Every time someone asks where I studied I feel a small familiar flinch.
Nowhere. I studied nowhere. I taught myself at a kitchen table with a beginner's brush set and a very patient sheet of paper. For a long time I apologised for that. I no longer do.
Formal training gives you real and valuable things — structure, vocabulary, foundational technique and connections. I do not dismiss any of that. But it also takes something away. The permission to be wrong. The freedom to develop strange habits that turn out to be your style. The blissful ignorance of rules you might have followed too carefully if you had known them earlier.
What self-teaching forces you to develop instead is something no classroom reliably produces. Resourcefulness. Genuine curiosity. The habit of looking closely at work you admire and asking not just what it is but how it was made and why it works. These skills only come from necessity. And necessity is one of the most powerful teachers there is.
Here is the thing nobody says out loud. Some of the most distinctive artistic voices working today are self-taught. Not despite their lack of formal training. Because of it. Their work does not look like it came from a curriculum. It looks like it came from a specific person with a specific way of seeing the world. That specificity is the thing that makes art worth looking at. It cannot be taught. It can only be lived.
If you have been waiting to begin until you have taken a class or found a teacher or felt qualified enough — stop waiting. Begin now with what you have and what you know. The gap you are trying to fill with preparation can only be filled with practice.
The practice is the education.
It always has been.
