A series of famous visual artists, like Leonardo da Vinci, Paul Klee, or Maurits C. Escher, are said to have been left handers, and examples like these have contributed to the popular belief that left handedness was associated with a special artistic talent. Besides this anecdotal evidence, the somewhat limited scientific literature provides, at best, modest evidence in support of this claim. So, to investigate the postulated association, we conducted an observational study on the social media platform “Instagram” examining the hand preference of visual artists who share video clips (“reels”) of their artistic activities. We found that roughly 9% of the artists showed a left-hand preference, which is (statistically) comparable to the 10-11% expected for the general population. Also, the such identified left-handed artists did not attract more “likes” or “followers” than their right-handed counterparts. In summary, we do not find any indication that left handers are more talented for visual artistic activities.
Visual artists are not more often left handers
