“In art, the route rarely decides the destination. The real journey begins the moment you try to make something true.”
Two Paths, One Reality in the Art World
There is something funny about how people talk about art careers. As if choosing between art school and teaching yourself is the magical switch that decides everything. Like one path leads straight to MoMA and the other to a dim studio that smells like wet canvas and unwashed cups. In reality, the roads wobble in similar ways. They can break you. They can save you.
Self-taught legends get treated like myth creatures. Frida Kahlo building her style from a bed, Henri Rousseau painting jungles he never visited, Basquiat sprinting from street walls to auction houses, his paint drying faster than the critics could invent new categories for him. No professors. No atelier critiques. Just time, stubbornness and that raw fire you feel in your throat when you know no one else is going to hand you the key.
And then you meet the art school kids. The ones who talk about “material intelligence” while stretching canvases in cold studios that echo like abandoned train stations. They get structure, feedback, the shared momentum of being around others. The self-taught route builds its own momentum too, shaped by curiosity, flexibility, collectives, shared studios, online circles or long stretches of independent work. Two environments. Two vocabularies. Same impulse to make something that feels real.
Something I have realised over time. When I meet a brilliant self-taught artist, I see how creativity refuses to follow a syllabus. And when I meet someone who left art school feeling smaller instead of stronger, I see how structure can sometimes miss the point. Different paths, but the same mix of pride and doubt.
It shows up everywhere. Last summer I met an incredible curator, sharp and generous, with an eye that could slice through the noise in seconds. Later an artist whispered to me that she was “over fifty and had no formal training,” as if that cancelled out everything she had lived. What he did not see was her whole story. She grew up inside the art world, surrounded by it, shaped by it, fully immersed long before she ever held a title. That school of life is its own education. And part of me wondered if he meant me too. What are you doing here, you aren’t official. You built this yourself. As if being self made was a flaw instead of a method.
A few weeks ago, during a studio visit, an artist told me she never went to art school because she could not imagine waiting for permission to start. The next day another artist said he would have been lost without the structure of a degree program. Two sentences, opposite reasons, same hunger to find a workable orbit.
Artists arrive through many doors. Some choose art school for the structure, conversation and deadlines. Others skip it because they cannot spare the years, or the money, or because they work better without someone steering their process. And self-taught does not mean working alone. Many build communities, teach each other or grow inside scenes that shape them more deeply than any syllabus. These choices are rarely about right or wrong. They are about circumstance, personality, access, timing. When artists talk about their paths, it is not regret that surfaces, but the ongoing desire to understand what supports their work and keeps it alive.
And when you zoom out, you see the truth.
Everyone is self-taught.
Even the trained ones.
Because at some point the professor leaves the room and it is you and the work and the silence.
Art careers are messy, brave and occasionally absurd, no matter where you learn. But there is beauty in that chaos. And maybe the real path is simply the one you can afford, emotionally and otherwise.
I am trying. We all are.
Dominique’s Lost in Translation.
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