The worst lie you’ve ever been told is that some people are just born with it.
Growing up I had this terrible idea that some people were born with natural talent and others were not – my brother was born a good student, my friends born great athletes, but I had been born without any special talents. So with this in mind, I never tried to be a good student, or a good athlete, or try to develop any other skills because I thought I was born untalented.
Even though I had a love for art from a very early age, at a certain point I figured I was not an artistic genius and I stopped trying to gain any talent in that area as well. I didn’t realize growing up that nobody was born with those skills. Nobody is a good student or a great artist coming out of the womb. What actually leads people to have these skills is the hard work that they put into it. By assuming they were born better than me, I was totally discrediting the hard work my peers put into their talents, and I was letting myself off easy for simply assuming I was not meant for greatness.
Just like nobody is born a creative genius, nobody is born with this belief that talent is a congenital trait. A lot of people actually think of the world this way – specifically in their idea of art. Although saner people than I know that most skills are developed through hard work, the majority of people still hold on to this idea that art is not one of those skills.
But art is work – they call it artwork for a reason. Leonardo da Vinci slept for a total of two hours a day and Michelangelo hardly had time to bathe. Gerhard Richter, a contemporary visual artist, admits to having an extremely rigid schedule of waking up early and eating the same thing for lunch every day in order to produce as much art as he can. And it works: one of Richter’s pieces was auctioned off at $46.3 million, breaking the record for the highest price paid for a living artist’s work.
The artists whose names you know, who have made a living off of their art, are the ones who maintained a strong work ethic, who produce massive amounts of work so that a small fraction can sell, and who never once gave in to the idea that they just didn’t have what it takes.
“The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.”
– Chuck Close
