The Boy looked at my Flickr pictures for the first time in, er, ever. He's seen maybe a handful of them, but never on Flickr. After wondering where I found the time to take all of them, he accused me of being artistic again.
I know, this sounds incredibly strange. Let me explain. He has convinced himself that he has no artistic ability. No one with eyes to see is lacking in artistic ability (and some would argue that the eyes aren't even necessary). From time to time he will sit down and pay enough attention to his work to do a pretty decent job.
We both took a Drawing and Rendering class, but in different semesters. He took his first. He, you may recall, is a Technical Director and is sometimes called upon to design. Or at least to take design classes. He's decided that since he's "not artistic" he's not any good at the design classes, but I am. Therefore, I should be the artist, not him.
Anyway, our final project in the class was a watercolour painting copied from a photograph. I did a picture of the river in New Zealand where some of the River Anduin shots were filmed for LOTR. It's hanging on our bedroom wall. It's not a bad job. It's rather lighter (yellow instead of green) than the original, but it's close. It is, however, not exactly a watercolour.
I used to watch a lot of Bob Ross when I was a kid. I've often thought that with as much of it as I've seen, I could probably pick up the brushes and re-create a Ross method oil complete with happy little clouds and big ol' rascally trees. That's kinda how I did the watercolour; it's a watercolour with several oil techniques. We weren't really taught much in the way of technique, more of a "lighter colours first, darker colours last, this is wet on wet, this is wet on dry, there are lots of things you can try, go!"
Anyway, the next day, the J-Boss came up to me and said she heard I did a good watercolour. I goggled at her for a while and she replied that the faculty did talk to each other, you know. It's not that I found her having had lunch with Designer Mark that incredulous, it was that she implied that he found some reason to talk about my project.
What reason could there possibly be for that? Obviously it was positive, but how does such a thing come up? I don't know. TB takes this to mean that I've done something fantastic in the way of art. He also manages to imply that it isn't fair that I have "mad skillz" that I don't really use. He said that his opinion was that most of my photos should appear in museums (they shouldn't) and how can I be that good at that and everything else I do, too?
I don't have "mad skillz". As I tried to point out with my photos, those are pretty much my best work and even then there are only a handful of them that are anything slightly above the ordinary. I don't know much about photography, even. I've never had a class, I've read a couple magazine articles intended for kids: the one "rule" I recall is not to let trees grow from the tops of people's heads.
Same goes for my drawing. I've never had an art class beyond fifth grade, except for that D&R class. I was in music and theatre, I didn't have time to be in art as well. But, I spent a lot of time in school drawing, Friend Carin and I were scribbling little cartoons and people to other in notes all through middle school. If you flip through my school spirals, you'll see doodles on almost every other remaining page.
I think everyone else is equally likely to do well at things. It's not just art. If I wanted to learn to ski, I could probably ski well. As it is, I don't much. I've not really considered there being things I'm incapable of, rather, things I've never tried. I truly believe that anything is possible, for anyone.