Oil Painting & Digital Art

I am not sure if paintings need words. Maybe they don’t. But I’ve come to think there’s value in leaving small notes on the margins — not explanations, not manifestos, just quiet entries about the process of looking, of building an image, of letting a mistake stay because it turned out to be more honest than the plan.

In the past, a painting might have stood on its own — a gesture, a silence, a field of color. But in the age of AI, things are changing. Just a nice image isn’t sufficient anymore (was it ever?). A technically competent image can now be generated in seconds by a machine. What’s needed now more then ever is a why — and the why has to be reflected upon.

This site brings together my paintings, digital art, animation, and experiments in writing — all part of the same search for imagery and meaning.

Ilia Belyi