Everyone knows about the young prodigies, whose raw talent was apparent in their earliest works. Other artists reach the peak of their skills relatively late in life. Some artists start out slow and gradually refine their technical mastery. But have any artists started out really bad (or at best painfully mediocre), yet managed to pull themselves up by the bootstraps to achieve justly earned critical success?
Offhand I can’t recall reading any biography of a famous artist which effectively said, “It must be acknowledged that, at first, this guy’s work was really, really horrible. Seriously, here are some early prints of his which depict ducks dressed as clowns. Even by the standards of clown-themed duck art, these paintings clearly suck pretty hard…”
I assume most artists started out sucky as they were training. Some may have had a good eye and sense of aesthetics, but I assume that there was a period where most had poor technical skills. We just don’t get to see it because this training period is taken for granted and we only see their output when they start being regarded as an artist rather than a student.
Are you talking about Fine Art, or can we include commercial hacks?
When Alex Raymond began his run on the comic strip “Flash Gordon”, his work was crude and cartoony. Over the course of the next 15 years, he got much better.
As the years go by, Boris Vallejo gets technically better, but creatively worse. When he started out, he was a hired hand, doing Frank Frazetta knockoffs for book publishers. But he produced some of the best Frazetta knockoffs in the business. Then he got famous enough to pursue his own muse. Unfortunately, his own muse is not that good.
**Paul Cezanne’s **story, to my knowledge, is framed that he “muscled his way to greatness” - was not considered good by himself or his peers untill pretty late in his life.
It is also my understanding that Jackson Pollock was considered okay at best - and he fought through styles until he found his voice in Abstract Expressionism…
Ah, Cezanne-- that’s a good one. His early stuff truly is poo-- he goes through this undisciplined emo-art-student phase with lots of black and nude women.
A lot of people in the early 20th c fought through styles-- like everyone and his dog went through a bad pointillism phase (Braque, Mondrian,etc). Pollock was a pretty decent Thom Hart Benton student, though.