BECOME A FINE ARTIST

Learn how to paint. What I mean here, is the part where you have an image either in your head, or in front of you, that you want to get up onto a piece of stretched canvas, or watercolour paper, or whatever, so you dip your brush into the paint, and apply it to the surface. I’m not trying to be a wise guy here, and neither am I putting down ‘modern art’ per se. What I am saying is that after spending most of the 20th century trying to prove otherwise, those factions of the ‘moderns movements’ that claimed that the skill of being able to make your hands produce what your eyes see was unnecessary or even deleterious to a painter’s development, wound up proving just the opposite. The moderns movements made some valid contributions to the fine arts, but some of their experiments were also failures, none, in my opinion, quite as large as the notion that learning how to paint whatever one wanted to paint, was a bad idea, and only served to ‘stifle creativity’. What in fact we wound up with, was several generations of crippled painters, crippled art schools, and eventually a system of crippled modern art museums to house their crippled work… in my opinion, of course. Heh.

Pay attention to everything that your teachers (should you be in a position to have teachers) have to say, but do not believe everything they have to say. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.