Almost all classical art schools are based on the idea that pupils and students are taught to reproduce reality. Academic drawing is the main discipline without which you cannot be considered an artist at all. When people evaluate someone’s drawings and artwork in the 21st century (well, at least today, in 2019 in Russia), the first thing they look at is “like / not like”. That is, until now, paintings and drawings de-facto play the role of “photographing,” that is, copying reality with some artistic embellishment. We will not look for the reasons for such a narrow interpretation of artwork by the masses, it’s better to think about how necessary it is for an artist to be able to draw in the classical sense, is it worth the time and effort to develop academic drawing skills? Previously, I wondered – “are there famous artists who“ didn’t know how to draw, ”and it turned out that you can meet such people. But today I wonder if I should spend my life on realism or on something else? what else to study academic drawing, if you do not strive to make art in a realistic style? You might think, as it often happens, that a person is lazy or incapable of realistic drawing, and he just decided to justify himself by saying that he doesn’t need it. So it can be said about a pianist who does not want to learn notes, but composes music and is generally called himself a musician. Why not master the skills, study the rules, then to break them with a calm soul and knowledge of the matter. After all, it is not in vain that many years of experience in art education suggest that people are taught to draw from real objects – still lifes and plaster heads. Does such an education give more opportunities for creativity or does it enslave the brain and cut off the imagination, driving the personality into the framework of the generally accepted? I study the drawing myself, but I will not say that I am doing it very hard. I like to draw more from the heart, although at the initial stage I really wanted to draw “it seems.” Gradually, I began to understand the amount of time and effort that I needed to spend on mastering realism, and I wondered if the game was worth the candle. I am 32 already, in my life I spent a huge amount of time on various things that seemed important to me, but then I realized that what I thought was necessary earlier turned out to be not what made me happy. I didn’t get so many really useful tools and skills for me in my life, and most of the things that I learned to do lie in my briefcase with a dead weight. And all these little useful skills were associated with generally accepted useful skills, with the same “correct” education, with what is called “that’s what people have been doing for many years, and you do.” And now I’m an artist, albeit self-proclaimed. And I think, should I still spend a few years of my life studying what I’m not very interested in, but it seems to be necessary to be a professional. Is it necessary? I draw what I like. I enjoy the process and the result. I have some of my own styles and favorite techniques that I haven’t spied anywhere, but I came up with myself through trial and experimentation. I like that my works have a touch of realism in the sense that you can find out where a person is and where a tree is. But I’m not interested in creating the right and accurate work, because there are already many people on Earth doing the same thing. Even if I spend several years of hard work and master the academic drawing and all the rules of oil and other painting, in the end, what will I get? I’ll just become the same artists as hundreds of thousands around the world are already painting. That is, I will again put a lot of effort and time into something that does not bring me happiness in the process, and by the result I will not get exactly any advantage. Isn’t it better to just draw these years ?! It’s clear that realism is simply more understandable to people, it’s easier to pay for it, it’s easier to find a job / project, and so on. But I do not have such a task to prove to someone that I am an artist. I am an artist and that’s it. I create pictures. I do this when my hands itch. I mean, that there is no right single path for everyone, everyone determines what he needs for his work. When I needed to learn something, I opened the Internet, watched videos and read books. My level of drawing is now sufficient so that it doesn’t bother me anymore. I sometimes have questions, then I open the book and do the exercises. But I will not say that for me this is a priority. Much more now I am concerned about the state of contemporary art. I understand more and more that realism is just one of the very ancient directions that have a long history and are still in demand. But there are many more other areas in which very different skills, ideas, thoughts are important. I would not even oppose them to each other, everything is very intertwined. Ideally, of course, own everything! Be able to create realism, cubism, postmodernism and so on. One does not precede the other; everything develops in parallel. Although there is a direction that originated a little earlier, but I would not say that all directions follow from realism, as many people think. As if all modern art, starting with impressionism, is just warped realism. It was as if people used to be able to draw, but today they have forgotten how to draw, and therefore they paint whatever. But if they could and could, then everyone would definitely draw as in the photo and even better, but 100% recognizable. Does that make any sense? Everyone draw what you see. Why is this? There are photos, videos, 3D holograms, stereo images … and still all the artists of the world paint realism. I think that art and the people who create it are something more than a mirror of life, it is also communication at other levels than the literal. No wonder people understand humor, allegories, know how to feel a lot of feelings and emotions, have a powerful mind. Highly developed organisms, people capable of more than just look at a copy of themselves in the reflection of the picture. For example, I have needs for a new, unknown, for something obscure, intuitive. It is interesting for me to get acquainted with my subconscious, because many of my drawings are like a dream in reality, an experiment, innovation. I think that the artist is not the one who graduated from art school and institute; an artist is one who reflects in his work an invisible part of himself. And how exactly he does it, does not play a role 🙂