Interruptions

When the pandemic pushed classes online, the walls at home started to close in.

 Most days, I was ping-ponged through a dull, gray blur between the silence of my bedroom and the sound of my mom’s approaching footsteps during the five-minute breaks between Zoom classes—coming to ask if I’d eaten, exercised, or “done anything besides stare at a screen.” I hadn’t, at least not in the way she wanted. In an effort to outrun the solitude, the nagging, and the constant downpour of bad news—COVID death tolls ticking higher by the hour, global protests, wildfires muddling skies rusty orange—my aimless clicking drew me into sprawling open-source museum archives.

So while my peers entered a covenant with the latest trends, busy perfecting their lip-syncing skills and competitive doomscrolling, I found a fellowship of my own that transcended centuries. In the eerie stillness of lockdown, I saw my reflection in the suspended figures of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks. Käthe Kollwitz’s contorted silhouettes kept me awake and pondering at night. Pieter Bruegel the Elder confronted me with the devastation of the Black Plague in The Triumph of Death.

Paradoxically, these haunting visions brought me solace—I realized my modern problems weren’t so modern after all. For the first time, I truly understood how artists tried to address the same timeless questions I asked: Why are we here? How can life be so wonderful and so sucky at the same time?

Thus, at age twelve, I became a connoisseur of artistic suffering. I had more cuts than fingers from trying to impart my fantasy worlds onto slippery sheets of loose-leaf printer paper. My prized 2H pencil was mercilessly gnawed down to a stub by my dog while I was taking an inequalities test—which I later Scotch-taped back together like a wounded soldier. Across centuries, Bruegel and Hopper whispered encouragement. Had they not survived disease and solitude even without modern comforts (e.g., antibiotics, WiFi)? I nodded, scribbling furiously, feeling lucky to be their designated heir—the latest chosen to transmute human suffering into transcendent art.

But once the world reopened, the rapid pace of high school left my sketchbook fallow. Concurrently, text-to-image programs like DALL-E (2021) emerged, capable of reducing years of artistic skill to instant memes and enabling the chronically online to mass-produce NFTs and faux album covers without ever putting pencil to paper. Meanwhile, in AP Art History, I learned about artists who enjoyed the privilege of time: time to contemplate, to explore the world, and to devote their youth solely to creation. But in the breakneck pace of modern life, the very conditions that once nurtured artists felt foreign. The frequency of my online gallery escapades and adrenaline-fueled sketchbooks dwindled as I wrestled with these questions, trapped in a vicious cycle of self-doubt and encroaching historical forces.

I finally slowed down and escaped the vertigo of my New Jersey snow globe last summer during an immersive arts residency, when I stood face-to-face with works I’d only ever squinted at through mediocre screen-captures on a projector. Standing before Mortlake Terrace in The Frick, I could almost hear the voice of J.W. Turner whispering to me across feathered brushstrokes. As I surveyed below the intricate banisters of the manor, my panic softened. I was surrounded by centuries of tradition—proof of humanity. If these works had survived wars, upheavals, and countless reinventions of the world, then maybe mine could too. I carried that tentative hope with me in my pocket, as if it might be enough to protect the future of art.

But on the last day of the program, my fellow art students and I found ourselves sitting before a panel that felt more like a firing squad. Apparently, the future of creativity didn’t include artists—the speakers weren’t painters or sculptors, but businesspeople and technologists: some feeding their own work into generative models, others selling AI-generated pieces as the “future of the creative economy.” And worse, these technologists co-opted our language, touting the “human touch” behind every line of code, as if intention alone could stand in for soul. Their droning voices all but confirmed my fears, but my despair was interrupted when a voice rang out from the back.

“While you advertise your ‘misunderstood machines,’ some of us are skipping sleep to work on portfolio pieces we actually care about!”

Her voice cracked, raw with frustration. “Do you know how it feels to wash paintbrushes at 4 a.m., scrubbing layers of stubborn pigment that never seem to come off because your hands are just as caked in exhaustion and dried paint as the bristles themselves? How can you [expletive] talk about expanding creative boundaries without a single real artist up there?”

For a second, no one moved. Then chaos erupted.

I sat frozen in both fear and admiration, watching her dreadlocks swing resolutely as the staff escorted her out. Heat rose in my chest—an urge to stand, to scream—but I didn’t. After years studying artists who conveyed emotions through brushstrokes and symbols, I’d convinced myself that strength lay in subtlety. But in that moment, I knew my silence sat closer to complicity.

After some indignant huffing, the panelists pivoted back to their smooth buzzwords, but the woman’s voice played on loop in my mind.

When I returned home, I began drawing with renewed vigor, my hands aching with insistence. I ignored my SAT prep books. I pushed aside my unfinished Common App essay. And I began to sketch like I used to—not for college credit or a perfect academic record, but with the same breathless energy I had when I was younger. The kind that littered my hand with a kaleidoscope of wax fragments and the table with wooden shavings. As the pages filled, so did my willingness to speak. Creativity had woken something in me that refused to stay quiet.

As a finalist for my school’s oratorical competition, I took the stage to defend artistic integrity before 1,100 students and faculty. When my art teacher approached me afterward, eyes glistening, and whispered gratefully, “You understand,” I realized in a moment of catharsis that I had found my voice at last.

I’m no longer helplessly swept up in my own ruminations, afraid to stand up for human expression. As an artist, I will affirm my conviction—through the painstaking process of creation—that no machine can replicate.