Zed A. Shaw, Painter

When someone would email me saying my art sucks I'd send them my very best drawing and say, "Yeah, can you do better than that?" They'd send me back something with flaws, but ALSO rip into my drawing with a critique. "It seems timid. Looks amateurish." Etc.

Problem is, I wasn't sending them a drawing I did. I was sending them a drawing from one my teachers who is WAY more accomplished and better at drawing than both of us. The *belief* that it was my drawing--a programmer's--made them see it as full of flaws. There's more.

Another test I'd do is use some form of cheating to do the drawing. My favorite is a camera lucida, which gets it about as perfect as you could, or copy a photo. I know for a *fact* the drawing is dead accurate because science. But, I'd send that to the "experts" and...

"This is the wrong perspective. That tree over there can't possibly be that tall. There's no way you'd see two light sources like that." Nope, can't tell perspective on trees and it's through a fucking perfect lens on a $10k camera brosniff. Did you forget there's clouds?

The final experiment was that I'd just take a photo and put it through one of those photo->painting algorithms and *still* they'd find "errors" because I'm a programmer. Meanwhile, they'd send me paintings full of errors, or gush endlessly over other artists full or "errors".

I'd also notice that if I didn't tell a teacher I was a programmer they treated me better. One teacher learned I was a programmer about 1/2 through, then at the end of the class told me I should stop doing art. Problem was, at the beginning he was showing my work to the class.

The gist of it is, these art teachers were treating me much the same way a lot of douchebags in STEM treat women. Their belief was that it was impossible for a programmer to learn to paint because I didn't have a "natural talent", which is similar to genetic predisposition.

All it takes is a decent training method and turns out painting isn't that hard. Just need to learn a few concepts and practice them like anything else out there. The real reason people are unable to learn it is all of the teaching and training assumes they can already do it.

And, that teacher's predisposed beliefs *that* you will suck are easily confirmed because they're the teachers and have control. I sucked at drawing because I was told to draw 100 spheres months while other people went right on to cast drawing. Anyone would fail at that.

This is one of the reasons why I advocate completely open and fully planned and complete curriculum with facilitators over teachers acting as gate keepers. A static course can't suddenly change to weed out undesirables and then be different for the chosen ones.

A static course can be analyzed and any discrimination and bias is exposed easily and removed. A racist or sexist teacher just gets to keep being racist or sexist until they die of tenure.