Arick was born in Los Angeles. At six his family made Aliyah to Israel. He came of age in the California desert and studied at UC San Diego, where he double majored in visual arts and art history.
During the pandemic he painted a painting a day for more than 550 days. He worked under the name Moriartsy, in meticulous photorealistic detail. There was a gallery show on Crosby Street in SoHo. There were three awards at Art Basel. The work was precise and the precision was the achievement.
Then a stranger showed him a set of AI generated images trained on his own paintings.
You can imagine several reactions to that. His was to change what he was making. If a machine can produce the image, then the image was never the valuable part.
What followed is the Emotional Brush series. Abstract, exaggerated, multi material. The paint sits up off the canvas. The brushstrokes are not in service of a likeness, they are the subject. The work is less pre-planned and more discovered in the moment, which means it can only have happened once.
In his words, anybody can make an image. His goal is to make it feel like it came from a human hand and a human soul.
Seventeen of these paintings are in his room here, all from 2023. Each is an original, and the full sale price is paid to him.