Fact or Myth: Do You Need Really Need Artistic Talent To Become A Painter?

Do you need talent to become an artist? In almost no other human endeavor are so many people so hung up on the need for talent. There seems to be an almost universal agreement that artistic painting is only for those rare individuals that are born with a mysteriously God-like ability to create art. We lowly mortals, should never even try to understand art let alone try to create it. Give me a break.

For most painters, talent refers to how easily and how quickly someone can acquire the necessary skills and understanding to make art. There is another facet of talent, (this is the one that hangs us up), that deals with creatively choosing what to paint, how to arrange the elements, what style to use and sometimes experimenting with completely new ways to represent a subject or idea.

So much of being successful with art has to do with your goals and expectations. If your goal, for example, is just to enjoy the process of learning and improving, then achieving this is more a matter of attitude and getting started then it is with having talent.

If your goal is to paint something that is good enough to hang in your house, give away to friends or to sell at a local art fair, you need to develop enough technical skills to not look amateurish. Talent will certainly help at this level but it is not yet a requirement.

What if your goal is to become a famous artist recognized the world over for transcending all works of past art with something new and great. Do you need talent at this level? Absolutely, you will need a truck load of talent. What is interesting, however, is that so much of what a master painter learns on the way to greatness involves the same set of skills that a talent challenged amateur is capable of learning. In other words, only at the very top of the art world is talent an absolute necessity.

So how do you become a good artist despite a lack of talent?

1. First and foremost, learn to see like an artist. This is the process of learning to shut down the normally dominant side of your brain that wants to identify, name, organize, filter and basically make sense out of what we see. This actually gets in the way of processing raw visual data needed to make art. Artistic vision is extremely important and yet relatively easy to accomplish.

2. Learn to paint with a child-like attitude. Do children worry that they will look silly painting? Are they saying to themselves that they must create a perfect piece of art? Do they have anxiety from fretting over what others will think? Of course not. Kids just enjoy the experience as they learn. As adults we often paralyze our natural gifts and talents with worry. Relax.

3. Have endurance. Think of becoming an artist as a lifetime adventure. There is no hurry to get it right.

4. Develop a broad knowledge base. Expose yourself to lots of techniques, styles, mediums and other artists.

5. Do not try to reinvent the wheel. Before you develop bad habits learn painting from a gifted instructors. This does not necessarily have to take place at a university. It can also be learned from a local artist that teaches weekly classes or from a top video painting course on dvd. Be sure to look for a painting course that offers a full systematic approach to learning all of the technical skills in a logical progression. Some art lessons are so narrowly focused that they will leave huge gaps in your training.

The bottom line is that you really do not have to have great talent to have great fun and be productive as an artist. Now that that excuse has been removed, shouldn’t you get started today?