ALL ARTISTS LIE TO IMPRESS. And the whole "talent vs. ability" is a meaningless debate because of that fact.

It's not just in the work itself that artists lie, they lie about their talent, they lie about their skill. They lie to win an influence of some kind. Every artist you'll meet, if you talk with them long enough, will deliberately mislead you in someway. I think part of the reasons why is because they want to have that mystery of being an artist for themselves.

We give artists, or people who do art extremely well, a strange reverence. We have a tendency to see them as mystics because so much of the effect from their work is in a sense a magical experience for us. We can't always distinguish why or how exactly a work appeals to us, we just know from looking at it that it does. It's one of the things that makes art so mysterious and so alluring.

And artists know this. So they play along. They'll act like they flicked out a work to get you to believe it's uniquely innate. "Oh this thing? I was just messing around." Or they'll give you a time duration to shock you with. "Yeah, I did this in a minute five." And then there is the already mentioned "My first drawing ever!" remarks. In all cases like these it's usually the artist fibbing to make you believe that the art naturally flows out of them with little to no effort at all. They lie about their talent.

And then there are the artists who exaggerate about the efforts put into the art. They'll tell you that they put in thousands of hours of strenuous practice to get where they are now, when actually it was just a few tutorials or classes and some lonely moments doodling away. They'll lament about the mental and physical duress they suffered through, when actually it was just a few hiccups along they way. Or they'll just talk in a way that makes it all look like it was an impossible feat that couldn't have been done without some extraordinary commitment and fortitude. It's no different than the talented artists bragging.

Artist do these sort of things to impress us. Many people don't know a lot about what goes into making art. For a great deal of people there isn't a need. You don't need to know how a work is made to appreciate it, you just do it looking at the art. And even when you do know how art is made artists will still obfuscate somehow, as if they have some kind of secret knowledge they used.

Telling you about the common drudgery or unspectacular circumstances kills the magic and the mystery. It takes the fun out of it. It dulls the aura the art surrounds them with. And so the artists lie about having talent, they lie about their ability. Maybe it's out of embarrassment, maybe it's because they genuinely don't know and luck plays a bigger role then they like to admit. Or maybe they want a certain type of respect for their efforts. Who knows? Artists lie.