Art and arrogance

I originally posted a version of this in my journal, but the reaction has been so positive that I decided to make it a news article, at Rockinfroggi's suggestion. And thank you to everyone who commented on the original journal!

I've been spending more time around dA lately, and while most of it is very positive, some of it... well, isn't. People telling each other their work sucks, stop drawing, etc. Or even people looking at my work and saying or thinking that they'll never be as good and getting discouraged.

Please, please, don't. No one is born perfect. No one is born able to compete in the Olympics or paint a masterpiece. I first picked up a pencil when I was one year of age – I've had over twenty-two years of near-constant practice, and I have a mother who's an art teacher. I had a load of encouragement and constructive criticism and advice. And I'm still hugely critical of my own work and see a hundred flaws in everything I do. I'm nowhere near reaching my full potential and I know it.

To put it in perspective and show that I know what I'm talking about, here's an example of the best I could manage ten years ago:


... and here's what I can do now, ten years on, after deviantART's members showed me what's possible when you have pencils and decent paper:


I've gotten to where I am now through a lot of practice and a lot of learning. I've copied and traced and messed up and so on, and if people had kept telling me that my work sucked, I'd have given up. But they didn't. And that's because the only kind of person who'll tell you that your work sucks is someone who needs to talk others' work down in order to make their own look better. Good artists don't do that, because they don't need to.

Basically, if the only kind of "criticism" you can manage is "this sucks", then you are neither a good artist, nor a good critic, and should probably keep quiet and stop spouting evidence of your own inability and ignorance into the world.

Besides that, the difference between bad and good art is subjective. My drawing of Han and Leia might be good technically, but it's a copy; who's to say that someone else's, technically not as good, drawing of their OCs isn't better art? I don't see my direct copies as good art at all; craft and technique and skill, yes, but not art. And there are probably people who'd disagree with me, and that's fine, because art itself is subjective. There's no one definitive set of boxes that something has to tick in order to be art. And finally, just because I don't like something doesn't mean it's not art. I don't like most of van Gogh's paintings, but I do consider them art.

And finally, bad art in a particular category doesn't render that category less valuable. If I take a terrible photo of something, it doesn't make photography as a whole any worse. That argument makes no sense and I shall defeat it with mathematics. Maybe a bad picture drags the overall standard down, because the average quality goes down. But that also means that if your work is above average, it's now slightly better, because it's slightly higher above average. Your own work doesn't get worse just because someone else did worse. Your own work can only get relatively worse in relation to works that are better. If everyone else in the world was bad at pencil drawings, my own would be seen as the epitome of bloody brilliant. If everyone else was better, mine would be seen as crap. Savvy?

So keep that in mind before you insult someone's work under the pretence of "constructive criticism". Take a look at your own early work. Look at other people's early work, in their scraps or on the last page of their gallery, and see how they started out. Keep things in perspective and remember that it's not necessarily about age, either. For me, fourteen years of age meant thirteen years of practice. For someone else, forty years of age might mean less than five years of practice. Of course that's going to make a difference to their art. Does it make them a worse artist, or less talented? No. So keep that in mind, too.

And most importantly: keep doing what you love, and don't let anyone dissuade you from it!