Definitely, but people don't get good at drawing without spending hours at it.
You may be stuck at a local maximum, and it may take a good or different coach to get you around it, but generally you can always improve.
But just trying harder is ineffective. You have to diagnose your problem, and how to fix it. Maybe you need a coach.
I remember having to "invent" all kinds of ways of looking at my drawings to get better. To get them to the next level. After a while you can't look at them objectively ... so you look at them in a mirror. You squint, to get a better sense of the balance. Upside down. You get the idea. It's problem solving.
I think of drawing as learning to see.
I took every elective I could in school, and would have taken more if AP and college prep classes weren't a priority for my parents. I used how-to books, and I still look up techniques from time to time. I've had lots and lots of practice: I went for years drawing and painting daily. That was probably my biggest increase in quality. I used to wish for art school.
My current liking is doing surrealist and visionary art in watercolor and ink: I've currently 3 canvases waiting on acrylic.
And through it all, I truly think it is a combination of talent plus practice plus interest/focus in some form. Most folks with enough practice can make beautiful landscapes and still life pictures, just like folks can learn to take a basic excellent picture most times. Everyone can learn basics.
Not everyone can bend their minds in ways to incorporate subdued symbolism in surrealist work - not everyone can look at a canvas in that way. Some of the really great photography is because the person thought to take the picture - not everyone does that in that way. Not everyone can create. That is where the talent bit comes in.
However, if art didn't interest me, I very much doubt I would have filled my time with it to get better.
I think this works similarly for math and other things, for the majority of us.
My observations from a year of drafting in high school (Future engineers need to be able to make and read blueprints was a fad a couple decades ago) and work with people in the field, there are people who can do three dimensional transforms and manipulations in their head with little effort beyond the mere mechanics of pencil on paper (or fingers on CAD workstation). There are also those who cannot visualize complex shapes in three dimensions. Just like you can't verbally tell people to train harder to grow taller it does not appear possible to learn how to visualize. I've observed those who can't visualize have all kinds of interesting coping mechanisms ranging from simply asking for help to leaving the field entirely to really elaborate memorized heuristics. Either you can, or cannot, visualize a basic transmission for a crane complete with which direction the gears rotate. No amount of staring at a blank sheet of paper will help, and practice does not help those people who can't and merely wastes the time of those who can.
Apparently you can train creativity and style, but the mental act of three dimensional visualization is either functional or absent.
So you're saying she did have a single-minded focus on school?
Considering she wanted to be an artist and mostly did that on the side, school was a net loss of time. It's one thing to scrape a C and doodle in all your classes, it's another to find time to draw on the side in the middle of a hectic schedule. Getting a 5 in AP calculus is hard for most people who want to use it, for someone who has little interest in math that's a huge time investment.
AKA if you do one thing well then you can argue it's a time investment, when you do everything well that takes something more.
>has an IMDB page
is a funny metric for success.
It's a surprisingly brutal world. She got into CalArts which has a 27.5% acceptance rate and the application takes a lot of time, so I suspect they scare off a lot of people.
But I failed the other criteria in the article, inventions (even if I invented a certain computer-game-as-artform category in the 90ies), PhD, scientific success, ...
Yes, it's a funny metric. And even if e.g. Cannes states that you can attend the festival if you are on IMDB, they never let me in. (Nowadays I wouldn't want to either because of politics) So it's inconsistent also.
Anyone in SAG can have an IMDB page. I know this because I have a child who has one after doing some trivial commercial and short film work...it really isn't a high bar, sorry.
Yea, it's not curing cancer. But, I know a lot more failed artists than successful ones.
People can always add an arbitrary benchmark. But, having reached a major and difficult life goal at mid twenty is further than the vast majority of people out there.
So yes she worked hard really really hard. But, those hours where simply worth more than other peoples.
In the end the nature vs. nurture debate is silly as it takes both to succeed. The minimums simply increase as you go up the scale. There are a few short people in the NBA, but nobody is below 5' tall. The top women are vastly better than the average man, but the classic men's vs women's sports has a core basis in biology.
*Shorthand for wanted to work for Disney as a kid, now has actual movie credits and words for Disney. That's about as concrete a form of success as you get for such a subjective field.