You’ve heard it before: Good artists imitate; great artists steal. Well, guess what? It’s still true.
And we still don’t know who actually said it. The phrase has been attributed to Steve Jobs (who misattributed it to Pablo Picasso), and also to Lionel Trilling, Igor Stravinsky, T.S. Eliot, and William Faulkner (Oh, and the less well-known English man of letters W.H. Davenport Adams, who seems to have come up with at least the idea, though not the phrase itself, while writing for The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1892).
And here’s the startlingly unremarkable truth: “You don’t have to look like your heroes, you want to see like your heroes,” writes Austin Kleon in his book, Steal Like an Artist published in 2012. Like the luminaries above quoted (or misquoted), Kleon doesn’t mean ‘steal’ as in plagiarize or blatantly rip off — he means study, give nods to, recontextualize, remix, mash up, and transform. The whole game is to take what you find and combine it in new ways to say something that feels honest and true to who YOU are as a person.
And here’s how to do it:
- Start painting. Take (steal) any bits and pieces of technique and concept that amaze you from the art you encounter – ideally from artists both living and historical.
- As you get better, forbid yourself to reproduce (ie. Do not copy, imitate, do the same thing as) the work of any of those artists (or any others you’ve seen). Keep painting.
- Learn as much technique as you can, gravitating to the teachers whose work you resonate with the most and which seems to point toward or match up with something you feel intuitively might be important for you as an original artist.
- Keep looking, thinking, and painting and allow the little bits of things you’ve learned and stolen to come together and combine in new ways in paintings that you feel passionate about creating because they feel like yours.
Karen Knutson, “Love Conquers All,” acrylic on paper
Scientific discoveries work the same way –scientists constantly review, share, combine and recombine other scientists’ work to create new insights, theories, and discoveries. Copying a painting, by the way, isn’t imitation in this sense – it’s how artists learn – always has been, always will.
Creative work builds on what came before, and so in a sense there is nothing new under the sun. Except you: No one has the same creative DNA – the same combination of memories, dreams, doubts, fears, skillsets, secret freak superpowers and fantasizes. THAT’S what you draw upon to be “original.” A big part of becoming an artist is finding out and learning to accept who you are. As Kleon says, “You don’t need to be a genius, you just need to be yourself.”
The art we admire, the masters who seem gifted by the fickle gods – none of this stuff happens in a vacuum. None of it, that is, except the truly bad “experimental” art made by bearded art students in leather pants consciously trying to be completely original (and ending up derivative of something they didn’t understand in the first place). Rather than trying to be totally original, great artists consciously work within the traditions and cultural context they share with all. To get there, as Matisse wisely advised, don’t imitate the results, imitate the impulse behind them.
It’s a mindset as much as anything else. Somebody once said writers should be reading constantly – even if it’s just the text on a ketchup bottle or a box of cereal at breakfast. Put yourself in the path of lots of what you like and even lots of what you don’t –everything is fair game for creativity.
Karen Knutson, Family Farm, Acrylic on Strathmore Aquarius II watercolor paper, 22″ x 30″
Don’t forget to register for Acrylic Live!
It’s three days of professional-level instruction in acrylic painting, and this is the very first soon-to-be annual event. Billed as “The Only Place To See 24+ Of The World’s Top Artists Teach Their Signature Techniques & Styles!” it will run March 26-28, 2025. Check out the premium faculty here.
Splashing Into Acrylics
Rick Delanty, “The Colors of Music,” acrylic on linen, 24 x 36 inches.
Rick Delanty paints luscious florals, landscapes, and still lifes with acrylics, oils, and watercolors. He’s got a magic touch with acrylics in particular, achieving with polymer paint the looseness, thickness, and even something of the luster and “juiciness” one generally associates with oils.
Rick will demonstrate his process during “Acrylic Live,” ( March 26-28, 2025. Check it out here.)
Delanty painted “Sunflowers, Sunlight of Ukraine,” above, after war broke out in the region.
“Not long after Russia invaded Ukraine, I painted this still life (“Sunflowers, Sunlight of Ukraine,” above) from photo reference, featuring Ukraine’s national flower,” says Delanty. “Acrylics have the capacity to be applied thickly, as with oils, or thinly, as with watercolors. One can see both viscosities in this piece, thick in the florals and thin in the shadows on the table. When I paint intuitively like this, I am better able to achieve flowing strokes, and more unusual mark-making. This piece was awarded “Best Acrylic” in the 12th Annual Plein Air Salon competition.
