What Even is 'Good at Art'?

Was Michelangelo good at art? Most people would probably say yes.

What about Joan Mitchell? I believe many people would hesitate.

How about Millais?

Or Monet?

... Matisse?

Even if we agree they are all 'good', it becomes immediately clear that they are not good in the same way.

Michelangelo pursued anatomical mastery and the structural logic of the body while Mitchell’s work is rooted in gesture, movement, and the physical encounter with paint.

Millais worked toward precision, observation, and an almost forensic level of finish; Monet becomes increasingly preoccupied with light, atmosphere, and the instability of perception itself; Matisse reduces and reorganises form in order to privilege colour or line. They are all moving in different directions.

And yet many of us continue to hold a surprisingly narrow internal criterion: ‘'is it realistic?'

Part of this is cultural. Within schooling, realism is legible. It can be assessed, compared, and praised with relative ease. The child who can draw 'properly' is identified early, and the ‘good at art’ label tends to stick. Over time, accuracy becomes conflated with ability.

But there is also a developmental dimension to this.

In art education theory, it has long been observed that individuals tend to orient themselves along a spectrum between what the theorist Victor Lowenfeld termed the ‘visual’ and the ‘haptic’.

At the visual end, the artist is primarily concerned with how things appear. Observation, proportion, spatial relationships, tonal structure, and likeness take precedence. The external world provides both the subject and the organising logic.

At the haptic end, the emphasis tends toward sensation and experience. Touch, movement, rhythm, material, colour, and emotional intensity are central. The work is less about describing the world and more about registering a felt encounter with it.

This is not a binary classification but a continuum and most people move along it but often with a clear leaning.

As a child, I leaned strongly toward the visual end of the spectrum and was praised early for my realistic drawings. I fitted, quite neatly, within the prescribed category of 'good at art.'

And so drawing became the thing I could rely on, and I held onto it accordingly. A pencil offered control, clarity, and a direct route to accuracy. Paint, by contrast, eluded me - it moved, spread, slipped out of line. It introduced variables that were harder to regulate and therefore harder to reconcile with a naturalistic aim. To be honest with you, it scared me.

Then - at the point Lowenfeld would describe as the 'Pseudo-naturalistic stage' of art development , when awareness of realism and technical limitation intensifies - my practice was interrupted altogether. I gave up art in favour of A-levels I had little interest in pursuing.

When I eventually returned to art later in life and decided to learn to paint, I realised something surprising: psychologically, I had never moved beyond that 'Pseudo-naturalistic' stage - I was still frightened to experiment. Frightened of losing realism. Frightened that if I loosened up, simplified, abstracted, or became expressive, people might think I simply wasn’t ‘good at art’. In other words, I still carried the adolescent belief that realism was proof of legitimacy.

But as I became attuned to paint and was able to make it behave with the same descriptive accuracy as pencil, I relaxed - and with that, slowly but surely, the defensiveness fell away. Freed from the requirement to demonstrate competence, I could begin to engage with the medium on its own terms. Paint became less a vehicle for imitation and more a substance with its own properties and possibilities. I became interested in how it could be layered, interrupted, smudged, smeared, or sanded back. How a surface might be constructed and then partially dismantled. How an image could hold two registers at once: the illusion of form and the visible trace of its making.

This did not represent a departure from a visual orientation - observation, structure, and likeness remain central to my work - but alongside them sits a second line of enquiry: how to sustain the material presence of the painting itself; how to allow the viewer to oscillate between reading the image and recognising the surface, the marks, the revisions, the decisions embedded within it. That shift, from control to engagement with the material, was where my work became more 'me'. In a sense, I had relinquished being 'good at art' and found my place on the spectrum.

So, if you are someone returning to art, please know that some people come alive through careful observation and realism while others find their way through abstract colour, expressive marks, collage, texture, simplification, pattern, or abstraction. And some people - like me - will end up integrating both to find their voice.

None of this is better or worse - it is simply be closer to the way they were always oriented to make art in the first place.

So now let’s get back to our famous artists. If you compare a Michelangelo to a Mitchell and ask which one is 'good at art', I hope now that the question starts to collapse quite quickly.

And, crucially - when it comes to yourself - a more interesting question than “am I good at art?” might be:

“What is my artistic orientation?”

And after that:

“And what kind of artist will I become when I accept myself and allow myself to explore?”