sole custodian of the Mulga Tree Dreaming taught to her by her mother-in-law Mitjili Napurrula. When Debra paints, she is continuing a transmission that has moved through four generations of artists in her family alone.

Maureen carries the Warlpiri stories of her father and grandfather's country at Warlukurlangu, and the Women's Ceremony knowledge passed down through her mother. She is blood cousin to the late Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, with whom she painted from childhood. Her daughter Julieanne Turner Nungurrayi paints. Her grandson Farron Furber Jampijinpa paints. 

When these women paint, the past becomes present, and the present becomes a teaching for the future genertions. A collector who buys their work and lives with it in their home is participating in that transmission, in a small way. They become a temporary custodian of an object that carries the line forward.

This is something AI cannot do, because the bridge requires a living person at the centre. AI can produce images that visually mimic the surface of Aboriginal art - and many AI systems do, often trained on Aboriginal artists' work without consent or compensation.

These images are not a bridge to anywhere. They reach back into a frozen archive of pixels and produce a new arrangement of pixels. There is no living person carrying anything forward. The image looks like cultural continuity, but it is exactly the opposite of cultural continuity. It is a flat sample, disconnected from the lineage it visually references. It lacks any sign of life and purpose. 

What you are actually buying

When you bring an AI image into your home, you have a beautiful picture. There is nothing wrong with this. AI images can be useful, can be lovely, can serve real purposes. We are not arguing that they should not exist or that people should not enjoy them.

What we are saying is that they are a different kind of object than a painting by a living artist. The difference is not visual. It is not about which image is more beautiful, or more refined, or more polished. The difference is what is on the other side of the image.

When you live with a Janice Stanley painting on your wall, you live with a presence. There is someone who was on the other side of the canvas. A Pitjantjatjara woman who made these particular strokes and lines at a moment in her life, who is still alive, still painting, still becoming. The painting connects you to her, to her family, to her country, to the lineage of women who have carried the stories for generations.

Janice's love for painting is shared with you and your home. This is something that a computer cannot replicate.

When you live with an AI image, you live with a picture and pixels. The picture might be beautiful. It will not change as you change. It will not reveal new things over years. It will not connect you to anything beyond itself, because there is nothing beyond itself.

A final thought

Original artwork is one of the few remaining objects where a human being can encounter another human being directly, across distances of time and place, through the surface of a single canvas. A painting is the trace of a consciousness through a moment. When you stand in front of it years or decades later, you are meeting the artist's consciousness again. You are not alone with the image, you are with the person who made it. There is something special and magical about it.

AI cannot do this, no matter how good the image looks. It has no consciousness to meet. It lives in the past, processing what has already been. Real art lives in the present and carries the present forward into time. Both have their uses. Only one is alive and real.

When a collector buys a painting from Art by Farquhar, they are not buying decoration. They are entering a relationship - with a person, a family, a continuity and story that reaches back generations and continues forward through the act of painting. The canvas on the wall is alive and breathing in a way that AI imagery cannot be, because someone made it.

That is what we mean when we talk about Aboriginal art. It is what we will continue to mean, regardless of how much AI imagery fills the air around us.