A Letter to a Young Artist Who Thinks They’re Not Good Enough

How to Silence Doubt, Reject Rules, and Own the Messy Truth of Your Art.

Dear Steve of the year 1999,

Mr Ravenscroft told you, “Steven, you can’t draw large scale,” and you believed him. You dropped out of his class. I know you’re hurting a lot, and really, all you wanted was just one other person to say, “You can do this, Steven.” But you didn’t have the courage to seek it out. You reacted. You felt rejected. You told him to fuck off, whether in your head or out loud, that’s what came up.

Your problem is that you compare yourself to others too much. In your mind, everyone’s art was better than yours, which isn’t true at all. Art is subjective anyway, and you always had a raw energy about you. Forget the polished dorks who could draw perfectly; they lacked any kind of soul and were more focused on getting A* grades. What art are they creating in 2025? None, I tell you. I digress.

I want to share some lessons I’ve learned with art, to reassure you that it’s going to be okay. I say ‘lessons’ loosely:

• Art isn’t about mastering every brushstroke or chasing perfection.

• It’s about screaming your truth when no one’s listening.

• It’s about raw, messy emotion, not some pretty decoration on a wall.

• So, take that frustration, that rage, that chaos inside you, and turn it into art nobody can ignore.

• Skill comes later. Expression is the whole point.

• You don’t have to study art at university to become a professional artist.

• Art is a valid career.

• Art is a valid career.

• Art is a valid career, but it’s not like any other career. There are no rules.

Because art isn’t about rules, it’s about breaking them.

So don’t wait for permission from anyone else.
You don’t need a certificate, a degree, or some expert’s stamp of approval.

All you need is the guts to make your truth loud enough to be heard, no matter how messy or imperfect it gets.

Because that chaos inside you? That’s where the real art lives.

Own it. Create it. Don’t stop until the world feels it.

The good news is, 20 years later, in 2019, you are reborn as SLART. You take all of these life lessons and transmute them into powerful art, and it becomes your modus operandi. You have great systems in place to sell your art, and you do it full time. You have a fantastic studio, a daughter who looks up to you, and a wife who is your rock. You have a dedicated following who believe in you, but mostly, you believe in yourself. You get out of your own way, and you become powerful beyond measure.

I want this burned into your brain: naivety in art is a superpower. History is full of artists who wasted years and fortunes… studying formally, only to tear it all down and start over.

Fucking pointless, isn't it? But they seemingly had to learn the hard way; you don’t have to.

Here they are, imbibe them deep into your brain:

1. Louise Bourgeois learned proper drawing at the Sorbonne and the École des Beaux-Arts but soon tossed the neatness aside, channelling childhood fears into giant bronze spiders and stitched-up fabric figures that feel like dreams you can’t shake.

2. Tracey Emin polished her skills at the Royal College of Art, then ditched the gloss; now she shouts her feelings through messy sketches, scrawled confessions, and installations that read like a teenage diary cracked wide open.

3. Paula Rego trained at Slade, only to abandon straight realism in favour of dark fairy-tale scenes with twisted bodies, mixing the wonder of bedtime stories with the sting of nightmares.

4. Rose Wylie also passed through the RCA, but her late-blooming success comes from clunky, flattened, cartoon-bright paintings that celebrate the carefree scribbles most of us leave behind in childhood.

5. Niki de Saint Phalle had only brief formal lessons and mostly taught herself, throwing off restraint to build huge, candy-colored “Nana” sculptures that bounce with feminist joy and playground energy.

6. Jean-Michel Basquiat tried Pratt Institute before dropping out and turning street smarts into studio magic: fast, fiery canvases loaded with graffiti marks, symbols, and urgent poetry.

7. Cy Twombly, fresh from Black Mountain College, let go of tidy composition to cover vast canvases in restless loops and chalky scribbles, like a kid drawing on walls, or an ancient scribe leaving secrets.

8. Philip Guston studied at Otis, spent years in cool abstraction, then scrapped it all to paint lumpy pink cartoons: hooded figures, worn shoes, and cigarette butts rendered with raw, awkward honesty.

9. Paul Klee’s Munich training gave him the rules, but he preferred play, turning childlike lines, bright blocks of colour, and whimsical forms into tiny, dream-lit worlds.

10. Georg Baselitz learned realist painting in Dresden, yet rebelled by flipping his figures upside down and laying on thick paint like a defiant kid questioning every grown-up rule.

One for good luck…

“It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.”
Pablo Picasso

Are you hearing me, Steven?

Being an artist isn't something you do. It's something you are, deep in your bones, from the moment you took your first breath. Own it.

Best wishes,

SLART