Renaissance of the Real

A Manifesto

“Inclement Weather: Vega”, an oil painting on panel still in progress.

Hello friends,

I ditched Mailchimp and moved my favorite people over here to Substack, where I’ll share studio notes, new paintings, and insights into the stories, books and street art projects I’m working on.

I thought I’d begin with a manifesto.

—Cynthia

Renaissance of the Real: A Manifesto

Art & Antiques magazine once called me “one of the greatest living surrealists.” Personally I refer to myself a magic realist.

So when AI-generated weirdly surreal imagery first began appearing online I was amused.

The amusement didn’t last.

I soon learned that these systems had been trained on the work of living artists. Our paintings, illustrations, and drawings were scraped, absorbed, and recombined without permission and without compensation.

Now AI imagery is everywhere. And frankly, I am tired of the slop.

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When I was little, my mother gave me the Metropolitan Museum’s Seminars in Art books—large volumes filled with glossy prints of paintings from the museum’s collection.

Most children hang posters of pop stars or horses on their walls. I hung Renaissance paintings.

My mother also told me stories about our family’s connection to the Sforza court of Milan, where Leonardo da Vinci designed inventions and painted the luminous “Lady with an Ermine”.

Whether myth or fact it hardly mattered. What mattered was this: I grew up believing that artists shape how we see the world.

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As an illustrator I spent decades painting by hand—gouache on canvas and plaster, often embedding surreal three-dimensional objects into the work.

I created thousands of images for publications including The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, and The New York Times. I illustrated Newbery Award book covers and historical fiction.

Each piece took time. It was hard, but gratifying work.

Five years ago—as AI imagery emerged— I began immersing myself in the techniques of the Old Masters. I studied color mixing, sight-sizing, glazing… all the old techniques that are becoming more rare.

And a new body of work is emerging ( s l o w l y ).

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Real models interact with creatures of the natural world in the fleeting light of magic hour or in interiors lit like a Vermeer painting.

No prompt. No algorithm. No synthetic imagination.

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I propose A Renaissance of the Real for artists who are sick of the slop.

Not nostalgia. A revolution.

In a world of artificial images, the most radical act may be to look closely at the real world again. To paint from life, work slowly.

To observe animals, light, bodies, and landscapes as they truly exist. Reality, it turns out, is stranger than anything a machine can invent.

The Renaissance of the Real calls for artists of every discipline—painters, musicians, writers, filmmakers, theater makers—to gather again. Not only online. But in real rooms.

Let’s hold salons where artists meet face-to-face to share work, ideas, and experiments.

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Principles of the Renaissance of the Real

• Real Life — Art begins with the real world—real light, real bodies, real animals, real imagination, real materials.

• Human Made — Work made by human hands and minds.

• Time Matters — Work that takes days, weeks, months or years contains that time within it.

• Presence Over Platforms — Art should be experienced face-to-face whenever possible.

• Salons Over Feeds — Artists must gather in real rooms to exchange ideas and challenge one another.

• The Mark of the Movement — Artists who support this philosophy mark their work with the symbol: ⓇR which is a simple signal that the work was made by human imagination, observation, and craft.

Join Us!

The future of art will not be generated. It will be made.

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