from a man born without fingers!

This young man, Desmond Blair, is a really talented painter, by any standards, but amazingly he was born without fingers. And yet most of us assume, simply because we didn’t succeed wildly at our first faltering attempts, that we can’t paint. What … we expected to be able to do it without some practice? And when it didn’t happen, we just gave up? What kind of attitude is that!?

The truth is we’ve got all the equipment we need – we’ve got hands, and fingers. That’s it – that’s all you need! We can draw and sketch and we can improve our skills with practice. Even accomplished artists had to study all the various aspects of art to become skilled at it. Hardly anyone, without some tutoring and practice, has a thorough understanding of proportion, and perspective, and the subtleties of hue and colour, and the delicate nuances of light and shade. These things take time. They take patience. They can be improved and developed.

We’ve all got to learn

Yet we just give up! I can’t paint … I can’t draw … my stick figures don’t even look like sticks … I’m hopeless … With that kind of self-talk is it any wonder we lose confidence in our abilities? And so we go through life with yet another avenue of self expression completely closed off to us. And, please note, nobody has barred the way. We ourselves make the choice. We make the decision not to go there, never to venture down that perilous path that might (shock horror!!) mean that we might, just possibly, create something less than perfect. Oh, the shame!

Yet, this man, this ‘disabled’ man, approaches the whole thing differently. He’s not concerned with what others might think. He doesn’t worry that his art might not live up to someone else’s expectations or standards. He just paints! He just gets on with it, and expresses himself through his art (which, when he began, I’m assuming, didn’t produce anything particularly noteworthy). Yeah, he just gets on with it, and revels in the opportunity to express himself through art.

Awesome skills that took time to develop

His skill truly is awesome. Now, it’s awesome … I’m pretty sure it wasn’t so impressive when he started, but the thing is, he started anyway. He didn’t care! He didn’t listen to that little voice in his head that was trying to convince him his efforts were less than perfect … failures, in fact. He didn’t listen and he didn’t care to listen. He ignored that voice, and shut it down forever. And he just got on with what he was doing … what he loved to do.

We can all learn so much from this young man, me included. I was quite talented as an artist when I was younger. But I listened to that voice, that poisonous whisper, that was pointing out all the mistakes I made and all the imperfections I created. I listened, and like a fool I took it all in. It made me virtually ashamed of my lack of skill and my inability to create something perfect. So I did the unthinkable. I gave up! I stopped trying.

Here I am, a lover of art, and I never pick up a pencil to do a sketch. Instead of developing a good habit, sketching daily for a half hour or so, I developed a bad one … of doing a sketch every once in a while and immediately seeing only its imperfections. And then putting the pencils away, feeling miserable at once again having failed to create something virtually perfect.

You can learn to be artistic

If this rings any bells with you, do yourself a favour: learn from it! Give it another go. Do a bit of sketching from time to time and see if your talent grows. And don’t just do it on your own, learn from a master; take a look at this amazing site, a really good art site run by Kirk Bjorndahl, a professional artist who has drawn about ten thousand portraits. He can take you, step by step, through the whole range of skills needed to produce artwork you’ll be proud of.

It’s a terrific site, and stuffed to the brim with detailed instruction on every conceivable aspect of drawing. Go on, believe in yourself for a while … give it a shot! I’m willing to bet that if you stick with it for just a half hour a day for a week or two you’ll be drawing things with a skill you really didn’t believe possible.

I know you can do it. I believe in you. Do you?