I know what you mean, and I've sometimes questioned whether my skill is actually creativity. As I said before, I graduated with honours in visual arts, so I must have done something right in their eyes.
In life drawing and painting the primary emphasis was on being able to accurately record the subject with the correct scale, etc. Then the individual stylistic elements could come into it. When we were required to quickly sketch a painting (30 seconds) the idea was to record an impression of the subject; even if the style was rushed, messy, odd colours, the subject needed to be recognisable within the work. So this makes me think that analytical and spatial skills are still vital in visual arts, at least.What you said also raises some other points... If you consider art throughout history you'll see there were many stylistic periods. Before Impressionism the accepted styles were always realistic. One of the hallmarks of the Renaissance period was the new use of perspective, which added a much more realistic appearance. Before the Renaissance the styles were more "primitive" but still were focussed on accurately portraying a subject, be it a religious subject or a portrait. The original ideas were in the composition of the work.
It wasn't really until the twentieth century that individuality or originality seemed to become much more important. Now there is pressure to be unique.
Remember that the way you do things is your personal style.
It doesn't need to be showy. And it is no less skilled and no less interesting.Do you know that Bowie mural that was on the news when he died? The guy who painted it, Jimmy C, has developed his own unique style of painting, a type of spray paint/aerosol pointillism. I went to uni with him and when we did our painting major together, he was already heavily into painting with aerosols rather than a brush. He just kept playing with it until he found something that worked for him. But he also had to do the regular life painting with a brush...
Another guy in our painting classes was really into abstract painting and I don't think I ever saw him do what could be called an "accurate" painting. It was always abstract, like cubist and so on. I don't know how he got on with the lecturers...I can't remember
. It was 20 years ago, haha.You'll find that most famous artists started out with "realistic" styles and experimented until they found their own style. But that doesn't mean it's necessary to express yourself in a fancy way... My way was to be super realistic, and that is ok.
If you do want to experiment, spend some time doing that. Be messy, try different media. Try to do a self portrait a day. Nobody will see it, so no need to stress about it being "good" or accurate. The task is to make marks on your paper and play around with how to move your body or implement in order to make them. You could set a timer, say five minutes, and stand in front of the mirror and sketch away until the timer goes off. Feel free to throw everything you make out as soon as you've made it if you don't want to keep it. All you want to do is free yourself up. You might find a new form of expressive mark making that you didn't know was in you. I hope this makes sense.
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