ON THE EVE OF 2000, legions of computer coders were employed to reprogram systems to avoid a giant worldwide Internet crash, the dreaded Y2K (which didn't happen). One of the emergency coders was a young painter. "I was a darn good coder," he later said at his painting workshop. Today, he’s a darn good realist oil painter, top-tier nationally.
Coding takes concentration, endurance, motor skill, and attention to detail. Could that be part of this painter’s success with the brush?
It goes to the question of how much physical temperament, that is genetics and biology, and cultural influence, make the painter. For some kinds of painting, motor skill and hand-eye coordination play a major role. Just how much is the question.
Culture has an impact as well. A top female painter was trained as a child in China. She spent hours practicing wrist motions to master Chinese characters. When you watch her paint today, the wrist action still is there, like a fine-tuned machine. Clearly, the nation’s Confucian legacy of rote education by drill underwrites her painting mastery.
The question remains: how much biology and how much environment—nature and nurture—predict the success of a painter, especially a realist painter (where you have to pass the test of replicating persuasive “reality”). We now enter controversial terrain: the difference between the sexes, and genetic endowments.
A leading economist once argued that it was a stereotype to say women are better at fine hand motions, or eye-hand detail. His example was the Swiss watchmaker, all males. However, while a few such watchmakers are famous, in Asia, tens of thousands of young women assemble tiny parts on computer boards. There must be something to the feminine knack, not to mention smaller hands (not to mention low wages).
In discussing such topics, always controversial, one of the most contested is the idea of the bell curve, a graph that seems to work in describing how, in nature and in human populations, there is a large average in the middle, and small outliers on both sides. Could it be that really good painters often fall on an outlier side, that is, the side of in-born skills?
The contrary evidence exists, of course. At an art college, I met two of the best realist painters in their classes. One was colorblind. Still, though his painting were "tonal"—in blues and greys, darks and lights—his mastery of values was stupendous. The other student, a young lady in the graduated program, was on the autism spectrum. Her concentration, and mastery of detail, put her on a painting pedestal compared to her peers.
There are obvious differences between the sexes, based in biology. The best, and most reasonable, studies come up with summaries like this:
Men: more likely to be colorblind and have dyslexia. Men throw better. They have higher visual-spatial ability and a better spatial-navigation memory.
Women: Higher aesthetic sensibility. Finer motor skills. Better memory of faces. Earlier verbal ability and better at reading and writing. Better memory of faces and short term memory, and better projection into other’s feelings.
Physically, as well, based on the two hemispheres of the brain, women’s neural activity generally connects both, and are more generalist in perception. Men’s brains focus in one hemisphere more, and are more specialist in their attention. In a fair summary, men and women have different mental tools, but in the end, both can achieve the same ends.
This has been called the “people-things divide” (a women-men divide). And it explains social patterns, since people generally do what they are good at. Being more “people” oriented, for example, women gather. In the art world, look at any art association, school, or conference. Participation is mostly women (by 70-80 percent). President Obama got in trouble once for suggesting that women shouldn’t go into to art history so much (as they do), but instead into math and science.
There's nothing wrong with these well-tested generalizations, because there are always outliers in both sexes. When it comes to art practice, both inclinations ad something and, meanwhile, training and practice can add more outlier specialization. But as is often said, "Not everyone was born to be a ballet dancer."
Motor and perceptual skill can be trained and mastered, but it often takes the raw material of a genetic load. Some people are indeed born to be painters, though not all of them take up the craft (we don’t know how many humans could have been better than Picasso or Sargent, because they never tried, for example).
The eyes matter as well. One art historian attributes Paul Cezanne's innovative style to a kind of eye condition, like a stigmatism. Degas developed macular degeneration, marking his later work. Not all eyes are equal, even if healthy. I once met an 80-something fellow who never had glasses, and was a superb 20/20; I had developed cataracts in the early fifties
On one of these extremes is what’s unfortunately been termed the “idiot savant,” those rare individuals who have one genius-like mental skill, while the mind has atrophied elsewhere. We know scientists and musician of this type in history.
Applied to painters, we know less, it seems. A genetic endowment may give some painters what one artist joked to be a "superpower" to see, draw, paint, or abstract shapes. There's no way to know for sure. There's no brain scan, or no IQ test, to pick out which of the thousands of painters are specially endowed. We can only look at their work, or their cultural training and work ethic (and luck perhaps), to make sense of why they are "so good."
At the turn of the twentieth century, and still today, there was a natural rebellion against what seems an elitist preference for great talents, either endowed by class or genes. Take the Surrealists, both literary and painterly. They favored art by children, mental patients, and persons obsessed with sexual peculiarities. They said this was the best art. That attitude continues today, but it is an outlier point of view.
No matter how endowed a painter is with biological advantages, the public decides on what is successful (along with the critics and the market). On average, most of the world’s people are impressed by "skill" when they see it. We are impressed by it because we know how hard it is to achieve. Most of us know average accomplishment.
Should we begrudge the fact that some artists, and painters in particular, were born to have better physical skills than others? Probably not, though it’s interesting to keep in mind all the reasons that some artists are a notch above others. Finally, we will never know the subjective state of the "other artist," those frustratingly, beguiling super-achievers.
All we can know is what endowments, genetic and cultural, that we ourselves have been given. From there, we make the most of them—or not.
larrywithamfineart@gmail.com