The More I Studied the Old Masters, the More I Realised I Could Never Become One of Them

When I first began to study painting seriously, I believed that the most important answers had already been discovered. They seemed to exist somewhere beyond my reach: in museums, in the paintings of the Old Masters, in centuries-old treatises, in historical grounds, rare pigments, and carefully preserved techniques. I wanted to understand not only how these artists worked, but why their paintings still possess a sense of life that refuses to fade with time.

The deeper I immersed myself in the history of painting, the greater my admiration became. But so did an unexpected realisation. I could learn from them, yet I could never become them—not because they were greater artists than we are capable of being today, but because they belonged to a world that no longer exists. Their cities have changed. Their landscapes have changed. Their patrons, beliefs, scientific knowledge, and understanding of reality have changed. Even the colours with which they painted belong to history as much as the buildings they depicted. Some pigments have vanished completely, others survive only in altered forms, while entirely new materials continue to appear, offering possibilities that painters of previous centuries could never have imagined.

For a long time, I considered this a loss. It felt as though every generation moved a little farther away from something irreplaceable. Eventually, however, I began to wonder whether I was looking at history from the wrong direction.

The painters we now call the Old Masters were never trying to become the artists who came before them. Jan van Eyck was not trying to paint like medieval icon painters. Titian was not attempting to recreate antiquity. Turner did not work as though the Renaissance had never happened. Each of them respected tradition, yet each accepted the responsibility of responding to the world they actually inhabited. That may be the greatest lesson they leave us - not a particular medium, not a secret recipe, not a technical process, but the courage to look at one's own time with complete attention.

The more I studied historical painting techniques, the more I realised that painting has never been a story of preservation alone. It is a story of continuous transformation. Every century changes the questions artists ask, and every generation discovers new ways of seeing. Every innovation - whether a pigment, a brush, a support, or an idea—quietly becomes part of the language available to painters.

Today we stand before a world that previous generations could never have imagined. We live surrounded by satellite imagery, digital archives, artificial intelligence, global communication, and an endless stream of photographs. We witness landscapes transformed by climate, cities reshaped by technology, and societies changing at extraordinary speed. Even when we choose to paint with oil on linen using traditional methods, we do so as people shaped by the twenty-first century. Our eyes cannot belong to another age, nor should they.

The longer I spend studying historical materials and the evolution of painting, the less interested I become in recreating the past. Instead, I find myself asking a different question. If every great generation of painters tried to understand the world they lived in, who will describe ours?

Perhaps the responsibility of an artist has never been to preserve history unchanged. It has always been to extend it - to receive everything that previous generations discovered with gratitude, to carry that knowledge forward, and then to add something that did not exist before. Every painter inherits thousands of years of accumulated experience, but inheritance alone is not enough. Sooner or later, every artist must decide whether to spend a lifetime repeating another century's answers or searching for questions that belong to their own.

That choice is uncomfortable. It requires uncertainty. It demands that we leave the safety of imitation behind. Yet it is precisely this uncertainty that has carried painting forward throughout history.

The more I study the Old Masters, the less I wish to become one of them. My admiration has not diminished; it has changed. Today I admire them not because they painted like the past, but because they had the courage to paint their present. Perhaps that is the challenge every generation eventually receives - not to recreate what has already been seen, but to look honestly at the world before us and to leave behind a painting that could only have been made now.