“You Are an Amateur”, What One Ugly Comment Reveals About How We Talk to Artists

By Udemma Chukwuma 

A public exchange over Opeyemi Matthew Olukotun's painting titled Deep Thought reignites the debate over artistic intuition, criticism, and whether every creative decision deserves an explanation.

There's a particular kind of comment every artist eventually receives, technically dressed as feedback, but really a demand for justification. And when the honest answer is simply "because I liked it that way," the response can escalate fast. Just ask the Nigerian-born, Canada-based painter Opeyemi Matthew Olukotun, who recently found himself at the centre of exactly that kind of exchange after sharing one of his paintings online.

The work in question is Deep Thought, a large-scale acrylic portrait measuring 60 by 48 inches and completed in 2025. It depicts a young woman seated on a worn, richly textured couch, dressed in a polka-dot top with her gaze lowered in quiet contemplation. Built with warm ochres and browns layered in expressive, visible brushstrokes, the painting favours mood and presence over photographic precision, particularly in the treatment of the sitter's arms and hands, which are rendered more as suggestion than strict anatomy.

That artistic decision became the flashpoint. A fellow artist criticised the treatment of the arms, questioning the technique and asking for a conceptual explanation. Olukotun's response was brief and unbothered. "Thanks for your input. I love it like that." Rather than ending the discussion, the reply intensified it. The commenter shot back that "Real artists don't paint what they like... just because. We try to paint the truth as we know it. You are an amateur and will be for a long time." Other artists soon entered the conversation, describing the remarks as being in "poor taste" and "passive aggressively combative," while defending Olukotun's right to make his own artistic decisions.

It's a small but revealing moment, one that raises a much bigger question: who gets to decide when an artist's confidence in their own choices stops being intuition and starts being a problem?

It's worth sitting with how unusual the underlying demand really is. Nobody asks musicians to defend every chord change with a thesis statement. Nobody expects poets to footnote every line break. Yet visual artists are often expected to justify every brushstroke, every omission and every departure from convention, as though creative decisions require permission before they can be accepted.

In a follow-up reflection, Olukotun addressed the exchange directly, writing that he did not believe every brushstroke needed a symbolic explanation because "some decisions come from years of looking, painting, failing, learning and trusting intuition." He was not describing carelessness but an artistic process shaped by years of observation, experimentation and experience, one in which instinct becomes part of the creative practice and not every decision begins as an intellectual argument.

There is an important distinction between constructive critique and demanding narrative justification. Saying the proportions feel off or that the colour temperature weakens the mood opens a conversation about technique and composition. Serious artists often welcome those discussions because they engage directly with the work. Declaring someone "an amateur," however, because they decline to explain a creative decision moves beyond critique. It becomes a judgement about legitimacy rather than an assessment of the painting itself.

Olukotun later summed up his philosophy in a simple sentence, writing that "Art is a conversation, not a formula." A formula has a correct answer and rewards conformity. A conversation allows for disagreement, interpretation and difference. Viewers are free to question a painting, just as artists are free to reject a suggestion without surrendering ownership of their work.

The instinct to ask artists "why" often comes from genuine curiosity, and that curiosity deserves a place in conversations about art. But somewhere between curiosity and confrontation, questions can become demands, and disagreement can become dismissal. When an artist is expected to defend every brushstroke, or risk being labelled an amateur, the conversation shifts away from the artwork and becomes a contest over authority.

Art has always existed in the space between intention and interpretation. Not every viewer will agree with an artist's choices, and not every artist will accept a critic's advice. What matters is that criticism remains a dialogue rather than a declaration of who does or does not deserve to be called an artist. In that light, Olukotun's simple response, "I love it like that," may be the most powerful statement in the entire exchange, not because it ended the debate, but because it reaffirmed an artist's right to trust his own creative instincts.