Can anyone become a great artist? I found out, the hard way

I’ve always hated the phrase, “Of course you can draw! Everyone can!” It’s been directed back to me (or spat back in my face) for years by artist friends, but the honest truth is that I can barely draw a stick figure. As my career as a junior art critic progresses, I’ve decided it’s high time I put this to bed. I’d hate to be a “hypocritic”, joining the slew of art reviewers who have never physically touched a canvas – perhaps stepping into the paint-splattered shoes of the artist will help me understand their world, even just a little.

So, to see if drawing really is an innate ability we all possess, I gave myself 30 days to become a fledgling portrait artist without any outside help (videos, guides, classes, etc.) – hopefully, in the process, to develop some semblance of personal style. You can learn to do most things by banging your head against a wall – I mean, that’s how I taught myself to write. At the end of those 30 days, I subjected myself to a sit down with an esteemed critic, letting him rip into my final (and hopefully best) drawing to test if I had improved at all.

Anticipating just how bad my first drawings would be, I decided the safest option was to begin with a self-portrait (I wasn’t prepared to inflict that on anyone else). I had put it off all day (being an avid reader of harsh art criticism has given me an ingrained fear of ever having to show my work) and it was getting late. So lit by candlelight and set up in front of my ornate gold mirror, I grabbed a blunt pencil and the first piece of paper I could find, and got to work.

It’s probably not what you were expecting given the enchanting ambience I’d created for myself. I’d maybe be identifiable as a police sketch in a lineup full of people that don’t look at all like me, if that counts for anything. Regardless, I signed it. In the event that it does one day sell for millions, it will at least save the authenticator a headache.

Clearly, I had my work cut out. I’d set the task of a portrait a day, meaning there were only 29 attempts left until my work met its judgement day. All I could do was draw, draw, draw. And I did. I brought my little sketchpad everywhere with me, to the pub, to the club, in bed with a cup of tea. Soon it was time to turn the focus on my friends.

“I look like a neanderthal?”, “Why have I got the chin of an 8th-century peasant?”, “Do I really look like ET?” were some of the (justified) responses to my efforts. I was overthinking everything and getting absolutely nowhere; I was simply incapable of drawing. My artist friends (whose work was undoubtedly better than mine) advised me to let loose, relax and draw without thinking. And of course, I turned to my go-to zone-out haven: Instagram reels.

I challenged myself to scroll my feed and draw whoever I saw for as long as the video was – if it was a ten-second video, I had ten seconds to capture their essence. I got a slew of ‘schizo-gram’ posts – Lidl devil conspiracy theories, dodgy men offering tequila roses – and honestly, these may have been the subjects for my most interesting work. There was something about not having time to hesitate and just letting my pencil flow that gave my drawing more character. I also drew inspiration from George Cayford, an artist I interviewed last year for this very publication, and his ability to life-draw so effortlessly, without stalling – though mine is obviously a little lower brow. I felt the lack of features added charm to my work; one particular image of a boy looking startled in a nightclub bore resemblance to a Yoshitomo Nara piece, I fancied.

A week had flown by. Newly confident and taking myself a little more seriously, it was time for an upgrade. My last time in an art shop was probably aged 12 to buy Crayolas, so the Cass Art I had trekked to was overwhelming, not to mention expensive. I’ve always heard about the bank-breaking cost of art supplies but have luckily never had to relate, so it felt like a rite of passage on my artistic journey. I left after much performative perusing with a £20 set of colouring pencils and the vague hope that one day I would sell enough art to get a return on my investment.

Works by David Rappeneau and Pascal Sender taunted my attempts with colour – how could they so simply blend the rainbow, so bold yet so unified? The mustard-soaked lip I gave my friend in an attempt to bring out his blond facial hair lacked the same charm. I was in awe of their mastery, and now flicked through their illustrations with a genuine disbelief I’d only really held for paintings in The National Gallery before.

I swiftly returned to the comfort of graphite. I was fed up with my vain attempts at realism, so caricature became my saviour. With a more absurd style, it didn’t matter if my subjects looked like they’d been in an accident; it was just ‘my style’. Up until now, I had only drawn my friends, and would shower them in compliments to make up for my poor efforts; I felt so much more comfortable drawing characters I didn’t care to flatter (e.g. Tommy Robinson).

As the days rolled on, my drawing became a little stuck, but there was something to my subpar style. 4Chan, the anonymous image-sharing board (like Reddit, but for more… explicit material), has a culture surrounding ‘wojaks’ (an internet meme depicting a rudimentary, black-outlined cartoon drawing of a bald man). It’s their extreme simplicity that makes them such effective caricatures. Whether I liked it or not, I realised I had been ‘wojakifying’ my friends for the past month. My complete lack of depth and stark features brought out something uncanny (apologies to the victims). I suppose you could call that ‘style’.

Either way, my time was up, and my final attempt loomed – this was to be the piece I’d be putting up for review by a critic. I rubbed out, drew, and rubbed out again until it was perfect. Sketching in ways I never had before, I was desperate to prove myself, to draw something that just looked like me.

It was certainly a technical improvement on my first work, and I was proud. But if I were to ever seriously sympathise with my fellow artists, I couldn’t mark my own homework, I would have to go under the knife alongside them. Obviously, I didn’t study art, so had never experienced the gut-excavating ordeal that is The Crit. It was a necessary step in my journey to become an artist.

I nervously brought out my shoddy sketchbooks to Thomas McMullan, writer and art critic for Frieze, ArtReview, and the like – I was in for it. Looking at them side by side, he laughed: “It’s like you’ve gone on a journey from a gym hunk to an anime boy”.

He latched onto and praised everything I had been so frustrated about for the past month. “There’s a sad inquisitiveness about your eyes in your first piece, there’s a heft to it. I feel you’re in a gym, mournfully looking up at a piece of exercise equipment that someone else has taken”. My supposed magnum opus I had drawn the night before lacked that depth. “It’s technically better, but there’s just more drama in the first one. It’s almost like a mannequin – it’s not alive”.

He even held more charm for my brief foray into colour in it, having abandoned it to the scrapheap so quickly. “It makes the face look more weathered, exaggerating the expression with colour. It just helps add that little bit more texture, they’re a little bit more lived in”.

Thomas isn’t an artist, yet, as a critic, his writing gets to the heart of a piece. “I don’t think you need to be a painter to review painting, a sculptor to review sculpture”.

I’m not sure my month of amateur sketching qualifies me to review a Rembrandt piece any better than before, but I’ll certainly be less likely to shoot someone’s art down for being just “bad”. And I’ll pass on Thomas’ advice for other aspiring artists who may be reading: “Generally, you should cultivate a way of seeing a painting that appreciates what’s gone into it, meeting a work on its terms. If you’re gonna be nitpicky about technique without real knowledge of the craft, that’s where it gets tricky.”

Leaving Thomas with the gift of one of my drawings (much to his amusement), I wondered if my work had lost its style in my pursuit of “perfection”. My final drawing, which just one night ago I was so proud of, suddenly looked very at home in a GCSE art classroom, doing everything “right” but lacking purpose.

I suppose that proves my friends right, though – everyone can draw. The things that I hated most about my art were the most charming: the wonky lips, the upturned noses, the sad eyes; there’s definitely something to my drawings, even if they’re not the most flattering. I still draw in the way that everyone who can’t does, telling myself nose here, eyes here, but maybe embracing that looseness, slipping back into my true wonkiness will get me further. Hey, it worked for Picasso, Bacon, Freud – why can’t it work for me?