Why Painting Will Never Die

For years, one of the conversations around painting has been about justification. How do you justify making paintings—this ancient form of smearing colored dirt on cloth rectangles—when innovation has given us countless other ways to make new images? Often, cinema is brought up as the “superior” medium for modern times. You make extraordinary movies. Why do you still make paintings?

[Laughs] The thing is, it’s so beautiful. In a way, the image has gotten cheaper and cheaper and cheaper, and the world is filled with millions of images. But a painting is a unique thing. When you stand in front of a thing that’s not done on a computer, it’s a special thing. It’s like how a lithograph is way different than an image printed from a computer. So, those things, in my mind, are even more precious today than they used to be. You know, things go in waves, and I think that cinema will never die, painting will never die, lithography will never die, and still photography will never die either. The mediums are here to stay, and they’re infinitely deep. Ideas will come to take them further, but these different mediums are so fantastic. It sort of makes you crazy how how much there is to discover and do.

I loved rereading this interview with David Lynch, on why painting will never die. Read the whole piece over at artnet.