Yeah, there is still room for the human painter versus Midjourney and other generative AI. The value of painting by hand is not in obtaining an image—that is now instantaneous—but in the experience of creating it: the attention, the body, the time and the personal discovery that no machine experiences for you. As Julia Cameron's approach reminds us, creating is above all a way of being alive and present, not of producing objects. That is why manual practice does not compete with AI: it belongs to another category.
The perceived threat
The arrival of image generators like Midjourney has provoked a mixture of fascination and anguish in many visual artists. In seconds, by typing a few words, anyone gets a detailed illustration, an apparent oil portrait or an impossible landscape. Faced with that speed, years of drawing practice suddenly seem outdated, almost absurd. If the market rewards the result and the result no longer requires manual dexterity, why continue?
The question hurts because it mixes two fears: the economic one (will I be able to make a living from this?) and the existential one (does what I do make sense?). The first is real and legitimate, and the art world will have to renegotiate how creative work is paid. But the second, the existential one, rests on a misunderstanding that must be dismantled.
Confusing the object with the experience
AI produces objects: images, files, results. What it does not produce is experience of creating. When a painter spends an afternoon mixing colors, correcting a line, discovering that the painting asks something he had not planned, that person is experiencing something that the final image barely reflects. The painting is the rest of a process; the process is the art.
The Artist's Way insists on this point again and again: creating is not making products, it is a way of inhabiting the world with more attention and more presence. From that perspective, whether a machine generates better images is as irrelevant to the painter as whether a bulldozer digs faster than a gardener enjoying his garden. The gardener does not dig to move earth: he digs because doing so changes his life.
What only the human body does
Painting is a deeply corporal activity. The hand that learns to control a brush, the eye that begins to see nuances that it did not distinguish before, the patience that is trained layer by layer: all of this happens in a body and transforms the person who lives it. This learning is not transferable to a machine or replaceable by it, because its beneficiary is the artist himself, not the viewer.
There is also a type of knowledge that only appears by doing. When painting from life, one learns to really look at a face, a light, a shadow. That attentive seeing filters down to the rest of life. Whoever delegates the image to an algorithm obtains the image, but the seeing is lost. And the seeing, not the image, is what makes an artist.
Combine without giving up
None of this requires us to reject AI. Many artists use it today as an exploratory tool: to generate references, test compositions or sketch ideas before bringing them to canvas. Used this way, AI is a lightning-fast sketchbook, not a substitute for work. The problem appears only if the comfort of generating completely replaces the habit of creating with your hands.
The key is to ask yourself why you paint. If you paint solely to get images to sell, AI is real competition and you will have to reposition yourself. But if you also paint—or above all—because the act organizes your mind, connects you with the world and makes you feel alive, then there is no possible competition: the machine cannot take away something that only exists while you do it. That is the ground that Julia Cameron's method helps you recover.
The historical precedent: photography and painting
This debate is not new. When photography became popular in the 19th century, many announced the death of painting: why paint a portrait if a camera captures it in an instant and exactly? And yet, the painting did not die; was released. No longer having to document reality, painters explored light, emotion and abstraction, giving rise to Impressionism and almost all modern art.
Generative AI could trigger a similar shift. If the machine is responsible for producing technically perfect images, perhaps it will push human artists towards what the machine does not have: intention, biography, risk, meaning. History suggests that new tools do not eliminate creators, but force them to ask again what is essential about their craft. That question, uncomfortable but fertile, is pure Path of the Artist.
Painting as a practice, not as a product
Julia Cameron's method proposes recovering creative activities for the pleasure and transformation they produce, not for their performance. Painting falls squarely into that category. You don't need to be good, or sell, or exhibit: it is enough for the act to order you inside and return your attention to the present. From there, the comparison with Midjourney loses all meaning, because you don't even play the same game.
If you haven't painted in a while for fear of not being up to par—and now, on top of that, because of the shadow of AI—consider returning without any pretensions. Buy some cheap watercolors and paint badly, like someone who writes ugly morning pages. The objective is not an admirable painting, but to rediscover the pleasure of creating with the hands. That taste is yours, non-transferable, and no machine can generate it for you.
What to ask yourself before giving up
If AI has made you doubt your vocation, take a moment to separate the questions that are mixed into that doubt. Are you frustrated because you fear you won't be able to sell your work, or because deep down you have stopped enjoying the process? Do you compare your work with generated images because you care about the result, or because you have forgotten why you started creating? These questions do not have quick answers, but asking them already rearranges the problem.
Many times, discouragement about AI is actually an old block that technology has only uncovered. Fear of judgment, perfectionism, the feeling of not being enough: all of that existed before Midjourney and will continue to exist after. Working on those roots—which is exactly what the Artist's Path proposes—usually returns the desire to create more strongly than any argument about machines. The tool won't decide if you're still an artist; You will decide, from a place much deeper than the market.