Talent matters. I have been a artist since I was a small child and my illustrations have graced books, brocures, etc., over the years. Yet that is just a side job for me. My daughter, now 20, is natural born artist too, and I never taught her how to draw, I just showed her how the play of light and shadow is the key part of an illustration or painting. She is in college now and her work draws gasps of awe and wonder from her art teacher and fellow students. I should mention that as a little girl, she spent hours and hours, sitting at the kitchen table drawing while her friends were out playing.
When I was a child, I spent my time finding samples to examine under a microscope, observing interesting specimens, or reading anything scientific that I could get my hands on. I played around with math--by the age of 11, I had figured out aspects of calculus that I didn't learn formally until I took calculus in college.
It's all a matter of having one part of the brain more developed than another part, I'm sure. Whether that manifests as academic intelligence or as artistic talent is a matter of which part of the brain happens to be more developed.