I'm sorry that your love of art was suppressed so soon. However, the bright side is that you may be earning a higher life style as a non-artist. And the really bright side of it, for FR, is all the wonderful insights you share here.
Sometimes I think that those who really have something new to say will keep saying it, regardless of whether anyone is "listening" (or "looking"). (And I have to think that it will be in a personal and somewhat abstracted style, since realism has been done ad infinitum. But maybe I'll be proven wrong; my prejudice is toward abstraction, although it is more difficult to understand.)
This may be a reason not to have quite so many grants; do they just help lazy artists who wouldn't otherwise make it?
By the way, this first Station of the Cross is quite large, something like 3' x 4' (although I don't have the exact measurements here), not just 8 1/2" x 11".
Realism has been done and is being done, true, but it's still not accepted back into the mainstream of the "art culture". Realism only exists in the art fringes, posters, tattoos, album covers...that's what my goal was anyways, but noone gives out grants and endowments for album covers. My bias is against abstract because of what the instructor said to me, although I can still appreciate some artistic value and creativity of some of it.
Incidentally, the instructor had a piece in the gallery on campus... it was a 6"x 10" x4" wooden box painted white and given a title based in chinese mysticism if this helps to further elaborate my disgust for the instructor and his "art."
The biggest problem in the art world as I see it is this, there aren't enough "talented" artists and too many "B.S." artists.