Talent, Hard Work and Late Bloomers
Recently, The New Yorker published an outstanding article by Malcolm Gladwell titled Late Bloomers which I briefly touched on at the time in my own article On the Nature of Creative Genius. It’s a common perception in our society that artists, musicians and other creatives require natural talent. Picasso is a prime example, the young Picasso was a gifted and insightful genius of his day producing his first masterpiece at 20 - Evocation: The Burial of Casagemas.
However, contrast the genius of Picasso, a natural talent, to that of Cezanne. It was not talent that drove Cezanne to painting, it was a passion to paint. He lacked the talent of an illustrator and even at 30 he produced mediocre work. Cezanne’s first one man exhibition was at the age of 56 and only because Pissarro, Renoir, Degas and Monet iimplored Vollard to hunt down the relatively unappreciated Cezanne in the town of Aix. If it weren’t for that visit to Aix the work of Cezanne would have disappeared into history. The point is that Cezanne was a great example of hard work, of passion, of what Gladwell describes as the experimental genius who, over decades, works on their skill to become a master. And, Cezanne is the result of many layers of social support including family, sponsors and teachers who enabled his journey of passion.
Gladwell makes a point of asking what Cezanne’s career counsellor would have said had he been in high school in our times? I would shudder to think how many talentless people are steered to work in factories simply because they can’t draw for peanuts.
The question about talent and passion regularly crops up among designers, photographers and artists. Jin over on 8164.org is asking about talent versus hard work and whether natural talent exists? My take on that question is to suggest there is no doubt the phenomenon of natural talent exists, but talent is far from the whole ballgame. Talent without effort equals a wasted opportunity. So what is talent?
At the core of our makeup we are all slightly different. Someone may have a better physical ability to balance, or be able to hit balls consistently on a sweet spot, or find it a natural experience to map the external world through their fingers to meet two dimensional representations or interpretations. However, short of being posed with direct restrictive barriers, those talents might well be learned through hard work, experimentation and passion. Imagine the young Cezanne, a talentless artist who had no natural ability to draw.
Which brings me full circle to a bugbear of mine. For a short time I taught best practice web design to graphic arts diploma students and they repeatedly kept saying they were visual people. This somehow implied that I was outside the sphere of understanding design and that somehow being a visual person meant they were not expecting themselves to learn new skills like basic web standards coding. So here’s the short rant that I continually process…
You can be who and what you want in life. You choose every day to be who you are by all the small choices you make every minute and hour. Designers, I’d suggest you find out a little about markup and programming… and coders you need to start reading about design and getting yourself a few pencils and a sketchbook. Keep journals. My theory is that people get really good at the things they do a lot. People tend to do what they get recognition for doing well. It’s a circle. Plug into that circle. If you want to be a designer or coder or an architect or a movie director then make those choices. Would Cezanne’s life be any less valuable had his work rotted away in that attic in Aix? It’s about the journey, not recognition. If you have a passion without natural talent your reward is the painting or the crafting or the design itself. It’s like throwing a pebble in a well every day for a lifetime. Anyone can paint, but only a master can Paint. If that makes sense?
Your journey of passion might start with reading a book. Or sitting by the water with some conte crayons. And, if you get a chance, buy a dog and laugh a little.
November 16th, 2008 at 10:59 am
[...] you follow the link to Steven’s website there is a good read about the discussion and his article links to others if you are interested in [...]