Art & Creativity Quote by John Hench

Restlessness is the engine in John Hench's remark, and it lands with the quiet bite of an artist realizing the institution can only take him so far. He starts with the earnest credential - "fine artist painter" - then swerves into something more pragmatic and, frankly, more modern: not just making images, but understanding how images move information through people. That's a shift from art as personal expression to art as a communications technology. In one breath, he reframes painting as a system with inputs (symbols, composition, color) and outputs (emotion, comprehension, behavior).

The subtext is a polite indictment of art-school orthodoxy. "I was not getting very far" isn't self-pity; it's a measured way of saying his professors couldn't (or wouldn't) teach what he was actually hungry for: visual literacy, audience psychology, the mechanics of clarity. Hench is describing a mismatch between an academy that often prizes individual style, critique-room mystique, and inherited taste, and a student chasing the harder question: why an image works on strangers.

Context matters because Hench's career would unfold where that question is king: mass culture, animation, theme-park design - fields that treat visual decisions as consequential, not merely expressive. His frustration reads less like rebellion against craft and more like impatience with art education's tendency to treat "communication" as something suspiciously commercial. He isn't abandoning art; he's asking it to be accountable to its effects.