art school

It took me a long time to reconcile with the fact that I had to drop out of art school due to financial reasons. I moved out on my own at 17 and had to pay my own rent so in art school it often came down to me buying a tube of paint or going hungry. I was also scraping by supporting myself at 17 by making glass carvings so I reluctantly decided art school had to go. I used to go insane when I would see kids filling up their bin in the art store with 60o dollars worth of paints and 100 dollar brushes while I could barely afford to feed myself. I spent a lot of years burning with the fires of resentment that I had to put up with all that "shit" while they would go back to their nice dorm rooms or the parent's jersey mansions. I also felt I had to make up for what I lost in those years in any way I could. In retrospect, I can see that I would not have chose it any other way in life. As an artist, one can always learn more technique, you can always learn some slick new painterly tricks-- but you can never make up for a lack of having lived or a burning fire in the belly. I cannot count the number of artists I know that hide behind the wonderful "system" and technique they learned in four years of art school but never learned that art is about life and living and surviving and that art based solely on technique and devoid of life and soul has a stench that even the untrained masses can smell when the wind blows the right way. I did not mean this to be a "rant" but rather an "observation."