Talented people doing art: lol just trying out some new techniques with this advanced program I downloaded, I think it’ll really help with my use of colors and composition! 🙂
Me doing art:
since I just heard Mrs Hess’s voice echo thunderingly around me like the greybeards, she would like to amend this with ’practiced’ in place of ‘talented’.
her Talent Rant was a thing of beauty and I wish i had a recording of it. i get the feeling expressed here, i do! and i do agree that people are differently good at different things, if that’s how we’re defining talent.
but i was surrounded by some incredibly talented artists growing up, and i looked at their art, looked at mine, and went ‘welp i have no talent for drawing.’ but what my friends hadn’t had was an abusive first grade teacher who flat-out told me that i had no talent for art, i had no business wasting my time writing and drawing, and i was a terrible child for wasting my parents’ hardwon money on such fantasy. and i stopped. the only time i drew was when it was demanded of me in an art class, i wrote stories only in my head.
my sixth grade art teacher tried really hard to pull me out of that, but it wasn’t until i had her again in eighth grade that i started to listen to her.
even then, i would say ‘i’m not good at drawing, but that’s ok, nobody’s gonna see it anyway’ and i would never accept any compliment on it. ‘oh man you should see (insert friend here) they’re so much better than mine’ etc. their art came from talent, in my eyes; i couldn’t make art like theirs, so i didn’t have any talent.
enter Mrs Hess.
Mrs Hess, slightly terrifying, very intimidating, kind of the McGonagall of the art department at my high school, somehow got that whole sob story out of me on like week one of the art fundamentals class. i remember sitting at my desk crying because i’d cried on my paper and wrecked a piece of nice paper and upset my teacher. She took me to the nurse’s office, told me she’d sign me off if i wanted to go home, or i could rest for the remainder of the block.
She took attendance a few days later like normal and then sat on her desk (which she Did Not Do) and gave us the Talent Rant.
it started with holding up Will’s self-portrait. Will was well on his way to photorealism. his looked like a black and white photo. She asked us how we thought he’d drawn it. talent, we decided. Will was just better than us. she then said “Will is becoming a very skilled artist, but his talent is not what is making that possible.” and asked him when he first started drawing. Will shrugged and said he didn’t remember, but he’d gotten in trouble for drawing in class since ever. she nodded. “and you’re sixteen?”
he agreed. “so you’ve been practicing drawing with pencils for more than ten years, then.”
we were all kind of taken aback. she looked at us and said “you’re five or six when you start school, right? and he’s sixteen now. sixteen minus six- i know I’m your art teacher, but i still know that’s ten.”
then she asked Stephen if she could show his. it was obviously a beginner’s effort. she then asked for one of his caricatures (he drew comics, caricatures of teachers and events for the school paper & stuff.)
she held them up side-by-side and asked us if we would say this was a talented artist, if we didn’t know they were both from the same person. before we responded, she asked Stephen how long he’d been making comics- his answer, similar to Will’s. “and how long have you been making drawings like this (showing self-portrait)?” Stephen: “uh, when did you assign it? like a day after that.”
she held forward the caricature. “ten years of practice.”
then she held forward the self-portrait. “three days of practice.”
she gave his stuff back and sat back on her desk, just kind of watched us in silence for a moment.
“Talent is bullshit. What you think of as Talent is practice. Don’t ever write yourself off as being bad at something because you can’t do it well the second you pick it up. If you don’t want to put in the time to train yourself in something, don’t. that is entirely okay and entirely your choice. but giving up solely because you don’t think you’re talented enough to pursue something is a great disservice to yourself. if you take one thing from this class, i want it to be that.”
she had a longer, more nuanced version of it, of course. the only part i remember verbatim is the start of ‘talent is bullshit’ because it’s always shocking when your teachers swear for the first time.
but i had never considered the idea that i was so many years of practice behind those friends whose art i admire so much.
We don’t teach kids how to read and then expect them to read War and Peace- that doesn’t mean that there aren’t seven year olds who can read War and Peace, but we don’t tell the rest of them that they have no talent for reading because they can’t yet do so. when a kid says ‘i’m no good at reading’ we say ‘you just need practice’ but when a kid says ‘i’m no good at drawing’ we say things like ‘everybody’s good at different things, and that’s ok.’ which, yes; that’s a good sentiment to teach. but we have this view of art and music like it’s a binary- either you’re good at them or you’re not, and we don’t challenge it the way we do with other things.
I feel like I need to tag @euclase in case she somehow hasn’t seen this yet.
Talent is indeed bullshit.
I mean listen. All of that reply above is right on the money.
But not even portraits—if you can sign your name, you can draw. Because what is signing your name? It’s a practiced movement, done hundreds of times. It’s putting pen to paper confidently and with personal style in order to communicate and express yourself. When you sign your name, you don’t worry, you don’t hesitate, and you don’t compare it to what other people are doing.
“But signing my name isn’t drawing,” you argue. “It’s just my signature.”
