"vrhorton" wrote in message
...
Well Guys and Gals, I am an "artist", per se. I am a formally trained
visual artist and have had a successful career over the last 40 years as
both a fine artist and commercial artist. Additionally I have taught art
classes for the over 18 years and have won enough ribbons to fill a trash
can (and, yes, that's exactly what happened to them)

Four things I want to offer for your consideration. First of all, artists
struggle and quite often fail . . . just like everyone . . . to create
"art".

Snip

A decade ago, I had the wonderful fortune of having my employer pay for me
to visit London. As luck would have it, we had plenty of free time to sight
see.

We spent few hours at "The National Gallery" I had the opportunity to view
some of Leonardo Da Vinci's work. IMHO it stood head and shoulders above the
most of the other displayed works of that period. I can a across what the
called a "cartoon", a charcoal sketch of one of the finished pieces. I had
an epiphony of sorts:

Great art is as much engineering as it is inspiration. What I had not
previously understood is that he did not just "pull this out of his a**"; it
was the result of numerous "studies" and "prototypes" and/or "cartoons".

Let that be a lesson to all of us "artists in (perpetual) training". It even
took Da Vinci a few stabs to "nail it".