Hand of the Artist
- Diamond Zhou
- Sep 26
- 13 min read
Updated: Oct 11
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SATURDAY EVENING POST
September 27th, 2025
A strong painting stores the history of its making in the surface. That history is legible to the eye. It shows up as edges that remember pressure, as haloes where a wash met a boundary and kept travelling, as the faint return of an earlier layer through a thin veil, as seams in collage that cast a small shadow only so slightly in the afternoon light. They are fragments of time and decision. When people say a work has presence, this is what they are responding to, even if they have never been taught the words for it.
Put your phone away for a moment. Forget the endless flow of images that come to you in a smooth stream. Step into a room with a painting that appears precise. From afar, the piece feels calm and complete. The intervals hold. Colour meets colour with limited drama. Now, walk forward. As you come near, the work changes. The edge that looked like a concept turns into an event. You can see where tape met paint and was lifted. You can find the tiny ridge where liquid pooled along a boundary and dried into a line of relief. You can follow a veil that breaks over the tooth of the canvas and tells you how dry the brush was and how quickly a hand travelled. None of this is sentimental. It is simply the way materials behave under pressure, and painters who accept that behaviour, rather than denying it, leave behind a readable history of choices.
That readable history is the hand of the artist.
This felt shift from image to event is what art historians sometimes called aura. The word carries superstition in some ears, but it can be made simple. Aura is the apartness a singular work can keep even when you stand very close to it. Not distance in metres. Distance as a kind of interior that has not been flattened by reproduction. Modern life is excellent at producing likeness, devices bring images near and make them easy to hold, but in the same gesture the experience thins. The copy travels well, but the original remains stubborn. It stores decisions that cannot be cloned without loss. In painting this stored life is not mystique. It is the aftermath of making. This is why a quiet canvas can hold a room.
When painters and historians talk about facture they mean nothing more exotic than the visible manner of making, and handling of material. Facture is what you read when a scumble breaks and shows a dry brush, when a heavy impasto piled leaves a slight burr that later layers cannot quite bury, when a sgraffito cut opens a small window onto a colour beneath. Facture is not a style tick, it is evidence.
Another quiet tool is the notion of the index. An index is a trace caused by the very thing it signifies. A footprint is an index of a foot. A tide line is an index of time and gravity. On a painting, the meniscus left by paint against tape, the feathered edge where capillaries in the cloth pulled a wash under the mask, the soft bloom where one layer announces itself through another, are indices of contact and sequence. One does not need the word to feel the point. It is enough to accept that a surface can register causes and that the causes can be read.
There is also a plain way to name what makes paintings different from files, which people sometimes sense without having the terms. A painting is autographic. Its identity is inseparable from its singular making. A digital image or a musical score is allographic. It can be perfectly realised from its description and still be itself. Geometric abstract painting can look allographic to the casual eye because it appears clean and certain. It is not, its authority depends on decisions that were contingent while they were made, and the surface preserves that contingency as evidence.
Finally, the body matters. A painter lends the body to the work. Tempo, reach, hesitation and force enter the picture as intervals. Gesture is not only flourish. In a disciplined practice it is the choreography of measuring, laying down, pressing, lifting, and then accepting or correcting what the material returned. The body is legible as tempo. This is why a viewer who cares about craft can stand in front of a painting and feel the rhythm without being told any theory at all.
With that in mind, the edges are a natural place to start. In geometric and linear painting the edge is where risk collects. Tape promises certainty, but paint talks back. Humidity changes the moment when a mask can be lifted. Pressure varies by finger and by hour. Even the best plan has to meet what the material is willing to do that day. When the result holds, the edge often carries a minute geography that tells you how close the work came to a tear or a seep, and how the painter lived with what happened. That geography is not something to be hidden. It is the part of the story that keeps an otherwise quiet surface alive. The excitement is not cleanliness. It is the trace of judgement under pressure.
Bleed and stain bring time into view. Colour does not only sit on a surface, it also travels through it. When a wash moves into the weave, it draws a perimeter that intention alone could not draw. A tide mark forms along a masked boundary and tells you exactly when the tape went down, how wet the mix was, how long the painter waited, and whether the painter chose to accept what the material offered or to adjust it. The halo that remains is not a mistake that escaped attention. It is a record of physics meeting a choice. That is why it reads as truthful, and why, once you notice it, you begin to look for it with pleasure.
There are traces that belong to thought as much as to touch. A prior drawing or an abandoned geometry may survive beneath the surface and return as a ghost, or return with commitment. Sometimes you see it with the naked eye. Sometimes the light in the room has to change before it speaks. When it appears, you feel the pulse of a decision. The earlier intention has not been covered, it has been allowed to support the one that remained. The surface has mercy for its own history, and that mercy reads as depth and merit, and sometimes allowed to shine like jewels sewn on to adorn.
Gesture deserves a fresh understanding in this context. We often use the word for bravura, for sweep and speed. In geometric abstract painting gesture becomes slower and more exact, but it does not vanish. It relocates to the choreography of measuring, laying down, burnishing, lifting, and living with what the paint returned. The body is legible as tempo. An arm’s reach translates into scale. A shoulder remembers the length of a session that had to stop because a layer needed to cure before the next step could begin. When you stand in front of a surface that keeps this history on its face, your own body recognises the rhythm without anyone explaining it to you. That recognition is one reason these paintings continue to reward looking long after the first impression has faded.
This way of seeing makes a common question much easier to answer, why not use a computer, why not print a file that specifies each boundary with perfect authority. The short answer is that a file is a description. A painted edge is an event. The identity of a painting is inseparable from the way it came to be, while a digital image can be fully accounted for as a specification, and a painting includes the unrepeatable history of its surface. The difference is not a quarrel between old and new, it is a difference you can verify at arm’s length. Stand close to a painting, then stand close to a printout of a file that imitates painting, the eye knows which one keeps giving you back the story of how it was made.
There is a second, older way to place all of this. The twentieth century did not lack for artists who invited machines into the studio or who tried to reduce their own hand in the name of clarity.
Barnett Newman made a zip that is often mistaken for a perfect stripe. Onement I famously lists oil on masking tape on canvas in its materials, making the edge’s construction part of the work’s identity. The line is not a diagram, it is tape laid down, painted over, and lifted. Its ridge catches raking light like the memory of a tide. The zip is an event that remains visible as a seam.
Agnes Martin drew lines that looked like rules and felt like breath. Her graphite over gesso registers the tremor of a hand that refused spectacle and chose steadiness, the grid in her work is not a concept printed onto the world, it is a practice that makes a rhythm visible. The surface becomes a diary of controlled attention.
Ellsworth Kelly liked to deflect talk about touch, but the edges of his shaped paintings still register decisions. A colour plane meeting a wall at a non ninety degree angle is not only a formal move. It is a choice that must be carried on the floor in the studio with sanding, repainting and testing against a wall. The crispness holds because someone made it hold, not because the idea alone was strong.
Kurt Schwitters collaged tram tickets and newsprint into small cathedrals of time. A torn edge remembers the hand that tore it, a knife cut reads differently and always will, Glue leaves a halo, paper throws a shadow, and the world outside the studio is invited into the picture by its own scars. The join is content.
Wade Guyton ran linen through a large inkjet printer and accepted banding and misfeed as a new kind of facture. The machine developed a signature. The point is not that all facture must come from a hand, the point is that strong work lets the source of its traces be legible, even when that source is mechanical.
One could add many names, but the contour is clear, a painting that keeps the history of its making visible within its look carries a charge that is hard to counterfeit. The charge is not sentiment, it is accountability, and the surface can answer how.
We cannot pretend that we look at art outside of time, we live in a culture that is superb at producing likeness. It is natural to ask what becomes of the hand of the artist when images can be generated as quickly as a search? What about art made with artificial intelligence? Does it have what people loosely call a soul? Could it gain one?
Contemporary text to image systems make pictures by moving step by step from noise to an arrangement that fits patterns learned from data, the outputs can be persuasive and beautiful, they are likenesses produced without contact with material. There is no tape to lift, there is no fibre to bruise, there is no scumble to catch late light. If the picture is printed, the printer brings its own mechanics. Dots gain, nozzles band, paper has a tooth. Those are the traces you can read, they belong to a different chain of responsibility.
We do not need to scold these tools to understand their limits. When people reach for a word like soul, what they often want to feel is the presence of intention tested by resistance over time. Painting is a contract with resistance. Gravity intrudes, viscosity argues, the tape leaks, drying times insist on patience. A painter agrees to those terms and leaves behind a record of the negotiation. That is why the surfaces of strong paintings feel thick with lived time. Synthetic images face other kinds of difficulty and have their own kinds of success, but the surface does not remember contact. They are often pleasing in a way that does not build with repeated looking. They are answers that do not become conversations.
Could this change? If artificial intelligence remains in the realm of data sampling, then the answer is no. There will be no local history of touch. If computation enters the studio as a body that touches things, then the answer becomes more interesting. Imagine a system that moves a brush, pauses for the paint to shift, photographs the result, compares it to a goal, and adjusts in response to the treacheries of bristle, tack, and drying time. That system would begin to generate a legible record of risk. Whether that record would matter to us in the same way is a separate question. We tend to reserve our strongest attachments for works in which a person chose to accept responsibility for what we are asked to feel. If a future machine earns that responsibility, viewers will decide case by case whether the traces carry meaning or simply record engineering. That decision will be made by eyes in rooms over years, which is to say, it will be made the way art has always been judged.
It is also true that the digital world is building better provenance. Files will carry public records of how they came to be. This is good for ethics and for trust, but it is not a replacement for presence. A line in a metadata field is not the same as a ridge left by paint against tape, labels explain, but paintings defend themselves by what the surface shows to anyone willing to come near and look.
The great advantage of acknowledging the hand is that it returns dignity to looking, no specialist language is required. A visitor can stand quietly and describe what is there without reaching for jargon. A teacher can show students how a tide mark reads like a sentence about time. A critic can speak plainly about why a seam matters. A collector can say without embarrassment that a painting holds a room because its skin refuses to forget its own history. These sentences may sound modest, but they are the reason people keep returning to galleries. An object that can be read in this way repays the attention it asks for.
There are of course artists who have made powerful work by handing authorship to rules or machines. Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings are executed by others from simple sentences. The work is allographic by design. It can be remade anywhere that a wall and an instruction meet. The authorship lies in the instruction and the decision to accept any accurate result as the work. The lesson is not that the hand always must be visible. The lesson is that strong work is honest about the source of its traces. In LeWitt’s case the traces belong to a system and a community. In Guyton’s case they belong to a printer and a stubborn material. In Agnes Martin the hand is quiet and in plain air. All three positions can be true at once and can sit in a single collection without cancelling each other out.
None of this asks for piety. The hand of the artist is not a slogan. It is an honest name for how meaning can take root in matter and stay there. The edges, the halos, the traces of an underlayer, the seams, the scumble, and the poorly dried paint — these facts are small, because painting is a slow art. They are decisive because they are the places where a viewer’s trust is earned.
CURRENT
GROUP EXHIBITION
This exhibition gathers artists whose practices transform material and perception into experiences that linger, works that shift the way we see light, inhabit space, and feel the weight and presence of form. United by a balance of beauty and thought, these pieces invite us to step into moments where looking becomes a deeper act of seeing. Exhibition features works by Michael Bjornson, Edward Burtynsky, James W. Chiang, Ronald T. Crawford, Gathie Falk, Deirdre Hofer, Jan Hoy, Robert Kelly, Joseph Kyle, Marion Landry, James O’Mara, David Spriggs, Charlotte Wall, and many more.
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