Knowing the rules is not the same thing as having formal training.<p>With then-innovated art like Cubism, which in some sense broke earlier rules, the point is that those artists, like Picasso, were <i>able</i> to do representative art in correct proportions -- they were just going beyond that.<p>This is a nontrivial issue, because there are always students who think they can skip learning boring mundane old fashioned art and go straight to something like cubism, but in 99% of cases that doesn&#x27;t work well at all compared with learning &quot;the rules&quot; first.<p>With writing, many great writers have broken &quot;the rules&quot; with punctuation, spelling, grammar, etc. But the important thing is that they do so <i>on</i> <i>purpose</i>.<p>Whereas if one doesn&#x27;t know the rules in the first place, one doesn&#x27;t have the choice of whether to follow them or break them.<p>Such a person will always break those rules they don&#x27;t know (subconscious knowledge counts btw) -- but not for aesthetic reasons, only out of ignorance.