Back in the day, artists mixed their own paints. They bought minerals, ground them up, and mixed them with binder. Then in the 1800s, metal paint tubes became a thing, and people bought smooth, bright paint in tubes.
Do they still teach mixing your own pigments in art school? Maybe, in one class. I took one class in Assembler when studying Computer Science. That gave me some useful perspective and some vocabulary, but the baby computer designs we looked at were nothing like the computers we use.
I’m betting that art schools don’t return to pigment-grinding for months out of every year of school. There are new styles to learn, higher-level methods of expression that build on top of paint tubes.
Why do my kids spend months out of every year learning to do arithmetic by hand? They could be learning set theory, new ways of thinking that come from higher-level math.
Why are they learning cursive instead of coding? We can express ourselves at higher levels through computers.
Human culture advances through products. Paint in a tube is a product that lets artists focus on painting. It lets them work in new locations and at new speeds. Monet and the other Impressionists painted as they did because they could finally paint outside, thanks to tubes of paint!
I don’t want new computer programmers to learn the basics the way I had to learn them. They don’t need to program in C, except maybe one class for perspective, to learn the vocabulary of memory overflow. Learn queueing theory, that’s a useful way of thinking. Don’t implement a bunch of queues, except as extra credit.
Some artists still mix their own pigments.
Viewing a painting produced entirely with hand-ground mineral pigments is a completely different experience than looking at one made with modern chemical paints. The minerals scintillate and their vibrations seem to extend from the canvas.
Laura Santi
We need a few specialists to implement data structure libraries and programming languages. There are contests for mental arithmetic, if you enjoy that game. Calligraphy is a great hobby. When I sit down to learn, I want to learn new ways to think.
When younger people skip the underpinnings and learn higher-level concepts, that’s called progress.