Can Artistic Vision be learned simply by exposing one's self to it, or must it be formally taught and studied?

If it had to be formally taught and studied, how would it have ever come about in the first place?

I think it’s primarily a gift that can be honed by study and practise.

Good answer @SavoirFaire. Perhaps by accident? Like when a Potato Chip looks like Abraham Lincoln… no AV required because it’s so obvious? And in that discovery, it is analyzed and taught? I dunno.

GA @downtide. I guess what I’m asking is if it is something which is discovered or created.

In my experience, it’s something you’re born with but, as @downtide says, it has to be discovered – then honed through study and practice.

Either you can see things differently or you can’t. I believe lots of people can, but never pursue “art” (for a variety of reasons), relligate it to a hobby, or don’t realize how much work (and time) is involved in cultivating it.

I studied art and design for nine years, practiced for seventeen (and counting), and taught it to college students for going on eleven years. Just so ya know where my opinion comes from.

Gadzooks, that was some good art. I don’t think you can teach artistic vision or interpretation like that easily, if at all. When I was a kid, I had an art game with fellow students as they would squiggle a line on a piece of paper and I would see if I could create something of it. They were amazed at what I can see in a squiggled line that they could not see, like the nomads on camels on the crack in the curb, not many would see that I would guess, or fallen trees as giant rustic pencils, even I never imagined that. A lot of that art took an alternate sense of creativity and seeing things as being different then they physically was, or a thought provoking concept. It would be very hard to instill that into someone if they don’t already have that leaning, if you ask me.

Artistic vision is one aspect of creativity. Like any other talent there are some who seem born with a gift for it and others who need to be, not so much taught, as exposed to, a way of seeing and thinking. I think if you are motivated to express something you find a way to express it. How well you express it has to do with your innate or learned talent as well as technical skill in execution..

Artistic vision has elements of brainstorming and free association. The greater your awareness of your surroundings and openness to new ideas, the greater will be the creativity unleashed. Awareness is the raw material. Everything you see, hear, taste, smell, and touch, everything you experience, can be revised, expanded, turned inside out and upside down, combined with other things, edited, stripped, recolored, resized, etc, etc, ad infinitum.

Sometimes the idea is conscious, that is, you are focusing on trying to create or invent something new or focused on observing what’s there. Other times it just hits you in a flash of inspiration. For example, the artist who did the tree log colored pencils on the Street Art Utopia website may have seen a bunch of sticks tossed on the ground and it reminded him of pencils. He took that as the nucleus of the vision and turned it around in his head and played with it until he came up with something that satisfied him. Or he may have had a commission to do a large outdoor installation and whatever his feelings and thoughts prompted him to create could have been a conglomerate of textures and colors he was drawn to at the time. It could have been a theme that interested him.

Proportion, texture , color, and good composition can be learned. They have to do with aesthetic values and principles. Vision can be nurtured and enhanced. A more sensitive way of seeing can be learned. But some of it has to come from what is inside of you and the kind of person that you are. In a certain way it is your personality made visible. It has to come from what you are drawn to. It has to do with being fully present, seeing, hearing and absorbing. It has to do with first having the awareness and then being sensitive to it’s deeper associations and meaning whether it be it’s humor, or the beauty and poignance of it’s utter randomness as in found art, or surrealistic juxtapositions. It can even be the beauty in it’s utter ugliness, which then is no longer ugly!!

That Street Art is Awesome. I think that Artistic Vision is something you’re born with, but something has to trigger its expression. Formal study can be a barrier to artistic vision.