I think everybody starts out by seeing a few works of art and wanting to do something like them. You want to understand what you see, what is there, and you try to make a picture out of it. Later you realize that you can't represent reality at all - that what you make represents nothing but itself, and therefore is itself reality.
Gerhard Richter, Dietmar Elger, Hans-Ulrich Obrist (2009). “Gerhard Richter: writings 1961-2007”, Distributed Art Pub Inc