To directly answer the question: absolutely yes, though it is not a popular theory nowadays. Whether this is an act of the subconscious, unconscious or is hard

To directly answer the question: absolutely yes, though it is not a popular theory nowadays. Whether this is an act of the subconscious, unconscious or is hard to know, but certainly it can frequently manifest unintentionally. From my experience as an art teacher of many years: - The student with only one arm who painted figures with only one arm. She did not realize she was doing this and was amazed when it was pointed out. - The student with only one eye who painted wide panoramas. He had absolutely no interest in landscape as a genre, but it all came together for him when he understood his paintings as devices for evoking the binocular vision he had lost. - The obsessive rugby player who painted groups of men arranged in scrum form. Even their heads looked like rugby balls. The worst thing that can happen for an artist is that this process can become intentional. A good example of this is the paintings of the Surrealist painter Max Ernst whose obsession with painting birds was self-attributed to his sister being born at the same time as his pet bird dying. His paintings can be difficult to enjoy without knowing this mythology. TFA mentions how a painters depiction of faces tend to be similar to their own face. Certainly true.