Word: self-taught
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Porter was largely self-taught. From the time he found his feet as an artist -- around the mid-1950s -- he stayed away from Manhattan, preferring to paint in Southampton and on Great Spruce Head Island in Maine, which his family owned. This didn't put him out of contact with "the scene." Porter was an exceptionally gifted critic who, in Art News and the Nation, produced some of the most lucid and cant-free essays on modern art in general, and Willem de Kooning's work in particular, ever penned by an American. But he knew his own mind...
...support his art. Then, separated from his first wife (he has had three, and four children), he loaded a few books, a gun and a sleeping bag into his Ford convertible and set off to visit every wildlife refuge in the country; by the time he was 32, this self-taught naturalist had produced the definitive guide Wildlife in America. Already, too, he was showing that he needed a lot of space, and wilderness, and clean water. His early novel Raditzer is an almost allegorical tale of a restless, artistically minded son of wealth -- Charlie Stark -- who goes...
Lincoln was largely self-taught in the area of books and literature. But in politics he underwent a long, hard schooling from his peers, and he graduated magna sine laude from that bruising course. Opponents would later exaggerate his crudity; but as a man on the frontier who neither drank whiskey nor smoked cigars, he used his disarming gifts as a storyteller in ways that later Americans have preferred not to remember. Today it might be called a character issue that Lincoln told racist and obscene stories to make a point among his none too delicate peers...
...recent survey found that eight hours was about average, and that a large part of the training consists of the mechanics of shooting rather than preparation for the real-life situations guards are likely to encounter. The survey also found that 40% of armed guards claim to be self-taught in the use of their weapons...
...fascinated by 18th century accounts of Aleutian kayakers, who were said to have sustained speeds of 10 knots on the open ocean in their 15-ft. to 30-ft. craft, defying the apparent limits imposed by the length of the boat and human endurance. For two decades, Dyson, a self-taught boatbuilder, has worked to rediscover the technological secrets of these fabled vessels, or baidarkas, as Russian colonists called them...