[camoufleur]

Are you saying that painters become proficient (even great?) from copying from life? I don't understand what you mean here. I don't believe there has ever been an artist that hasn't been influenced by art, discussed art, and personally known other artists.

[tourmalinetaco]

Art is innate to us as humans. Cave men drew on walls independently across the world. Children make the entire world their canvas. How is it some impossibility that great self-taught artists exiet, independent of others? Especially given the hundreds of thousands of years of human history? The billions of lives, trillions of human hours lived. You can say definitively that there has never been a singular artist born into a family of non-artists, who mastered their craft without any foreknowledge of those before him?

Besides the general absurdity of your claim, how are you surprised that an artist can become great solely by drawing from the world around them? That’s how almost every single artist becomes great. It’s literally one of the most basic forms of practice.