Arick was born in Los Angeles and has lived all over the world. At six his family made Aliyah to Israel; he came of age in the California desert and studied at UC San Diego, double-majoring in visual arts and art history.

During the pandemic he painted a painting a day for over 550 days. Under the moniker Moriartsy he worked in meticulous, photorealistic detail, opened a gallery show on Crosby Street in SoHo, and won three awards at Art Basel. Then a stranger showed him AI-generated images trained on his own paintings, and everything changed.

He pivoted to work no machine can duplicate: abstract, exaggerated, multi-material painting where the paint and brushstrokes are the point. He calls the series Emotional Brush, less pre-planned, more discovered in the moment. “Anybody can make an image. My goal is to make it feel like it came from a human hand and a human soul.”