>>5825907See
>>5828118We have very few people who are capable of teaching because we have very few people who are capable of executing works of art to the degree where they can extract the fundamentals to teach. Read that again. This is why we more or less fawn over the artists who know what they are doing. They are so few.
A commercial artist may know enough to get away with good enough work. Many do. It's evident when someone is on "autopilot" mode of working. Portfolios are full of such work.
There is this amusing/misguided idea that because we have all the knowledge, books, scanned details and Science! of today that we should somehow be able to surpass the Old Masters and stand on their shoulders, so to speak. "We have 3D anatomical scans and they had to dig up corpses!", /ic/ says. But this is not how intelligence and competence works. Not then, not now.
Old Masters did not wrap it up for the day, take photos, and go back to their studios to finish the painting from photos the next day. Yes, they did studies. They had models. But take a look at any of their great works and you'll see what is effectively executed entirely by eye. Any thing they had that could be called a "reference" was a study done by eyes alone. These masters possessed memory and ability to arrange what they saw and to turn it into pictures that they existed at the very far right end of the human intelligence spectrum.
We know now thanks to Science! that memory correlates strongly with intelligence. Yes, my dear reader, old masters were incredibly gifted in more than one way. Raphael's works are a testament to pure intellectual genius and not so much to drawing/painting ability.
So it's great we have so many schools and people willing to teach, and willing to learn, but I think most are simply not cut out for it, and those that are, would rather get paid for their works than teach the talentless what they won't be able to pass on themselves.
