I have some skin in this game. I'd say that painting is not difficult at all. Depending on your preferred style it can be as easy as literally throwing random pigments on whatever surface you prefer to target.
Painting (or drawing) to some degree of visual similarity requires practice, so some effort is needed. You have to "rewire" some muscle-vision-brain coordination. It will be perceived as hard only because a) you will know how easy it is to snap a photo and apply filters/photoshop (or, propmt an AI), and b) because you will be your own worst critic. Others will see you progress quite fast if only you do the training part.
What is hard about it, really hard, is making a living from it. Or, even getting small change out of it. Most often, if you've not been to the right schools and intermingled with the right people in the right way at the right times (with an added very big portion of sheer luck) you are not going to make it, ever. Even then, it is unlikely. Regardless of your talent.
Talent does not bubble up like you would imagine. You can not just build a better mousetrap and they will come. This is a very controlled market, and also one where the different niches are working in very different ways. Even in very different ways from other markets you would know about.
It's not sour grapes, it's just a fact that for every art market niche there are only a very small amount of people able to gain a foothold while there are thousands or tens of thousands that may have an equal amount of skill/talent but these people just does not make it.
> This is a very controlled market, and also one where the different niches are working in very different ways. Even in very different ways from other markets you would know about.
Are you talking about making "art"? Because if you don't neccessarily want to make "art", but just paint paintings ordinary people will enjoy, the market is not controlled at all. The skill level required is very high, but if you can product museum-quality non-abstract paintings of subjects people are interested in (e.g. pastoral landscapes, or landscapes of the US South West), then you can probably sell them at non-negligible prices - a couple hundreds to even a couple thousands dollars a piece.
The task is difficult, because there's so much competition that your work needs to really stand out, so that people will pay $1000 for it, instead of say paying $100 for painting done with good, but not great technique.
I guess it’s about the ”different markets”. I know the nordic art scene a bit and it looks like it’s hard market for ”good artists” trying to sell quality art as in order to ”qualify” for the scene there is a limited amount of gatekeepers and it’s not about skill for sure. The most talented artist I personally know retrained as doctor because art market was just too hard (this should tell something about the talent level - his art was impeccable and regarding his other qualities just choosing to go to medical school - into which many people try to get into for years - displays his other skill levels). So high end - it’s about luck, connections and brand rather than skill.
If one chooses to operate in the non-gallery market, I’m sure it’s a bit easier. But also I guess this locks you out from the high-end prestige art market. Because - you know - selling to the plebs is so disqualifying (the latter part is my own inference and if some people know better please do counter me).
Replying to my own comment only to admit that it is fairly easy to give yourself a task (ie. a problem to solve through the medium of painting) that will be perceived as hard, or even extremely hard. I do not negate the difficulty of solving creative puzzles.
You will experience that your ability to subject yourself to difficult problems will improve with time. That is, you will become better at what you do. This does not in any way correlate with creative style. There will be quite hard problems in non-figurative painting just like there will be in painting visually identifiable stuff.
The upside is that problems that were once considered complicated may not continue to be so. And, that you are your own employer, and you decide the when, how, or "if at all" of the solving.
This sounds similar in some ways to the startup/VC ecosystem - with enough practice you can produce something marketable, but with out the right connections, it's probably going to go nowhere, and even then there's no guarantee.
Robert Hughes was a real treasure. His archive is worth exploring if only for his honesty and no bullshit approach. He was incredibly well informed and erudite.
His book “The Shock of the New” is a landmark to this day for anyone interested in getting a perspective on how modern art, culture, and western humanity intersect and wind through history. The BBC made a TV version he narrated in the 1980’s that’s very good too - about 7 hours of content. You can find it on YouTube and you don’t need to be an art enthusiast or even too knowledgeable about the subject to appreciate it.
This seems to be about how making a living as a painter is difficult.
I've often thought that drawing or painting is difficult for ego reasons. Few things demonstrate my incompetence to myself better than failing to draw something. There is nothing I aspire to do that would be more uncomfortable than drawing or painting a self portrait. For these reasons, I've often thought about trying, but I'm scared.
Learning some ability to draw and paint takes roughly the same amount of persistence as learning to write. That is, you have to recall what a struggle it was to hold the pencil and make a steady mark from the wrist...and then apply that to the kinds of marks you make for drawing, which can be longer, more varied, and use a different grasp on the tool.
And then you also have to learn some "shape literacy" if you want to control how you see things. This is likewise comparable to learning to read in that there are ways of breaking down images to understand them as "letter", "word", and "sentence".
When we know how to write but not to draw, we draw like we write, using motions from the wrist and observing things in terms of symbolic meaning - the human figure flattens out into a hand shape, an arm shape, an eye shape.
But there's very little mystery to "what do you do about that" - you grab a book of exercises like Keys to Drawing or Natural Way to Draw, and you try to see the object you want to study through the exercise. Because we recognize silhouettes first, and we make marks as lines first, contour drawing is a typical starting point for practicing both "seeing" and "doing", and that's something you can spend many months on just by itself.
If you want to force a designed result, rather than the result from your eye and hand, you start to apply technology, and that can mean a very old technology like using a grid and rulers(as old as the ancient Egyptians), or it can mean digital tools and tracing over photos.
This is accurate. Many people claim to be “bad” at art or music, but both can be learned by almost anyone up to a certain functional level in the same way you would learn a vocation. You won’t be Picasso or Hendrix, but you’ll have a level of competency to accomplish most tasks.
As an adult I learned to draw and to write legibly because—-to me—-those are valuable “intrinsic tools”.
I made sure my daughter received a foundational music education from a young age, and she can play several instruments with a high level of proficiency based on hours invested, not natural talent.
We often don’t value the arts the same way we do other practical skills, and to me, that’s a shame.
We need to value and develop arts pedagogy as well.
I was lucky enough to have art classes growing up but they were entirely wasted on me because there was almost no explicit/ systematic instruction.
Asking me to look out the window and paint a tree was about as productive as asking a kid to estimate how tall it was without teaching them any geometry or trigonometry.
Most people use feedback to draw: they keep on adding lines until they like what they see. Picasso, however, could draw with just a feed-forward network, i.e. a single stroke would do it ...
I basically got good enough at drawing to do simple thumbnails, storyboards, and concept art for the 3D art I actually enjoy making. I used to be better, but it was always a slog, and I quit. There's something different about working directly with objects rather than constructing them with lines on paper. But the ability to quickly iterate with primitives and cropped detail sketches on paper is hard to beat.
This probably relates in some way to why I prefer working with a MIDI roll and virtual instruments in a DAW over trying to learn a "real" instrument. Noodling on a pad controller locked to a scale leads to interesting melodies, but it's far from the end goal.
I've also recently noticed that we're surrounded by a massive amount of ambient artwork - from advertising, logos, artwork on products, book covers, magazines & newspapers, websites and funny memes.
I recently started looking for pictures to print out for my kids to colour in, and there are thousands online that people share.
So at any time there must be hundreds of thousands of people creating content of various degrees of quality all the time.
Picasso was very good at drawing and painting. He could sketch as well as other artist traditionnal artist. He choose to explore a different path, with success.
I don't like Picasso, but I can recognize the quality of his works.
Hey now, how can you guarantee p(Picasso) or p(Hendrix) is 0 for all readers of your comment?*
In any case, I think your response and multiple similar responses make the essential point(s). One of the useful 'results' from decades of R&D at trying to build machines (&/ "software" - may be considered another type of machine) has been 'seeing' the difficulty in practice at achieving capabilities we (and many other animals ... even, say, nematodes**) absolutely take for granted.
One of the old jokes I always associate with Groucho Marx is something like:
"Can you play the piano?" ... "I don't know, I've never tried"
It reminds me of how people often say "foreign languages are difficult" ... As though any "native language" is somehow different / easy / easier ... Entirely neglecting the tens of thousands of hours of experience and practice most people have with some "native language" by the time they're a mere 10 years old. AND, we all continue to "practice" whatever language we speak and think (to some degree) in every hour of every day.
It's all in what you put your time into, as you get at, as well. And, one particularly crucial aspect is what you believe about how skill "arises" which you reference as well. One of the greatest disservices to (young, especially) people is inculcating them with the idea of "talent." While most people are not likely capable of becoming, say, the top tennis player (male / female) in the world - there are all sorts of variables - too often people are artificially limited by nonsense that passes as "common wisdom" and permeates "culture" (ideas that just propagate from some people to others - here, especially, parents to children).
It's interesting, to me, that while my mom, for example, was an incredible "believer" in education, and had defied her own parents and exceeded the role(s) they envisioned for her by many orders of magnitude, she also would often reference "talent" in various contexts when I was growing up.
We are riddled with nonsense - in our heads. I know for sure that I'll always be full of internal inconsistencies and false beliefs and the like. But, it is very helpful to escape as many of them as possible. Particularly those that artificially constrain us - a species limited enough as-is.***
* Where symbols "Picasso" & "Hendrix" are understood / defined 'in the usual / obvious way' - in terms of equivalence in impact / fame / etc.
** See recent articles on mapping of "neural network" / nervous system structure of C. elegans, for example
*** I write this not to disparage our species but simply to highlight the fact that we are constrained just like all other species by our form(s) and what is optimized by the process of natural selection and such ...
Talent is very real. Any teacher will confirm this. Give some five year olds something new to do and some will get it immediately. Others will never get it, no matter much how effort they put in. In between those extremes most will get it eventually, but only after struggling with it.
Most domain have hard skill cut-offs. As in math - I've known otherwise intelligent people who just cannot get how basic algebra and trig work. At all. No amount of patient explanation made a difference. They just couldn't do it.
There's a very real natural ceiling on ability. For some people/skills it's pretty low, for others it's so high you can barely see it.
The problem in this culture isn't that talent is a discouraging myth, it's that most of the population doesn't get anywhere those limits.
A lot of native ability is wasted. Most people could do a lot more given the time and resources.
I agree. My earlier comment is really about maximizing ability within your range of natural capabilities with a qualifier stating that most people’s ceiling is higher than they would expect.
> It's interesting, to me, that while my mom, for example, was an incredible "believer" in education, and had defied her own parents and exceeded the role(s) they envisioned for her by many orders of magnitude, she also would often reference "talent" in various contexts when I was growing up.
Do you see a conflict? Talent provides an upper bound on what you can gain from education.
Excellent comment. I'm one of those people who always thought: "I can't draw". Now I understand that for me it is a matter of practice. I started with Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.
The thing with a lot of the arts is they aren't pushed or required in school the same way math or writing are. So someone that says "I draw like a five year old" probably stopped drawing around that time.
I'm a firm believer that everyone can learn the craft part of drawing and painting. Some people will learn at a faster rate and some will learn at a slower rate, but everyone can learn. And just like math and writing, there will be those who excel, those who are average, and those who are below average.
I was trained in singing in elementary school and then again in high school.
I made an honor choir or two. (This would be a significant accomplishment if I was female, which I am not. They'll take pretty much any boy who can hit the right notes.)
Years ago I recovered from a cold except that the phlegm in my throat didn't go away. It is still with me. If I try to sing, my voice will just cut out on certain pitches, and sometimes I'll get a gurgling effect from the phlegm.
I had a voice teacher who was also an opera singer, and "singing when you have a cold" was a very common problem for him. Every singer has to do it, so I'd encourage you to consult one. Good luck.
Priit Pärn, a legendary cartoonist and animation director from Estonia [1], has used an excellent term, "mileage of the line". I DeepL-translated (with rough editing) a couple of excerpts from interviews he has given.
First excerpt:
Q: How is your inner self-critic working, are you satisfied with the results of your work?
PP: Yeah, I think I'm a very good drawer. One of the best.
Q: How long do you estimate the mileage of your line at the moment?
PP: For "Gabriella", I tried to calculate how many final frames I drew, about 10 000 to 15 000, 50 cm of line for one frame, so five to seven kilometres for one film. It's the kind of consistent drawing neccessary for an animator to keep his hands in. A beginner animator who is at the beginning of the road with the search for their own line and is making a film is forced to draw hundreds or thousands of drawings with the same rudimentary line. A cartoonist is not limited by his own predetermined rules, he can experiment and search. In most cases, one has reached a line of one's own by the age of about 35.
---
Another excerpt from another interview (rough translation again):
"It has come with decades that you can draw without any preparation in all sorts of angles and dynamic positions. And it also emerges from somewhere that you can draw in whichever way you want, but it's still your drawing. This requires a very high degree of thoughtful line mileage, which means you have to think while you're at a line."
(Priit Pärn is actually a trained biologist, so his way of reasoning is always very precise and synthetic, clearly influenced by an education in the natural sciences. Always a joy to read his interviews. Quite obviously, in addition to his views on the technical process of drawing, this level of analytical thinking also manifests in the hyper-multi-layered black humour and visual language of his animations [2, 3]. A national treasure for Estonia for sure.)
> This seems to be about how making a living as a painter is difficult.
Eh? It's a review of a biography of the impressionist painter Claude Monet (whose "almost [...] last written words were a shaky scribble in the autograph album of Paul Valéry’s daughter, Agathe: ‘All I can say is that painting is terribly difficult.’"), with some introductory remarks about severe corruption in the art scene ("that nexus of artist, dealer, critic and curator") which the author traces to the "critical mass" in that sector that arrived with the impressionists.
Well since you've identified it as a problem and the real consequence of failure is just to have to keep doing stuff until you're better at it... maybe just do it?
I get that's easier said than done, but as a random on the internets all I can do is encourage you to try- because simply becoming okay with failing at things is a useful skill.
So, as a rando of the internet, consider this a challenge/ encouragement: do it and fail, and learn to embrace the fail, for if you can learn to suck at stuff with grace, the world will open itself to you. :D
I say that as a person who really had embraced the suck: it's a valuable skill that you can learn just by being bad at stuff and paying attention to different aspects as you fail.
One method is to do quick sketches on bits of paper, and just mentally plan on throwing them away, regardless. It helps lift the subconscious weight of thinking someone else might see how bad it is, or that you've ruined some final product.
Resketching the same thing repeatedly helps too, just nit pick what you hated about the last iteration and try again.
I've been doing that often as I pick up art again. Early, I had started a portrait of my late dad but because I initially tried to make it good, I felt resistance to doing more out of fear of ruining what I worked so hard already for (which is fairly blocky and cartoonish anyway hah)
I'm good at drawing. You're exactly right. Making drawings that you care enough to put a sincere effort into, but won't mind throwing away after, is key.
When a pianist practices, they don't record every time. The nature of drawing is such that practice is intrinsically recorded, but it is better to treat it the way the pianist does. The only ones you keep are the important ones, the hundreds rest are throwaways just for the practice.
It's a cheeky-powerful feeling when I go out with newsprint and charcoal and draw in public at a museum or downtown then crumple it and toss it in a bin. People who notice are aghast because my work is pretty good. But I can just do it again.
A stroke of the brush does not guarantee art from the bristles, but you don't need to be talented to draw something. As with most skills, it can be learned.
i've taken mechanical design courses where we kept a sketch book and had to do a sketch-a-day kind of thing. it's something you'll just naturally improve at the more you do it
Though the article isn't about the act of painting, I just wanted to encourage anyone who wants to get into art to check out the Procreate app. It makes it so much easier and faster, though you don't end up with a "real" painting (this is an advantage sometimes).
Having an undo button makes "painting" much more fun!
Speaking from second hand experience, not having an undo button can be a lot of fun too because it can inspire you to paint something you hadn't intended to when you started out, or force you to try what you were doing in a very different way. What started as "mistakes" can end up being your favorite part of a painting.
That said, painters also have a lot of options for fixing errors including repainting over the whole canvas. The few painters I know often revise old works adding or removing elements months/years after they were first finished.
It seems like painting in general is a lot of fun "real" or otherwise, although personally I've never been any good at it, it's still usually a good time.
Honestly, I undo so much in Procreate I never get anything done. I'm best with it if I start with a rough in actual pencil, snap or scan it, then finish it in Procreate.
> There, he employed six gardeners, one of whom had the job of dusting and washing the water lilies
This reminds me of a humorous book I saw in a museum gift shop once, supposedly about "wives of great painters." "Mrs. Matisse cleans the goldfish bowl" is the page that stuck in my mind.
Anyway, great article. I knew nothing about Monet, which is probably the way he wanted it.
The first half of this, about criticism and how it shapes art was fascinating.
To then go on and list canonized artists whose work will have unattainable prices is revolting. It's a bit of self referential irony.
The title, is a farce as well... Bob Ross is rolling over in his grave right now! Learn to paint, do it badly, or find its something you can do well. Buy what you like, locally, and hang it on the wall of your house.
It's HN, we all have those friends who think that what we do is magic, that we are some sort of tech priest class or wizards. It's a skill, some of us have a knack for it. Art is just the same, every one can few will be great, lots can be serviceable.
One of the things I enjoy about doing a painting is that it doesn’t involve technology, just me, a canvas, and paint. Machines equipped with mechanical arms are no doubt going to soon be churning out fine painting after fine painting, but nevertheless, it’s an enjoyable human activity, made by humans for humans.
> One of the things I enjoy about doing a painting is that it doesn’t involve technology, just me, a canvas, and paint.
You would actually be surprised at how much actual technology there is in the canvas, paints, and brushes. Especially, if you want the paint not to be toxic.
I think those pointing out the tech missed your point. It's fair to say that making paint is a technology but "painting" is an art and the two are very distinct.
An artist can create art with most anything, dirt and sand for example.
My wife has been painting lately. She has two sisters that paint as well and they're all remarkably good at it. So was her mother, and her mother's uncle was as well. He did a mural in the Ames, Iowa Post Office that was a WPA funded project that's pretty cool. Makes me wonder if there is a genetic connection :D
Admittedly unrelated to the original article, you may find https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/aug/21/picture... interesting - he's been going around the country photographing those Post Office murals (I ran across this because my office is currently in a former WPA-era post office building and it is preserved in the lobby even though it hasn't been an actual post office for at least a decade - it kind of took it from "we have a weird revolutionary-war-themed painting" (it's new england, we've spent 200 years subliminally preparing to start shooting at brits again) to "this is part of a nation-wide historical collection that just happens to be in decentralised storage" :-)
Wow! That's a great project and it's very cool to see all those other murals. You can really see that same style of art in a lot of them. They have a very sturdy feel to them.
Ok, I think this is a funny comment but if you think about it for more than a second it really condenses what a lot of the AI handwringing is about: humans value what's difficult to humans, or at least what's difficult to a lot of humans. We get upset when something shows up that can even partially mimic a creative process that's valued for its scarcity.
There's still zero progress made towards generative AI doing anything but mimicking existing work done by humans, and very poorly and inefficiently I might add.
Please tell me where I can find research demonstrating truly novel output from generative AI.
This text is a review of the book "Monet: The Restless Vision" by Jackie Wullschläger, discussing the art scene in New York, the ethical issues in the art world, and the life and work of Claude Monet. It highlights the corruption among art critics and curators, Monet's impact on the Impressionist movement, and the influence of his work on modern art.
# What might a reader gain from reading this?
A reader would gain insight into the complexities of the art world, including its ethical challenges and the profound influence of Claude Monet on the Impressionist movement and modern art.
This did not prepare me for the framing of the crusty Robert Hughes introducing the overflowing filth of corruption swamping the art market. I mean, one of the sentences mentions it, but it's a pretty pale summary.
I'm not sure how useful AI summary even is. It's a best-case scenario: translate input data into 'what most people might think of this', which is a core competency of LLMs. It's stripping away the ability to convey intention or a specific vision, though, and that's a significant lack.
