Art: The good and the bad/ugly

Yay, looks like another one of my favorites has a permanent home now too. CattyN seems to go through vicious mood swings and has a short fuse sometimes, but his work is always creative, pleasantly cartoony, and pretty varied when you step back and look at it as a whole. I'm glad he's got a stable place to show off his formidable talents.

CattyN's success reminds me inversely of another artist, who shall remain nameless. I rarely point out bad artists in the community because I truly feel that anybody who wants to contribute should be encouraged to do so; if their work needs improvement, they can only get better with practice, right? That's what I thought, but there's one particular artist who has officially proven me wrong.

This person is sort of CattyN's evil twin in that all the things I like about CattyN's work are the exact opposite with this person. Their work is rarely creative (there's no depth to what they draw, no approaching the subject from multiple angles the way so many other artists in our community do), unpleasantly cartoony (doesn't matter which cartoon they're borrowing characters from, all the pictures look rather crappy), and never, ever varied (characters are always drawn in the same pose).

When this person discusses their work, they quite honestly sound mentally challenged. They certainly were when they tried to have a conversation with me, which really was more of a non-constructive accusation by them about my work. I replied only by suggesting how this person could grow as an artist based on patterns and tendencies I'd noticed, and what they could try in order to shake themselves out of their established habits. They didn't/couldn't/wouldn't understand my point. Why change, why try to improve? The DeviantArt hit counter speaks for itself, right?

So we've got someone who isn't good at drawing, isn't good at writing, isn't so hot on the offering or the comprehension of constructive criticism, and might be retarded. And the only reason this personally bothers me is that I'm afraid this person is somehow going to represent the fetish to the outside world someday, and when the world one day finally finds out we exist, we will all be assumed to be mongoloids.