I was writing a paper this weekend about Vincent van Gogh and learned something interesting. His art career lasted only 10 years, and the first few years of that he did not do oil painting. Which means that he wasn't that great at oil painting when he started doing it just 7 years before his death. He had developed a good eye by then and was very informed in artistic technique. So he wasn't terrible. But it's pretty universally recognized that his best paintings, where he really showed mastery, were done in the last two years of his life.
(Imagine the years and years of additional mastery we and he would have gotten if he'd lived longer. But I digress.)
Van Gogh did not become a great oil painter by luck. He became a great oil painter through practice.
Yes, he did some art as a kid. Mostly sketching. But he did not dedicate himself to art until he was 27. And at that point, he was all in.
(That was his personality. If he was going to do something, he was going to do it completely. Reminds me of some people I know who write papers about Van Gogh, but I digress again.)
Vincent van Gogh worked really hard at being a good artist. He practiced and studied and apprenticed himself to a relative who was a well-known watercolorist. He read books about technique. He wrote to his brother Theo about color theory. He learned from other artists by copying their work (which is something that every artist, regardless of medium--visual, musical, written--should try; just don't try to pass it off as something you came up with on your own).
Van Gogh incorporated other artists' techniques and motifs into his work, then used their work as jumping off points for his own. He got interested in pointillism and played around with it and came up with something that was kind of like pointillism but not. It was a totally new thing. He loved Jean-Francois Millet's painting The Sower so much that he modeled all or parts of dozens of his creations after it, some of which are considered among his best works.
Some people think that van Gogh was so prolific and creative because he was bipolar and the mania enabled it.*
That's bullshit.
He was prolific because he wanted to get better, and getting better means practicing, and when you practice, you produce more; and also, because he loved making art. And he was creative because he worked hard, and he practiced, and he learned, and by doing those things he was able to remix and recombine and finally come up with totally new things of his own.
*(I actually don't think he was bipolar, but that's a different post (but probably only if somebody asks me to write it). But even if he was, which is very possible (I just think some other possibilities are more likely), his creativity didn't come from that. His most productive period was the year he spent at the asylum in Saint-Rémy, and for most of that time he was calm without being depressed (interspersed by shorter periods of delirium or psychosis).)
Anyway, all of this is my very long-winded way of saying to people who think, "I want to make beautiful/cool/fun art but I don't have the skills (so I'm not going to try) (or) (so I'm going to use AI to make it and anybody who questions that is a total gatekeeping evil person who is trying to keep artistic creation away from the masses)" that, while I get your pain because creating things can be hard, this is also true:
Van Gogh didn't have the skills either.
But he didn't let that stop him.
Here. Enjoy two cypresses.
