Let me admit something that I worry is a little duplicitous.

Last week, I was working on a YouTube video, and I began it by showing some examples from my sketchbooks. The examples that I selected were the ones that looked the most photorealistic. I wanted to give viewers the sense that, hey, I actually know how to draw.

I feel I have to establish my own bona fides before I can give people advice about drawing. But the reality is that those examples that I have of my ability to make accurate, near-photographic drawings aren’t really the ones that represent who I am as an artist.

But I feel obliged to show off first. For most folks, realistic art is superior, somehow more “real,” and inherently valuable. Hyperrealism is a cool magic trick: you can see the skill instantly. It’s proof of talent, seriousness, legitimacy. A 6-year-old couldn’t do it.

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I've been watching old seasons of Portrait Artist of the Year, and my favorite artists often don't get picked as the winners. The artists who I like often draw in a distinctive but primitive fashion, wonky, garish, unique, and personal. I just find it much more interesting to see somebody make art that only they could make.

When I scroll through my Instagram feed, I'm drawn to illustrators whose work is wonky, playful, childlike. I collect books filled with pieces that embrace rawness, bright colors, simple tools. Art made by people fully capable of realism but who intentionally draw in ways a child might—or maybe an outsider, someone unburdened by formal training.

Sometimes, I'll watch a fellow artist do a drawing that turns out so simple and misshapen that I hold my breath for them to say, "Oh, yuk, that’s not good, “ but instead, I thrill when they step back and say, "Ooh, I like that."

They've set out deliberately to achieve this effect of lumpy naiveté. These artists are speaking loudly about how they see the world. Not how a camera sees it.

So, how do they measure their success? If I set out to make a drawing that looks like a photograph, well, the closer it is to the photograph, the more I’ve achieved my goal. But if I’m trying to make something that is lumpy and bumpy — how do I know when I've gotten there? The metrics become internal and intuitive. It's a purely subjective and somewhat bent yardstick I’d have to use to measure my work. It takes a lot of courage that I’m still developing. It also takes confidence and that’s the quality that shines through.

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When I visit the Metropolitan Museum, I see artists dancing back and forth across this line. I stand before 17th-century Northern European painters like Vermeer making astonishingly accurate images. But then I turn a corner and find myself face-to-face with painters a couple of hundred years before that or a couple of hundred years after that who refuse to adhere to the standard.

Then everything blows up in the 1850s when cameras become widely available, and artists realize there is no point in competing with technology head-to-head. That's when art becomes really interesting, moving further and further away from objective reality — until the photo-realists rebel in the 1970s—a rebellion that's short-lived because ultimately it's just not that interesting.

What I love about so much contemporary art and illustration is how it feels more connected to cave paintings than it does to Vermeer or Norman Rockwell.

And today, the pressures of technology on image-making are more profound than ever. When you can snap an image with the phone in your pocket or type a sentence into your computer and get back any image you demand, slick perfection is commonplace. It’s automated, computer-generated, frictionless.

Instead, I find myself drawn to the one thing AI can never truly replicate: the messy, beautiful, contradictory nature of lived human experience captured through a unique hand of flesh and blood.

So painters and illustrators are drawing like children using crayons or markers, ludicrous perspectives, raw emotions, clever annotations. They're making art that doesn't feel like it was created on the other side of the high-gated walls of traditional galleries and art schools. No, it's art that was made by humans with all the richness of their unique sensibility, perspective, and sense of humor. Imperfect because we humans are.

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Art is a journey and the destinations I set for myself are a key part of being an artist. I have to ask myself essential questions: Why am I doing this? What do I want to get out of it? Do I aspire to make art on a sliding scale that ends with near-photographic realism? Or are my goals much more complex, with lots of variables like truth, depth, feeling, and a rich creative experience in the making?

It hurts my heart when so many of the people who share their art with me tell me about its flaws. They deride themselves for not capturing perspective or likeness or being able to mix colors that look true. They tell me that it's easy for me because I can draw so well. What they don't realize is that I admire the energy and innovation I see in their efforts. I love the art "outsiders" make up my art. I’m bored by the academic. The polished and perfect.

I want to make art that’s looser and freer and unencumbered by the strictures of accuracy. And I want to be honest about that ambition.

I'm not choosing authenticity because I can't achieve perfection. I want to play three-chord punk rock — and not because, secretly, I'm afraid to play a perfect Beethoven piano sonata. I'm choosing it because that raw energy speaks more truth about what it means to be human than technical perfection ever could.

How about you?

Your pal,

Danny