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A gallery owner in Santa Fe told me my piece looked like AI, and it made me change how I label everything
I was at a small art walk on Canyon Road in Santa Fe about six months ago, showing three oil paintings I had finished that spring. A gallery owner walked up, looked at my 36 by 48 inch landscape for maybe 20 seconds, and asked me point blank if I had used an image generator for the underpainting. I had not, but my smooth blending and perfect skies made her assume it, so I pulled up my phone and showed her the 14 progress photos I had taken along the way. Since then I tape a small card to the back of every canvas with dates and photos, not because I have to prove anything, but because that question is not going away. Has anyone else started keeping proof of process just to avoid that conversation?
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west.henry4d ago
Kept a stack of my old sketchbooks after something similar happened to me last year, but not for the gallery folks. What nobody talks about is the buyer side. Once AI images flooded every feed, people stopped trusting their own eyes, and that doubt lands on real work whether we like it or not. A process card on the back of a canvas does nothing for the person scrolling past a photo of it online, because they never see the back. So the proof has to live in the open, in the messy parts we used to paint over, like visible brush marks and edges that do not blend perfectly. I stopped sanding down my texture and let some strokes stay rough, and the questions dropped off. It is a strange trade, making work slightly less clean just so it reads as human, but that seems to be where things sit now.
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