If Paintings Could Speak: What We Call Talent

“Painting became my way of understanding the worlds we carry inside us.”

Working on Emerald Green led me to question what we call talent and whether it is something we are born with or something we build through work, patience, and devotion.

Opening Reflections

Whenever somebody tells me that I am talented, I never quite know how to respond.

Not because I disagree with the compliment, but because when I look back at my own journey, talent is not what I see. For a very long time, I wasn’t even sure I could become an artist. I had many doubts and very little self-belief. I doubted whether I had a style, whether I had any particular gift for painting, and whether I would ever be able to create the kind of work I admired in others. Yet despite all those doubts, something kept pulling me forward. It was not confidence or certainty, but rather a quiet curiosity that encouraged me to take another step, learn one more thing, observe a little more closely, and try again. At the time those steps felt insignificant, but looking back, I realize they slowly became a path.

Some time ago, I came across a study exploring how people perceive talent and hard work. Researchers discovered that when people were presented with two individuals who had achieved the same result, they often preferred the one described as naturally talented rather than the one who had reached the same level through effort.

What fascinated me was not the result itself, but what it revealed. We seem to love the idea of talent, yet whenever somebody is called talented, they rarely think about talent at all. Instead, they remember the years behind it, the failures, the uncertainty, the countless attempts, and all those moments when giving up would have been easier than continuing.

And that made me wonder whether we sometimes misunderstand talent altogether.

Emerald Green

While working on Emerald Green, I was reading The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone, and it became one of the most inspiring books I have read in a very long time. Looking at Michelangelo’s work today, it is easy to call it talent. Yet the more I learned about his life, the more difficult it became to explain his achievements through talent alone.

Michelangelo started from humble beginnings and spent his entire life studying, learning, refining, and pushing himself further. Even when others encouraged him toward what was fashionable at the time, his heart always returned to sculpture. He became so devoted to marble that, in a way, it stopped feeling like stone and began to feel almost like clay in his hands. Looking at his sculptures today, it is difficult not to wonder how many years of study, frustration, failure, and devotion it took before something as unforgiving as marble became so responsive to his vision.

The same devotion appeared in the way he approached the human body. Long before creating the masterpieces we admire today, he spent countless nights studying anatomy under conditions that were anything but pleasant. He wanted to understand what existed beneath the surface, how the body was constructed, how muscles moved, and how life itself manifested through form.

Looking at that level of dedication, I found myself returning to the same question: when we stand in front of a masterpiece and call it talent, what exactly are we looking at?

Because what we see is the final result. What remains invisible are the years of study, uncertainty, frustration, patience, and devotion that made that result possible.

Talent in Art: The Equation

The more I create and the more I learn, the more I find myself questioning what talent actually is.

I think we often assume that when somebody is talented, things come easily to them. We look at a beautiful painting, a remarkable sculpture, or an extraordinary performance and imagine that talent somehow made the journey simpler.

For a long time, I thought patience meant simply waiting, but over time I realized that patience has much more to do with belief. Belief that you can eventually get where you want to go, even when you are not there yet. Belief that there is a path forward, even when you cannot fully see it. Without that belief, it becomes very difficult to continue.

When we look at somebody’s work, we see the answer and call it talent, yet perhaps what we are really looking at is the result of three variables coming together:

Work + Patience + Devotion = Talent

Perhaps talent is not one of the variables at all. Perhaps talent is simply the answer.

Final Thought

I still do not know exactly what talent is, and perhaps that is why the question continues to fascinate me.

What I do know is that every meaningful thing in my own life came from returning: returning to the canvas, returning to the question, and returning to the desire to understand something a little more deeply than I did the day before.

Perhaps that is why the study stayed with me for so long. We admire talent because it is the part we can see, while the years of work, patience, and devotion that made it possible often remain invisible.

Perhaps talent is not nearly as simple as we like to believe. We see the answer, but rarely the equation behind it.

“I am still learning.” — Michelangelo