What “Making Art” Is NOT.

I expect most readers will disagree with my views, but I am compelled to put them down anyway.

Whenever I write or talk about creativity and the creative process, or whenever someone finds out I make art, I get these sorts of comments:

“You are sooooo talented.  I can’t even draw a straight line.”  [I can’t either.  I use a ruler or T-square for a guide and often the line is still NOT straight.]

“Art is a gift.  You got it and I didn’t.”

In a recent article about why people keep making art when they get little to no feedback, a fellow artist wrote saying”

“It is in your genes.  Artists can’t NOT make art.”

You are born an artist or you are not. And you stay an artist, dear, even if your voice is less of a fireworks. The artist is always there.  Maria Callas  See: 

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/m/mariacalla163370.html#Lm8yr217KWFHPSIj.99

I did this right after my heart stent.  I’m giving it to the heart rehab facility.

When people tell me they have always wanted to create art, but they just were not given that gift, you may notice a little grimace pass across my facial features.  That is just me restraining myself from slapping you about the head and shoulders.

I think people that claim they want to “make art” but don’t, are using the “it is in your genes” myth to excuse their laziness. It is like me hearing my son talking about some scientific question and wishing I had a PhD and unlimited funds to investigate that question.  It is never going to happen, and I really don’t want to do the work it would take to have a PhD in molecular biology or theoretical physics.


Ability is linked to effort.

I sometimes say, and firmly believe this:  “If you had done as many drawings and paintings as I have done, you would be a better artist than I am.

I do not accept that artistic talent is in your genes, or that it is a gift from God.  Of course there are some names that beg to differ.  Mozart and Shakespeare appear to have had extraordinary “makers of art” and their amazing work seems to have been effortlessly produced.  I don’t understand the easy and volume of art made by Mozart and Shakespeare, and I doubt if there could ever be another Mozart or Shakespeare.

I agree to set aside some artists as being so astounding that we just have to leave them in the category of Mystery.  This does not explain my work, or the millions of other talented makers of art in the disciplines of painting, music, dance, software design, et cetera.

Eric Hoffer wrote, [paraphrase] When it comes to talent, we are still in the food gathering stage.  We don’t know how to grow it.

Hoffer thought that becoming good at something depended on numerous factors.  In America adults might see a kid throw a stone and suggest they try baseball.  American’s admire and encourage sports and we produce a lot of gifted athletes.  In Florence around 1515, if a kid was doing a drawing with chalk drawing on the sidewalk, the adults would admire that, get that kid someone to work with, and they encouraged art rather than baseball. 


If the culture admires something, it will produce citizens who are good at what is admired.

Yes, sometimes a talent comes out that does not appear to be encouraged, and it is something not admired by the home, and still it emerges.  That is not proof that the skill is a gift or a quirk of the genes.  All that means is that we don’t have all the information we need to know why this person became this, or that.

In my own case, my father thought of himself as an artist.  He only painted about twenty or thirty finished works, but all of them are better than my best work.  My father is far more skilled as an artist than I am.  In the early 1950s my father had his shirts cleaned at a Dry Cleaner’s shop, and when the shirts came back, they had a little cardboard inside to keep the shirt wrinkle free.  My father gave me the shirt cardboards and  stuff to draw and paint with, and I was encouraged to draw.  This was before I had a TV or siblings.  I spent a lot of time alone, and I entertained myself by drawing.

In school I was an unmotivated student, so while class was going on around me I drew on everything around me.  I drew on notebook paper, on homework papers, on handouts. I would imagine I have doodled and drawn many thousands of times.  I believe if you want to draw as good as me you would need to draw as many doodles and pictures as I have drawn.

I don’t know what causes someone to be good at drawing, or playing the guitar, or whatever art you can think of, but I do believe that art improves with practice. 

Here is a big difference between artists and non-artists.  Something keeps a talented person practicing.  I took piano lessons, but I didn’t keep after it, I didn’t practice, and I am not good at playing the piano.  I firmly believe I could be a good piano player, had I practiced, but I didn’t.  The artist and the non-artist differ because of motivation to practice.  That is it.  That is the difference.

So when I struggle with the question of why artists keep making art with little or no positive rewards, I do not believe they keep working because it is in their genes.

I know too many very talented artists who quit.  My father painted 20 paintings and he quit.  I had a friend in high school, now a philosophy professor in West Virginia, who was an extremely talented artist.  He isn’t making art today.  I thought Richard Montgomery was going to be one of the great artists of America.  I firmly believed he would be a full time, successful artist with works in the great museums of the world, but it didn’t happen.  Life caused my friend to bump into other interests.  My friend is a professor, a husband, a father, a grandfather, and a mentor to collegiate youth.  My friend is successful, his life is successful and to be admired.  But he was very skilled at making art in 1968 and he quit making that sort of art.

I have stopped making art, but I never quit making art. 

I struggle with self-doubt.  I fear criticism and rejection.  My wife hangs art prints she bought at Hobby Lobby, and does not understand why that bothers me.  Family and friends have accepted paintings from me, and later I have learned they “re-gifted” them.  It is possible some of them were “gag gifted” to colleagues at office parties.  I rarely sell a picture.  I am so afraid of rejection and failure that I don’t go to art shows, or seek to hang my work in local coffee shops.  Still, I continue to paint.  Most people my age have stopped making art and I just wonder why some people with greater abilities stop and other people, like me, with less ability, keep painting.

I firmly believe that making art is a trivial pursuit.  On the grand scale, making art is labor to create something that most people don’t want.  My art is mildly supported by my friends and family.  My wife may not personally love the work I make, but she says she loves me, and on birthdays and Xmas she does give me gift certificates to the art store so I can keep stocked up with canvas and paint.  She doesn’t object to me having one room in our small house where I can paint.  She didn’t fuss when I rented a Temperature Controlled storage facility to store my completed works.   The world does not care about my work.  This country has an income gap so very few people have enough money to buy art.  The majority of the country is lower middle class to poor and those people don’t buy art.  I live in a very poor state, Oklahoma where art is rarely fine. 

One of the few times I did an outdoor art festival I sat all day every day for three days and sold nothing.  In the both next to me the artist was selling something he called turd birds.  He took dried horse feces, and horse “droppings” are about the size of charcoal briquette, but much softer.  He put toothpicks into to the horse turd to make legs, a couple of feathers for wings, and a second smaller turd and toothpick making a head and beak.  The turd birds sold like crazy. My work did not sell at all.

Motivation is an interesting thing.  I wish I had more of it.  If I worked more I would create a greater body of work.  Good art comes only after making lots of bad art.  I want to crank out as much bad work as I can, because I believe that is the only way I will get to the place where more of my work is better. 

My guess is that a few of my works will hang on the walls of a few friends and relatives, and the rest of it will eventually find its way to a landfill.  I hope some of my work survives.  I’m still leaving a trace of myself in this work.  Once I’m dead, I am guessing it won’t matter much to me what happens to the work.  My motivation is weak, but I keep trying.  It isn’t a gift.  It might be a curse.  It is what it is.