“No Talent, No School”
I have to admit, one of my greatest pet peeves as an artist is seeing ads with titles like the one I used for todays blog, “No Talent, No School.” It’s usually tied to a tutorial or ad about someone who is showing how they were able to make art with excellant quality supposedly without any education or ‘talent’ to start with. I get it, it’s a way to appeal to those who feel like they cannot create art, would like to try, but can’t afford anything lessons. On the other hand… it makes me want to scream like a crazy person haha.
The thing is, I’ve been drawing and learning ever since I was a child. I am continuing to learn and practice now, and I firmly believe that anyone who really wants to do art can. The skill can be learned, and the hand and eye can be trained. The biggest difference between an artist and someone who “can’t draw” is patience and interest. It takes a LOT of time and practice to do something well, and a lot of love, trial, and error to develop a style. Sure, there are those who seem to have a knack for it and produce better results more quickly than others, but I feel that’s because they already learned how to “see.” (I’ve given a couple of art lessons before, and the turning point I notice with others as well as myself, is when you learn to actually draw what you see rather than draw what you think something looks like.)
Anyway, school does help and talent does help. Teachers are great for giving tips and guidence (I’ve picked up a lot of ideas that helped me improve through college and my own grandmother who was a painter). However, the majority of what I’ve learned was actually self-taught. The real change came because I was fascinated and invested enough to put the effort into learning. There’s that saying “you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t force it to drink” or something like that. It’s true, you can go to art school for your entire life and learn nothing if you’re not actually interested. Whereas you can never attend school and be one of the best artists because you are patient and willing enough to hone your own skill. I copied book covers for practice, analyzed faces, my own hands, and studied skeletons and muscles just to better understand human anatomy. I drew in the car, during events, and late into the night when I just felt like it… Again, I’m still learning, and I still have room to improve, but my art has come a long way since childhood. Some people who have never touched a brush, can pick one up and discover that they’re actually really good at painting and can become even better-if they keep painting. Others say that they can only draw stick people, but I noticed that those who say that don’t typically seem at all interested in drawing to begin with. And that’s fine, that usually just means they’re facinated by something else and investing their time and effort there.
I guess the point of this rant is, I hate the ads that throw products and programs like the one I saw earlier in people’s faces because I feel like it’s degrading to artists and misleading to people in general. It makes it seem like you can buy whatever they’re selling and be just as great if not better than the artists you see with little to no effort. I think that’s what bothers me the most. There’s already a tendency to look down on artists and think our work is ‘fluff.’ The reality of an art piece by me or other artists I’ve seen or met, is that there was a lot of time, energy, and sometimes pain put into developing our ‘talent’ whether formal school was involved or not. There’s a story in the art peice not just because of the subject, but because the hands that created it have an entire story as well, which is why I think some people can see a bit of the artist’s soul in their work.
With that, my rant is done haha. You can click on those ads, they may have some really great products to be fair. The next time you look at someone’s art though, I just hope its with some level of respect for the soul who dreamed it and took the effort to learn how to make it as well.
