From Imitation to Innovation: A Case Study of an Amateur Artist

Imitation is a human instinct, and it is an effective way for humans to learn new things. Imitation is an effective method in the process of learning painting. With the advent of the era of national aesthetics, everyone has the opportunity to become creators. Generally speaking, they have not received professional training, so they are called “Amateur Artist”. This research takes the process of learning painting by an amateur artist with an engineering background as an example and selects 10 groups of his imitated paintings as experimental samples for questionnaire survey and analysis. A total of 322 interviewees from domestic and foreign have participated. The result shows that: (1) Although this amateur artist didn’t start learning painting until he was 70, he has quickly mastered the expression skills of painting through imitation. So that part of his work can even surpass the original. (2) The interviewees’ understanding of the “painting” does not affect their confidence and reason for judging the “original”. They rely more on their intuition to make judgments. (3) Whether the interviewees like the “original works” has little relevance to the attributes they judge they are “original works”. This research can be provided as a reference for readers who are learning painting or planning to treat painting as leisure. The author looks forward to the emergence of more and more amateur artists, forming a trend of national aesthetics.