Deligitimizing art

I've been involved in a prior learning credit program at the university for some time now. Not too long ago, it occurred to me that I could get credit for my painting skills, so I began to look into the program. Upon reading the guidelines, however, I noted these fatal words:

Artworks painted or drawn from photographs will not be considered in the portfolio.

Huh? Okay, so do they mean a painting can't be done via a trace/project method? Do they mean that it cannot be done if the composition is the same in the frame? Do they mean a photo cannot be used in any way at all? Where is the line?

Today I got an email back from the school with details. The bottom line is, almost any use of a photograph disqualifies the image from consideration. Now I understand the idea of knowing how to do things by hand. This makes perfect sense, you learn manual before you learn the shortcuts.

But I'll also be up front with you right now. My paintings are painted from photographs. Period. Why shouldn't they be? I'd be nuts not to. I compose for paintings with my camera, which is no different, not one iota different than the likes of Renaissance masters such as Vermeer using a camera obscura. Artists for centuries, perhaps millennia have been building frames of sticks and string to compose with. Any method that gets me closer to the end results I want, so long as I am doing the work is no less legitimate than someone who wants to do it all from scratch. In fact, lets take it back further the other way. How come drawings made on machine-made paper and with machined pencils is legitimate? Shouldn't we have to make our own pencils too? Or use only charcoal? Preferably charcoal from a tree we grew ourselves, from seed, cut down ourselves, processed ourselves into charcoal, and drew with on paper made from the same tree by our own hands?

Artists have used mechanical aids for as long as mankind could create them. Hell, the brush is a mechanical aid -- without it we would be finger painting. But apparently the fact that I do makes me an illegitimate artist, someone who belongs in the same category as the velvet-painters and the paint-by-numbers kit buyers.

Someday I'll look back and laugh at this. I was painting since almost as far back as I could stand, and I'll be painting until the day I die. I daresay in the time to come I'll see more, not less, public exposure, but even if I never had a gallery show, even if I never publish or sell another work again, there'll be more artistry in me taking a shit than in all the work produced by the stuck up fanatics and small men of Acadamia.

Morons.