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10:27pm February 22, 2012

➸ sex and violins?: I fucking hate art students.

downdowntogoblintown:

But earlier today I hung out with some and I gotta rant for just a second.

Hi, my name is Emma and I have no formal training in any kind of art whatsoever. Actually, that is a lie. I have exactly one year of art school under my belt. I dropped out. I couldn’t afford it, the school I went to was…

I don’t know you at all, was just going through random tags to keep my mind off stuff. But THANK YOU. 

I’ve spent most of my life being told that I can’t paint worth shit, and pretty much agreeing because (trying to use their methods) I could get nothing I liked. At all.  So I mostly gave up for most of my life. 

Then my friend pretty much told me not to listen.  I started painting a bit, using my own techniques, and my friend basically said “If all it took was me saying that, for you to produce THAT, then I should have told you a long time ago.”  When I stopped being able to afford materials, I started going to a place for self-taught artists where they give us basic materials and let us do whatever we want. 

A couple years later, my art’s been in three galleries without my even seeking it out, people keep offering to buy it, and when I give the highest price I can feel remotely comfortable asking, they tell me I’m underpricing it.  And while that obviously isn’t the measure of whether work is good or not, it says to me that people are doing more than just a condescending pat on the head to the disabled artist when they praise my art. 

(I honestly have no clue how to evaluate my art’s quality by any normal standards, plus I always see every single mistake.  And I don’t trust the same kind of people who gush praise at me when all I’ve done so far is paint a yellow blob.  So this is one of the only ways to tell that anyone with regular aesthetic standards seriously likes it.)

And that means that I can finally feel pretty confident that the people who constantly told me I couldn’t paint, especially without formal schooling (I have taken two design classes at a non-art school, and they didn’t focus on painting skills) were snobbish assholes.  But it’s still nice to hear stories that reinforce my observations, even if they come from aggravating experiences.