Last night, I rewatched the movie “Crumb” about famed countercultural artist Robert Crumb and his family. It really is a fascinating study of dysfunctional people and their relationships, as well as a look at how subversive art is viewed by different factions of society.

But I was mainly struck by one thing. Robert and his two siblings, Charles and Max, were all highly gifted artists from a young age. Robert’s son is also a terrific representational artist. Robert’s daughter Sofie – a pre-teen at the time the movie was filmed – is also a great artist. It seems like the Crumb family makes a strong case for there being some kind of “visual artist gene.”

Such a theory leads us back into the whole nature versus nature debate. Are the Crumbs’ artistic talents because of DNA or because of an environment that encouraged artistic development? The case might be made that Robert’s children were simply encouraged to explore art. But Robert and his brothers grew up in an environment run by a tyrannical father and a pill popping mother, neither of whom seemed to have much interest in their children’s development.

But how would an art gene work? That’s very complex of course, but I do think a lot of what makes a good artist is a strong understand of spacial relativism. In essence, if you can look at a face and understand that that person’s nose takes up 20% of the width of their face and you can then render that on the page you have a good head start towards creating representational art. (There’s also years of practice, of course, but this natural talent can only help.) If this sort of spatial ability can be passed via genetics that would explain the Crumb family talent.

An interesting experiment would be to take one of the Crumbs, grind up their brain into a liquid, inject it into a non-talented person and see if that person becomes and artistic genius.

I had actually forgotten that Robert’s brother, Maxon, is an artist. In fact, he does some very interesting work – he’s the most non-representational out of all the artist brothers; his work is vaguely cubist. Here’s a Tumblr blog with a lot of his art.

Here’s Sophie’s Tumblr with art.