Art Quote by Buffy Sainte-Marie

Buffy Sainte-Marie’s line lands like a small, sly correction to the way we still police “real” art versus “tool-assisted” art. She doesn’t frame digital software as a replacement for craft; she frames it as a bridge that exposes how porous the categories always were. The phrase “painterly side of photographers” gives photographers permission to admit what’s been there all along: staging, mood, color, and gesture are not betrayals of documentary purity but part of image-making’s full vocabulary. Then she flips it - “the photographer side of painters” - reminding painters that immediacy, capture, and indexing the world are not lesser forms of seeing. They’re complementary instincts.

The intent is democratizing, but not in the corny “anyone can be an artist now” way. It’s sharper: software collapses old hierarchies by making hybrid practice frictionless. A photographer can push light and texture with the deliberateness of brushwork; a painter can pull in photographic reference without shame, using layering, masking, and collage as legitimate compositional engines. The subtext is that authenticity isn’t located in the medium’s purity; it’s located in choices - what you emphasize, erase, exaggerate, and frame.

Context matters: Sainte-Marie came up in an era when gatekeepers treated mediums like social classes. Digital tools arrive not as mere convenience but as cultural leverage, letting artists cross borders that institutions once enforced. The quote works because it’s evenhanded and pragmatic, refusing the usual tech panic while quietly dismantling the snobbery underneath it.