Striving, Not Arriving: The Practice Behind Expert Performance
Image shown: Judith Leyster, Self-portrait (c. 1630). Oil on canvas, 74.6 x 65.1 cm (29.4 x 25.6 in). National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Excellence in art rarely announces itself. It does not arrive fully formed, nor does it live only in finished works. What we recognize as colloquial mastery is often just the visible edge of a much larger process shaped by repetition, revision, and sustained attention.
For a long time, art history has favored stories of talent and sudden brilliance. However, research on expertise suggests that high-level performance depends not simply on accumulated hours, but on the quality of practice: focused goals, feedback, repetition, and sustained engagement with specific problems. Seen through this lens, art history becomes not only a record of finished masterpieces but also of inquiry, revision, constraint, and persistence.
Leonardo da Vinci offers a vivid example. Several of Leonardo’s significant projects remained unfinished, including The Adoration of the Magi. Rather than merely signaling failure or abandonment, these works can also be understood as evidence of an unusually comprehensive investigative working process. In addition, his notebooks, filled with studies of anatomy, water, and mechanics, reveal an artist deeply committed to inquiry. Each insight appeared to generate further questions, hinting at an ongoing core challenge in representation: representational artists do not “copy” objective reality in any direct sense. Rather, they respond to their own perception and understanding of it. This gap, sometimes described as the A1 problem, means that effective representation depends on understanding both how we perceive the world and how viewers are likely to perceive a representation of it. In this sense, Leonardo’s repeated studies were not detours from the work; they were central to the work itself.
Michelangelo’s practice points to another dimension of excellence: endurance. Painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling required years of physical strain and sustained focus. His unfinished Prisoners sculptures push this idea further.
Figures seem to struggle out of the stone, held back by the marble itself. These works remind us that materials are not passive. They resist, and that resistance shapes the outcome. In both art and skill development, certain kinds of difficulty can become productive when they focus attention, force adjustment, and invite repeated problem-solving.
Claude Monet approached the problem from a different angle. His serial paintings, such as the Haystacks, show the same subject under shifting light and atmosphere. Working on multiple canvases at once, he tracked subtle changes across time.
They were experiments and not just simple variations. Each canvas tested how fleeting perception could be translated into stable relationships on the surface. Repetition, in this sense, becomes a tool for discovery.
Similar logic appears in the work of Anni Albers. At the Bauhaus and later at Black Mountain College, she treated weaving as a structured system. Small changes in material, tension, or spacing produced clear visual effects. Her textiles and writings are framed as a way of thinking. Each iteration becomes a test, and each result feeds the next decision.
Time also plays a quiet but decisive role. Katsushika Hokusai, now known for The Great Wave, believed that he only began to understand his craft late in life. He changed his name many times, marking shifts in his development. His view aligns with what we now know about expertise. Skills build gradually, often over decades. Early success matters less than continued engagement.
Not all artists receive recognition during their lifetime. Some face structural barriers that shape their path. Sofonisba Anguissola, working in the Renaissance, received unusually serious training for a woman of her time, but she was still excluded from many forms of formal artistic education available to male artists, especially life drawing and large-scale public commissions. She turned to what was available, painting intimate portraits of family and court life with remarkable sensitivity.
Judith Leyster achieved success in her time but was later overlooked when her work was attributed to others. [Her work is our title image, Judith Leyster, “Self-Portrait” (featured image), c.1630, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.]
Hilma af Klint created a large body of abstract work, much of which was kept from public exhibition for decades after her death. In each case, the process continued regardless of visibility. Recognition arrived later. However, the discipline behind the work was always present.
Excellence is not always individual. It can also be collective and cumulative. The Alhambra in Spain was shaped by generations of artisans working within shared systems of geometry and design.
These structures evolved over time, generation after generation, refined through practice rather than tied to a single author. Antoni Gaudí’s Sagrada Família, one of the world’s most famous unfinished churches, continues this idea. Begun in the nineteenth century and still under construction, it reflects an ongoing process that extends beyond one lifetime.
Across these examples, a pattern becomes clear. Excellence is an activity. It lives in the repeated attempt, the adjustment, reflection, evaluation, and the willingness to continue. Finished work absolutely matters, but it is only part of the story. Beneath them lies a robust and complex record of decisions, revisions, and sustained effort. For artists today, this perspective offers something both practical and encouraging. It grows from steady engagement with the work itself, not from some sudden, mystical inspiration. What you do, day after day, shapes what becomes possible.
Excellence, in the end, is often grounded in what you don’t see.
Brief Biography of Artists Mentioned
Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519)
Leonardo da Vinci, born in 1452 in Vinci, Republic of Florence, trained in Andrea del Verrocchio’s workshop but quickly moved beyond conventional artistic boundaries into wide-ranging scientific inquiry. A lesser-known dimension of his practice is the extent to which his notebooks, written in characteristic mirror script, function as experimental spaces. They contained observations on anatomy, hydraulics, and mechanics intersecting with pictorial problems. His repeated unfinished projects have often been interpreted not simply as negligence, but as part of a restless, investigative working method, as each resolved passage opened onto further investigation. These incomplete projects, like the notebooks themselves, reveal a mode of thinking in which art is inseparable from an ongoing, open-ended process of discovery.
Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564)
Michelangelo, born in 1475 in Caprese in the Republic of Florence, trained within the Florentine artistic milieu yet distinguished himself through an acute sensitivity to the physical and conceptual demands of his materials. The Sistine Chapel ceiling (1508–12), executed under conditions of prolonged bodily strain, exemplifies a practice grounded in endurance as both discipline and method. This engagement with difficulty finds a more explicit articulation in the unfinished Prisoners sculptures (c. 1513–34), where figures appear to emerge incompletely from the marble block. Rather than evidencing abandonment, these works foreground the resistant agency of stone itself, suggesting a sculptural process defined by negotiation rather than imposition. Across painting and sculpture, Michelangelo’s oeuvre reveals an understanding of artistic production in which constraint and resistance are generative forces, integral to the realization of form.
Claude Monet (1840–1926)
Claude Monet, born in Paris in 1840 and raised in Le Havre, developed his sensitivity to atmosphere early through caricature drawing and coastal observation rather than formal academic training. His Haystacks series (1890–91), painted in the fields near Giverny, exemplifies his practice of working on multiple canvases at once, as he tracked fleeting shifts of light across the same humble forms. Monet’s agricultural motif transformed into a sustained optical inquiry. In the 1880s, Monet also cultivated his garden at Giverny as a controlled environment for such investigations, effectively constructing the conditions that would allow serial works like the Haystacks to emerge as studies in time, perception, and repetition.
Anni Albers (1899–1994)
Anni Albers, born Annelise Fleischmann in Berlin in 1899, entered the Bauhaus in 1922 and was steered into the weaving workshop, where she transformed a marginal discipline into a site of rigorous modernist experimentation. A lesser-known aspect of her practice is her technical collaboration with industry, particularly in developing sound-absorbing and light-reflective textiles that blurred the boundary between craft and architectural function. After emigrating to the United States in 1933, she and Josef Albers joined Black Mountain College, where her teaching helped reframe weaving as a language of structure rather than decoration. Her writings, especially On Weaving (1965), articulate a rare theoretical position in which textile practice becomes a primary mode of thinking about material, perception, and the logic of form.
Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849)
Katsushika Hokusai, born in Edo (now Tokyo) in 1760, sustained an unusually long and restless career marked by frequent changes of artistic name, each signaling a shift in style or ambition. In his own retrospective assessment, much of his earlier work fell short of his aims, a view he expressed even after the success of Under the Wave off Kanagawa (c. 1831), part of the series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji. His late writings suggest a deeply iterative philosophy, claiming that only his advanced age did he begin to approach a true understanding of form and nature. This sense of continual revision reframes the iconic print not as an isolated achievement, but as the product of decades of disciplined experimentation across formats, subjects, and techniques.
Sofonisba Anguissola (c. 1532–1625)
Sofonisba Anguissola, born around 1532 in Cremona, Lombardy, emerged as one of the first internationally recognized female painters of the Renaissance, receiving an unusually humanist education encouraged by her father. A lesser-known aspect of her career is her long tenure at the Spanish court, where she served not only as a portraitist but also as a companion and informal instructor to Queen Elisabeth of Valois, shaping courtly image-making from within. Unlike many of her male contemporaries, she did not pursue large-scale religious commissions. Instead, developing an intimate style of portraiture attentive to gesture and psychological nuance. Late in life, she continued to advise younger artists, including Anthony van Dyck, extending her influence well beyond her own production.
Judith Leyster (1609–1660)
Judith Leyster, born in Haarlem, the Netherlands, in 1609, was one of the few women admitted to the city’s painters’ guild, achieving professional recognition in a competitive Dutch Golden Age market. A lesser-known detail is her documented legal dispute with Frans Hals’s workshop over a pupil who had defected to her studio, evidence of her active role as a master with her own apprentices. Despite this success, her work was later misattributed, often to Hals or to her husband, Jan Miense Molenaer. This contributed to her long posthumous obscurity until her rediscovery in the late nineteenth century. Her career, though relatively brief after her marriage, reflects both the possibilities and constraints that women navigating authorship and attribution faced in early modern artistic practice.
Hilma af Klint (1862–1944)
Hilma af Klint, born in 1862 in Stockholm, was academically trained at the Royal Academy yet pursued a parallel, largely private practice shaped by spiritualist beliefs and séances. She claimed that paintings were guided by external, non-physical intelligence, which she meticulously documented in notebooks. Her series The Ten Largest (1907), including No. 1-Childhood, No. 3-Youth, and No. 5-Adulthood, translates stages of life into sweeping, color-saturated abstractions, predating more widely recognized developments in non-objective painting. af Klint stipulated that much of her work remain unseen for decades after her death, contributing to her delayed recognition and the ongoing reassessment of abstraction’s origins.
Alhambra (principally 13th–14th centuries, with later additions) & Shah Mosque, Isfahan (1611–c. 1630s, later additions)
The Alhambra in Granada and the Shah Mosque (Masjid-i Shah) in Isfahan exemplify architectural traditions in which authorship is dispersed across generations of artisans rather than centered on a single named artist. A lesser emphasized aspect of both sites is their reliance on highly sophisticated geometric systems of modular grids, proportional ratios, and tessellations. These allowed designs to be extended, repaired, and refined over time without disrupting their internal logic. Workshops transmitted this knowledge through practice as much as theory, enabling continuity even amid political or dynastic change. The resulting surfaces, whether Nasrid stucco or Safavid tilework, embody a cumulative precision in which excellence is not asserted by signature but sustained through disciplined, intergenerational care.
Antoni Gaudí (1852–1926)
Antoni Gaudí, born in 1852 in Spain, developed a highly individual architectural language shaped as much by close observation of natural forms as by his training in Barcelona. Less widely emphasized is his use of weighted string models and inverted catenary arches to calculate complex structural systems, allowing gravity itself to “design” the load-bearing logic later realized in stone. His work on the Sagrada Família, begun in 1883, became increasingly ascetic in its later years, as he lived on-site and devoted himself almost exclusively to the project. Left incomplete at his death in 1926, the basilica continues to evolve through successive interpretations, embodying Gaudí’s fusion of geometry, devotion, and an unusually open-ended architectural process.
Resources:
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Kemp, Martin. Leonardo da Vinci: The Marvelous Works of Nature and Man. Oxford University Press, 2006.
Wallace, William E. Michelangelo: The Artist, the Man, and His Times. Cambridge University Press, 2010.
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Albers, Anni. On Weaving. Princeton University Press, 1965.
Nochlin, Linda. “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” ARTnews, 1971.
Chadwick, Whitney. Women, Art, and Society. Thames & Hudson, 2020.
Varnedoe, Kirk. A Fine Disregard: What Makes Modern Art Modern. Abrams, 1990.
Honour, Hugh, and John Fleming. A World History of Art. Laurence King Publishing, 2009.
Bailey, Martin. The Hay Wain and Monet’s Haystacks. National Gallery Publications, 2009.
Droste, Magdalena. Bauhaus 1919–1933. Taschen, 2002.
Lowenthal, Anne W. The Paintings of Judith Leyster. Doornspijk, 1989.
Mueller-Westermann, Iris. Hilma af Klint: A Pioneer of Abstraction. Moderna Museet, 2013.
Cognitive Science & Expertise Research
Ericsson, K. Anders, et al. The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance. Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Ericsson, K. Anders, and Robert Pool. Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016.
Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.
Rock, Irvin. The Logic of Perception. MIT Press, 1983.
Gregory, Richard L. Eye and Brain: The Psychology of Seeing. Princeton University Press, 1997.
Perception and Art Training
Waichulis, Anthony. “The A1 Problem: Perceptual Mediation in Representation.”
