Especially not "back in the day". Extremely few people back then could have the free time and money to learn how to paint by practicing, no? Were they born into servants or something and spent their entire lives learning how to draw just to be able to paint the portraits of the kings or something?

Just a couple of examples of insanely impressive paintings that aren't even among the best ones out there:

http://img134.imageshack.us/img134/8463/charlesiiiofspaindc1.jpg
http://img134.imageshack.us/img134/9841/alfonsovelmagnanimodh2.jpg

How is this even possible to create with a brush? I just don't understand it. It seems impossible to me! I can at least in theory understand most professions, but this one is just one big fucking mystery to me.

Please explain.

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Yes, I feel as though I'd have to be locked in a room for a lifetime in order to be able to paint like that. Of course, I can't paint. ;)

Seriously, though, although there was a great deal of talent involved, most of the skills necessary are indeed technical. Realistic artistic techniques (such as sculpture - what the Greeks did two thousand years ago just blows my mind) are just another one of those things that Western culture painstaking produced and then perfected. If you read about the history of art (say on Wikipedia) or take a class, you will learn how the technique developed over centuries.

Music is the same way. When you listen to the great composers, particularly of the Romantic era, it just strikes awe into you. Yet the techniques employed by those composers were the result of technical achievements made over centuries (and originating, once again, with the Greek discoveries of the mathematics of harmony).

It's sad that musicians today can't be bothered to learn beyond the absolute basics of music theory. Most modern music, even the best of it, sounds to me like painfully earnest reinventions of the wheel.

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They paint what they see, not what they think. They will look at one piece of their visual field, compare it with another, and paint the differences between the two. When you paint photo-realistic paintings, you basically try to ignore everything you know about what you're painting. All you're concerned about is form and color.

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a good excercise would be taking a picture of a landscape, and try to paint that upside down. This way a 'new image' appears, one that you haven't seen before, wich will make you more aware of subtle color differences. Also, you will paint it 'with your eyes' instead of your head: people tend to think in symbols whenever they try to draw something like a face. That also is the main reason people 'can't draw': they use their head instead of their eyes.

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