is someone really born with artistic talent, or can anyone, with tons of practice, become an artist.
Well, cQ, I think it’s pretty much the same as anything else.
Lots of people play football, but there’s only one Johnny Unitis.
Lots of people can sing, but there’s only one Pavarotti.
Lots of people can draw, but there’s only one Michelangelo.
Anyone can learn how to draw - it’s a skill like anything else. But being able to draw and being an artist are two totally different things.
Thomas Edison: Genius is 1 per cent inspiration and 99 per cent perspiration.
While it is undoubtedly true that some people are born with greater artistic talent than others, what most people perceive as genius or divine inspiration is, for the most part, just a result of a lot of hard work – and even genius will atrophy if it isn’t put to use.
To get beyond what just sounded like a homily, there is a concept in developmental psychology called the 10-Year Rule, which “essentially says that anyone seeking to perform at world-class level in any significant domain must engage in sustained, deliberate practice in the activity for a period of at least ten years. Even prodigies with particular obsessive tendencies toward deliberate practice in a domain must work for something approaching that time.” (cite) This has been backed by research, and if you’re interested, you might want to do a search on “K.A. Ericsson” or “Anders Ericsson.”
One example of artistic genius that many people think of immediately is W.A. Mozart, especially because of how much he had achieved even before getting out of his teens – but one has to remember that he had a much earlier start in musical training than even most other professional musicians.
Disclaimer: I am not a developmental psychologist, and will happily defer to the real experts.
i’m a music teacher, and i know one thing: even if you aren’t talented by birth, you can still catch up with the naturals, if you are intelligent above average.
hard work is essential, but it won’t get you anywhere beyond mediocrity, if you are not intelligent enough to understand how art functions.
i know a great lot of people who started very late in music (one of them didn’t even know how to read notes until he was 17), but who became very good musicians, simply by having the necessary IQ to make up for the natural understanding that they were lacking.
and then i know several very very hard working students (one of them practices 10 hours every day) who are really bad musicians.
You can teach someone to play piano or use a paint brush but I don’t think anyone can be taught artistic vision.
Talent is the drive to understand and master. It can be learned, but you’ve really got to want to.
That’s what I think anyway. Mine is an IMHO post.
sigh people insinst on believing that art is something that comes from the heavens. i hope you’re not one of them.
of course, you can’t teach artistic “vision” as you call it (i don’t like the term “vision”, as it implies too much metaphysics for my taste). if fact, there are very few things that one can teach. you can’t teach how to be a good mathematician, the art of being a successful lawyer, political skills etc. you can only provide the essential knowledge, point out some guidelines and give lots of examples, hoping that the student may start to think of ways to apply that knowledge within the guidelines you gave him, trying to emulate or surpass the examples you have given.
you have to first understand art, before you will be able to create or reproduce your own. if your understand very little of already existing works of art, chances are that the producs of your imagination will be mediocre, despite how talented you might be, and how much effort you put in it.
understanding of certain principles and interconnections is one of the things that can be taught.
and of course it takes a certain amount of brain capacity to process that knowledge. all the genetic predisposition and practicing will not help you, if you are intellectually challenged. it’s no coincidence that all great artists throughout history (and i know of no exception) were intelligent above average.
take a look:
http://home8.swipnet.se/~w-80790/Index.htm
You can work as hard as you want to develop your artistic talent, and can make a career with just a minimum of talent and a maximum of good luck (insert your own example here), but there is definitely something innate that separates the truly talented from someone who keeps trying.
Hard work is definitely a part of it, and if you want to be successful, by all means do the work, but what makes a Shakespeare is more than just hard work.
That’s true in all fields. The talented are perhaps more attuned to the field, but it’s more than just hard work. Otherwise any monkey could type Shakespeare.
Please note, too, that most people don’t really understand what it means to be creative – including those who study it.
I think that people are born with talents. It goes to how you think and feel. And some things, I feel, just can’t be taught.
You just can’t teach things like depth perception for them to draw… or tone for them sing. And you can’t teach them how to put soul into something either… which I think is the essence of art. Like you feel something inside, have a passion/need/drive to release it and it comes out in your art.
Example of a non-artistic talent just because:
Some people are good with numbers and they love to play with them… so they go into accounting. I know of several people who become accounting clerks who don’t think like an accountant therefore they don’t progress up the ladder. And no matter how hard they study or practice or have it explained to them… they just don’t get it… and they never will. (This comes from personal experience and I’m looking across the office at my example…hehe)
I think this is a good point. I think the question is what motivates certain people to concentrate on their talent with singleminded passion? Even a cursory glance at the biogs of people who have made extraordinary contributions, whether in the arts or sciences, show an obsessional interest in their subject - so where does this obsession come from? Equally, most of us know legions of people who won stars and prizes for music, painting, biology or whatever as children but never grew up to be artists or scientists.
‘Talent’ always seems to be discussed in terms of intellectual capacity or hard work - the emotional drive to do that work is underplayed. Picasso started out with a strong aptitude for drawing. So do many children. So why did he become Picasso the artist, not Picasso the insurance clerk who painted on Sundays to relax?
Artistic Talent??? First you have to define it…there are alot of great technicians (in all forms of “art”), but does that mean they have artistic vision??? It works the other way, of course, also.
It’s more than just putting down notes, or knowing perspective…I think your “vision”, interpretation, and how you convey them have alot to do with it…doesn’t matter if your a painter, musician, or writer. The more technical aspects…have alot to do with practice and natural ability…damn, I have had enuff…just my 2cents…IMHO
What did the OP mean by “artist”?
- Visual artist?
- One who creates “Art”?
- Anyone who creates something in their profession (i.e. writers, musicians, etc.)? This is a very modern definition.
The question is about talent, but which talent? The narrow talent of being able to represent what you see accurately in a 2D or 3D medium is what I think most people still mean by “artistic talent”, and what I assume the OP meant. For the rest of this post, I will refer to this definition.
It is a very interesting question. I have read studies (sorry it was in a book and very long ago) about child prodigies, and the author remarked that the frequency of artistic child prodigies is very small in the population compared with other prodigies, (musical, mathematical, etc.) The interpretation that the book presented was that this kind of frequency could reflect an underlying frequency of “normal” talent in the population.
It is true that most people have musical ability - only a minority of children cannot carry a tune. However, I believe that most people are not born with the ability to draw well, and when it presents itself the difference is quite obvious.
I am speaking from personal experience now. No one in my immediate or extended family has the ability to draw well (except for one third cousin in a far off land). I was born with this ability, and how I got it is a mystery to me. It was recognized by everyone around me when I was very young. When I was in kindergarten or first grade, I noticed during class drawing exercises that there were always 2 or 3 children including myself,(out of about 20-30 students) who were more advanced than the others. Where other kids drew a dot for a nose, I drew a head in profile with a nose. Where other kids drew a cake as a circle with lines as candles sticking out sideways, I drew a cake in profile as a square or cylinder with the candles in perspective. I drew three dimensional houses instead of the triangle and square version. No one trained me, I just did it that way. I think the difference shows what I’ve observed in adults: Most people will draw what they think should be there, not what they really see. The same also applies to colors. I had a long conversation about drawing ability with a friend once (why most people couldn’t just draw what they saw), As we were walking, I pointed out what colors I was seeing, and was astonished when she described something completely different. Up until that point I always assumed people saw the world as I did, I didn’t even have to think about the colors I was seeing when I painted, they seemed so obvious.
In high school art class, there were always 2 or 3 students who really stood out and who everyone recognized as having artistic “talent”, just as in grammar school. In my case it was not a matter of effort or practice, outside of class I didn’t doodle or draw much.
It is true that the ability is honed with practice, and that practice only comes with passion. You need that passion to become an working “artist”, the talent is not enough. I don’t have the “passion” to draw all the time. I know someone who is a very talented visual artist, and he draws CONSTANTLY; it’s a compulsion.
I have also encountered examples of people improving their painting of “what they see” through training and much practice, but it doesn’t seem to come easy. The logical interpretation of what you see seems to be difficult to overcome.
Too bad that the ability to recreate what you see isn’t worth much in today’s “conceptual” world. I haven’t found any use for it yet. If anyone knows of a profession which combines this ability and science please let me know. 
I believe artistic talent is learned.
I learned mine. People often say, “You’re so talented Forbin, blah blah blah…”
I think they overlook the hard work I’ve done to learn my “talent”. It sometimes feels rather insulting.I’ve been tempted to reply, “I got that talent through hard work.”
You may not have practiced a lot at actual drawing, but the skills you possessed were in observation.
Art, in this sense, is the ability to take what you ‘see’ (in vision or in your mind) and translate that to your materials (paper, video, sculpture, etc). The results of that are unique to you, and they may be a true-to-life representation or a more surrealistic one.
The ability to manipulate your tools isn’t ‘talent’, though that’s an element of creating your vision. ‘Talent’ is translating your vision to its finished form, which is a learnable ability. You just need the passion to put the effort in, and that effort is almost definitely used most in understanding the intermediate process between vision and result.
It’s not how to draw a nose, it’s knowing what a nose looks like. It’s not how to paint a beam of sunlight, it’s recognising that sunlight is a particular colour in particular circumstances and it behaves in certain ways. Once you know and understand that, and some people have more aptitude and can therefore pick things up a lot faster than others, then you can translate it to your finished image.
From Dictionary.com:
Talent -
-
A marked innate ability, as for artistic accomplishment. See Synonyms at ability.
-
a Natural endowment or ability of a superior quality.
b A person or group of people having such ability: The company makes good use of its talent.
Note that the definition specifically says “innate”, not “learned”.
Please see the following cite which briefly explains that artistic ability is possible in idiot savants:
"Musical genius is more common than artistic ability in the general population. " http://www.bol.ucla.edu/~changc/page2_3.html
Some of the savants in the above cite have a very low IQ, and can barely speak, which suggests that the ability to draw or sculpt is separate from the factors that contribute to IQ and general intelligence.
It seems that people are uncomfortable with the idea of “talent”, but how is it this case different from being born with a high spatial aptitude or any other aptitude?
You can’t go by dictionary definitions. They’re deliberately simplified and are often based on popular understanding more than anything else.
Aptitude is not necessarily governed by intelligence, though idiot savants are special cases in any way you look at it.
You are attempting to redefine “talent” as is commonly understood by most people. We are talking about an innate ability here, that was the point of the discussion and the reason the OPer used the word “talent”.
Cafe society is our forum for discussing the artistic disciplines.
Off to Cafe Society.
** - DrMatrix** - GQ Moderator
My take on the OP is that one is born with a certain amount of talent. I’ve been drawing since before I knew my alphabet. I didn’t immediately understand all the principles involved in art (drawing in my case), so yes, a certain amount of study was needed to develop that talent.
My grandfather was a painter, and was even offered a show of some of his works in LA. My mother has artistic ability and helped me learn some of the basics involved in drawing when I was younger. I can draw very well, and, all modesty aside, have surpassed my mother in drawing ability and pastel use, but I can’t use a paintbrush to save my life. My older sister however is still at the stick-figure stage of drawing, as is my father.
I have tried to teach my sister the basics of drawing (hey she asked). She had difficulty grasping the artistic concepts of fore-shortening, perspective, and breaking down the object you’re attempting to draw into their simplest shapes (circles, cylinders, cubes, etc) and building onto them from there. That part of her mind just doesn’t get it.
This is not to say my sister isn’t intelligent enough to get it, she finished school with a higher GPA than I did and got an academic scholarship to college. She is also not without artistic ability - she plays more than a couple musical instruments including the flute, the piano, and the violin. I, on the other hand, never got past the “Mary Had a Little Lamb” stage of learning the piano (the “stick figure stage” of the musical world). I just don’t get it. I can’t get my mind to reconcile the notes on the page to the keys on the keyboard and then get my hands to do the necessary movements.
So, IMO, it’s all a matter of how one’s brain can perceive certain ideas; whether it’s the ability to see a 3-d object in a 2-d form in its simplest shapes or the ability to hear the notes in your mind as you read them from a page. One can be taught to read music, and one can be taught the principles of drawing, but the talent to fulfill those teachings to maximum potential, I believe, is something one is born with.
Why is this surprising? Musical ability has nothing to do with visual artistic talent, why are you conflating the two? They are quite separate abilities. If you read my cite above about savants you will see that intelligence has absolutely nothing to do with it either.