Painting is a stop start activity. It has to be. It’s in the durations of the stop phase that determine the look as much as those in the start/ active phase. In the stop phase, the looking takes over, usually, the regrading, considering and deliberating next moves. When this relationship is hurried, a singularity of expression sets in - note, not in itself any guarantee of wholeness. Abstract artists working with a hit and hope frenzied approach capture time in much the same way as a scenic painter seeks a well composed illusory capturing of a time of day motif - an art form which they would reject and indeed go out of their way to disassociate their work from (it being the very antithesis of their own perceptions). I believe this moment in time is a covert academicism which also dogged the Impressionists. Hence the lurch into more esoteric and perceptual concerns by Cézanne - whose paintings are painstaking affairs yet maintain a freshness if not an obvious airy immediacy.
Working in such painstaking ways as an abstract painter has many pitfalls. Not least the dreaded notion of composition - a choreography of actions towards an understood norm. The challenge is in maintaining a direction of a painting whilst remaining open to discovering and adapting to the results as they unfold. Therefore any direction decided upon must by definition be one of principle rather than plan: an abstract state rather than a concrete one.
The stop start of a painting is thus beholden to how time is managed. As such, it will be affected by the clarity of decision making, issues of patience and even persistence; again markers of the principles of the direction.
With this in mind, it is apparent that AI in art (at least in its current form) is counter to the principled direction and more akin to the captured moment. In short, it too is academic. How could it not be? It’s an optimal accumulation of data: opinions and information. It operates at speeds which are polemically divergent to any stop start, a non-stop answer service. By working with time instead of against it, an opening up of the feelings of space can naturally happen. How the work is shaped will then place greater demands upon the artist as mentioned above, but in these demands are the roots of a more profound, a more personal, a more human art.