How I Found my Own Art Style and you can Kind-of-Sort-of Find your Own Too
That meme with the old lady crying in the film Titanic as she says, “It’s been 82 years.” springs to mind in view of finally finding my own expression of art. It’s not actually been that long, but it’s been long enough. Decades is long-enough in my view, but that is my own fault though, at least in as much as anything can be blamed on someone when they don’t necessarily have a choice in what their own character is at birth or how that might unfold and play-out. There’s little you can do to stop your life’s trajectory, one way or another.
It’s the journey, not the Destination
As someone who has struggled with this whole ‘Finding your own art style/expression’ thing, I have little patience for meaningless platitudes anymore, and the above axiom made me want to slap anyone who said it. I don’t really mean I wanted to slap them, by the way… but I definitely wanted to low-growl a bit as my eyes rolled-back in my head. They are right though, of course… but wrong, but right, but wrong and right (and so on.) My meaning is, you wouldn’t even have a journey (by definition of the word) without the destination in the first place, would you? Therefore, perhaps the destination is rather more important than the above axiom might suggest it is.
However, throw me into an open world game, and it’s true… I’ll just wander about all day looking at stuff out of curiosity, and only sometimes do the missions. Surely it’s a waste to do otherwise? Life isn’t much different if you ask me, nor art for that matter. Is that a journey? Maybe.
In any case, last Summer of 2024 in August I went through an obligatory phase of GM’s on Twitter (This means saying ‘Good Morning’ in case you don’t live in that land) and then found myself hyper focused on Twitter again, scrolling and scrolling, liking, RT’ing, commenting. All “The good stuff” (that’s an air-quote) so they say in view of engagement, algo-fluffing and to (be honest) just to get some more eyes on the artwork. The problem was/is, I have no middle. I can’t multi-task, either I’m focused on one thing or another, but nothing in the middle. And if there’s a brick wall I need to bang my head against, then I might well do so, and for quite some time. If you’re that kind of person, you have to be careful about what you care about. Very careful. If nothing else, life has taught me that much.
(In view of art, I’ve learned to back off when other areas of my life are going badly due to art. And they have. Obsession sounds lovely in the movies, but it’ll not be much use to your art development if you’re dead. So I hear, anyway.)
Distractions, Distractions
Consequently, I found I was doing almost no artwork at all during that Twitter phase, and that’s bad. If you see me a lot on ‘Twittex’, you can almost be certain my art is suffering. Ironic, isn’t it? I mean, many in the Twitter Crypto-NFT-Art space seem to think that the loudest, most talkative with tens of thousands of followers must be really, really serious artists or something. They might be (and some I know of definitely are) I’m not saying they aren’t. But I generally see a lot of sizzle without the steak. What you see – or think you’re seeing – is not always what you get.
Bearing the above in mind and feeling frustrated that I wasn’t finishing any of the series that I’d already begun due to being hyper-focused on doom-scrolling, I hard-pivoted and told myself, ‘screw-it’, and threw my hands up in the air. ‘Do I do art, or the Twitter thing, and if one helps the other shouldn’t I be doing both?’ – yet whenever I did one, I didn’t do the other very well, if at all. No balance. It’s not that I dislike Twitter, it’s just that I dislike Twitter. So I just went off and read a book (Terry Pratchett, in case you’re wondering,) ate a cake, and stared out of the window a lot, sighing to myself.
I then made a decision to just to do my artwork and barely bother about the Twitter thing. In truth, I generally take a dive into Twitter once a day and like people’s posts even if I’m not posting, but at that time I decided I was just going to do my artwork. Either I’d find myself on Twitter, or I just wouldn’t, and that was just fine by me. You get tired of trying to force it, you know? But, then something happened…
Generative Project
There had been a generative project concept I’d wanted to work on for some time, the concept of which was written on a post-it note stuck on the wall that would glare accusingly at me everyday as if saying, “Don’t you love me? Why am I here when you’re ignoring me, I’m better than that ‘thing’ you’re working on now. Maybe that’s what you deserve, though.” Some of my series are quite temperamental and taciturn, as you can see, and often times sarcastic, too. To be fair, it had been there for about two years, and that’s a long time to leave anything waiting.
I’m not a natural coder, some people are. Give me a pencil, brush, canvas etc and I’m as happy as a clam. But coding just makes me want to question the meaning of life itself, and ask why does it have to be so complicated. Coding is sort of like asking the question, ‘How to get from point A to point B in the simplest and quickest way possible?’ and the answer is, ‘Raspberry jam’. At least, that’s the way my brain interprets it.
You may ask why code if I don’t particularly like to code, the answer is quite simple and is the carrot on the stick that forces me, the donkey, to follow it. It’s the amount and variety of shapes and compositional form that can then be created at the click of the ‘Go’ button spawned from your own art concept. Coding art and seeing the propagation and variety of your concept appear before you is simply orgasmic for a visual artist. There, I said it, orgasmic.
To cut a long story short (too late by now… I know) I had real trouble working out how to create the form I wanted to with code, and then I realized something. I realized that no matter if I were successful, I wouldn’t actually be able to get all the forms I wanted in the way I wanted with just code. That’s when I had what would be called ‘a light-bulb moment for stupid people ignoring the obvious’. Which was simply, “Hey idiot, can’t you just draw the elements and run them through a standard generative engine like you’ve done before?” To which I replied to myself, “You may have a point.”
Some things are so obvious that they hide right in front of you but you still can’t see them. So I got to drawing. By now you may be thinking, ‘What is this mysterious generative project’. Well, if you look in my Artist’s Statement, you’ll see one of my artistic influences sort of hanging around and looking like he’s got somewhere else better to be…
Lichtenstein, but not the Country
Roy Lichtenstein. I know, I know, ‘But he did this, and he did that, and I don’t agree with…’ etc. etc. I’ve heard it all before, and read it all before. My head knows what’s right, but my eyes and heart just simply don’t agree. I love Roy Lichtenstein’s work. Once he hit is groove, there’s literally not one single piece of his artwork that I’ve ever seen that I don’t like. Not one, and I only recently realized that, too – when what happened, happened and I tracked back and looked at page after page of his work and surprised myself.
I usually only strongly like 1-3 pieces of any artist’s work, rarely much more than that. Dali, two, Van Gough, two – but there’s probably a third of his that I can’t remember off the top of my head at the moment. Monet, one, DaVinci, none (yes I know, I have no class, etc. but I do kind of like his tank sketch.) I’m the same with music/bands and anything else. But what I do like, I love. If I really like a song, I can listen to it a thousand times and it’s like the first time, everytime.
–It’s right at this part of the article that I wrote so much unnecessary information that added 1,000 words to it, so if it seems as if it jumps a bit, then just know that I’ve really done you a favour by cutting it
I’ve experimented with other artist’s forms and sometimes subject matter – it’s a way to learn – but what I didn’t know was that I’d always avoided Lichtenstein, apart from one nude I did around the 2000’s. I’ve had to ask myself, why? I could only come up with the answer that I have a certain kind of reverence for his work, I can find no other logical reason nor feeling that tells me otherwise.
So to summarize, I was creating Ben-day dots as background for the generative project. I had found a nice quick way of creating what can of course only be called pseudo Ben-day dots via uploading a blank square of colour on a site and then changing its colour, and sizing the dots to what I felt looked good. It was a nice streamlined process that gave me what I needed and with ease of colour tone alteration. And then it happened….
Tales of the Unexpected (visuals)
Forgetting to put the settings where I’d previously had them, I uploaded my jpg of solid colour and saw it. Something so simple yet so perfect I gasped. Out loud. In that instant I knew – and yes I know this sounds ridiculous – that this was exactly what I’d been looking for, for years. It was perfect, at least for me it was.
As soon as I saw those squares and more importantly the space between them at just that right amount, I then quickly tried it behind parts of the generative form’s transparency, and it was all there. Everything aesthetically was there, and it was like the heavens opening up. I’m not being ironic. Had the settings not been exactly where they were at that moment in time, and had I not been thinking about whether the forms that were closer to the viewer in the composition needed something else instead of Ben-day dots, it would possibly never have happened. Two things intersecting at exactly the right time.
After that I just got to work and couldn’t stop. For me, everything just fit into place…
The above piece was where I realized I can combine my love of large areas of minimalist color with what I would describe as visual-texture areas using the square forms. Aesthetically, a certain kind of visual balance was achieved. To my eyes, at least. I also found an artistic leaning that I’ve developed over the years coming out of its own accord, a sort of propensity to shift dimensional planes. You can see it in the bottom line of the building.
The patterning of squares that I’ve taken to calling ‘Pillbox’, can be used as a form of substitute for texture in a digital image, for a shading area, patterning, and also when their angle is altered to extend/warp planes of sight/view.
Those of you who’ve ever visited my Cryptovoxels plot will know that I rather like The Sphinx of Egypt, and it seemed like a rather good choice of subject matter to try out with the new found aesthetic.
You can see the way I’ve played with some of the dimensional planes of the pyramids. The funny thing is, I would have thought Lichtenstein would have done the Sphinx. at least once, but no. Not that I could then find, anyway. Pyramids, yes, I’d seen those years before as prints, but The Sphinx, apparently not. Perhaps he left it undone as a riddle. There’s terrible conceptual pun in there somewhere.
After doing The Sphinx I had to ask myself what next. I then went with the whole ‘Warhol paint what you like’ angle. It was worth doing, but with a spin. A can of Chinese Coke…
With this piece and the others in the same series, if you look closely, you’ll find it’s two-dimensional, not three-dimensional, hence the word-play title of this series, ‘Flat Coke’.
Then, I looked at my messy work desk… and let’s just say all of the items are on my desk are for inspiration (it’s not really the case, it’s that I put things on the desk and never move them again) and saw one solitary, red building brick. Behind my head are many more, but this one I must have just picked up and left there. The rest became obvious to me.
It was only really by this stage that it was fully apparent to me that some form of dimensional shifting of form was what I truly wanted to work with, subject matter wise. If I look back at my digital work and on canvas past around 2007 it’s obvious. Only, it wasn’t obvious to me. I don’t know why. Something was staring me in the face again but I didn’t know it. I then sketched a whole load of ideas on A4 as quick as they came. It’s really going to take time to work through them to create the final pieces from those sketches.
And so here is an important point about finding what is your art style and subject matter: It’s already you, it’s already in you. The process of really defining it – after you’ve gotten a broad base of different media usage, techniques and style experience – the process is actually one of then getting rid of the extraneous parts of your art practice that are not you, as in, they don’t really resonate with you on a deeper level. The first question to know the answer to is simple, and that is, “Do I really like it or not, yes or no?” and the second, “Yeah, but could I paint it or something similair for the rest of my life though, and be happy about it?” The rest is just a refining process of almagamation and development that will traverse particulalr lines which are you.
You can view the process more as a sculptor chiselling away at a slab of marble until the final form is revealed, rather than adding anything. It’s not that all you’ve experienced/learned before gets wasted, it’s still there in you and the experience you’ve gotten from it can still come in useful at some point – and you will never know for sure past a certain point if it will or it won’t – or at least, that’s what I’m guessing based on my experience of doing different forms of work up until now.
When I look back over my work in relation to minimalist use of colour areas and sometimes composition, outlining, geometric forms and a lot of the subject matter leanings, then I can say it was already all there. It was just waiting for one more piece of the puzzle. It may very well be the same for you, depending what stage you are at. There is another way of looking at it, and that is the fact that it is ‘you’ that is the style and form, it was just that the lens you were viewing yourself through was kind of out of focus, even worse if you didn’t know the lens was out of focus – which most of us don’t.
You’ll meet yourself there when you arrive
How will you know when you arrive? The only thing I can tell you is, when you get there, when you arrive and at that exact moment, you’ll absolutely know it without a shadow of a doubt, it’s like everything sliding into place at a singular point in space and time within yourself and visually outside of yourself, synchronized. Anything extraneous just falls away. And I don’t mean that ‘metaphorically speaking’, I mean you will literally somehow feel it inside.
The closest analogy that I can give you to help you know and check if you have really reached that elusive beginning point of your own pure self-expression is in the question, “How do you know if you’re in love?” As anyone who’s ever been in love will tell you, ‘You just know it within every part of your being that you are’, if there’s any, “Am I, aren’t I, maybe I am.” then no, you’re not. It’s the same, it’s just like that. And if you’ve never been in love before, then yes… that wasn’t a very useful metaphor for you. Sorry about that. Go find someone to fall in love with. Then paint them. But not in the James Bond Goldfinger way.
By now you may have more understanding of why I titled this article, ‘How I found my own art style and how you can possibly-maybe-sort-of find your own too’. Aside from giving yourself a broad experiential base within art and you moving into areas of art/visuals that interest you, no one can tell you anything, and neither should they try to. If they do, you could end up in the cul-de-sac of art practice for the rest of your life, and then the world loses something it hadn’t yet gained – and so do you, for that matter. The world won’t be a better place for it. It’s annoying, I know. Of that I can assure you, I know it very well.
The journey is unfortunately(?) travelled alone, but you’ll meet fellow travellers along the way on the same journey as you that you can then get drunk with as you both bemoan your frustrations together. (I am not advocating getting drunk, eat a cake instead or have a Coke and a smile). It’s something, at least.
Coke Without a Smile
I should add here that you don’t actually ‘have to’ find your own style, no one says you have to and neither am I suggesting that you have to. It’s a personal decision you make based on ‘your’ desire to do so. Not anyone else’s. There is another school of thought that says if you just keep doing untold hours of art, that you’ll find it anyway. I can’t say that’s wrong, if anything, I think it might be correct – with the caveat that you allow changes to just naturally occur as time passes instead of rigidly maintaining a form/style due to fear of change. One way or another though, you’ll do untold hours of art, anyway.
If you do decide you want to find your own personally expression of art though, don’t ever give yourself the comfort of saying that you’ve given up, as in, that you will stop making art. By all means, throw your hands up in the air and exclaim, “I’ve no idea what I’m doing, where I’m going, nor what my style is or should be.” Because somehow, all you may have to do is…
There’s not really the possibility of the word ‘failure’ within any true artist’s lexicon, nor any connection to that word whatsoever, either. Sure, you can be failed as in you made no money, but that’s not really failure in artistic terms. Failure is just the admission of failure. So why would you ever admit to such a thing when not admitting to it still allows for the chance of success in finding your own artistic form? It’s not logical.
There is no failure as long as you keep going, there are actually only two things: success or death. There is no failure unless you say it is so. If you need to, take a break and go look at something else for a while, travel the world, or do some other creative pursuit that you may not realize at that time might finally lead you to your own true expression of art. It all matters.
But, don’t ever say to yourself that you’ve given up trying to find your own true expression of your artistic form/nature. No. Don’t ever completely let go of the discomfort inside, let it remain, let it fester if needs be, for one day – and if you keep going – you will find that it served you well, and you, it – like the grit in an oyster that forms a pearl. Discomfort… it’s part of the process, because what you’re really doing is stripping yourself down to reveal your own fundamental nature before you can express it outwards. It doesn’t sound much like a walk in the park, does it?
To go back to the beginning of this article at this end: It’s the journey that makes you, but it’s the destination that defines you – or maybe you defined, ‘it’ and your style. It’s really one of the same, you know?
How to Find Your Own Art Style in Three “Easy” Steps (…which would have been a more attractive title for this article)
1. Give yourself a broad base of experience – no matter it’s physical art or digital art – to find out what medium feels right for you. In physical art, oils, acrylics, pencil sketching, charcoal, and so on. In digital art, it might be in using different types of brushes/brush effects or a specific digital art modality, as in, animation. Just don’t make a final decision too soon before you’ve really tried almost everything. Personally, I went down both paths with the benefit that I’ve found one positively affects the other.
Draw/paint/animate different types of subject matter until you find the subject matter or themes that for whatever reason resonates with you internally. It may just be a type of concept though, which is more difficult – yet not impossible if you keep watching your choices.
They say charming landscapes sell well, but you personally find yourself enjoying to paint jelly robots. So do a jelly robot on a landscape, I don’t know, you work it out, or completely ignore landscapes altogether if you find them dull (but do try them for a while, yes do, because you may find out you’re the world’s best realist painter of stones, who knows?) Even painting something you don’t like that much – and sometimes actively hate – can really show you what you actually do like, it becomes a contrasting sign-post that points you in the opposite direction.
2. If you followed the above two steps for what might be some years – yes, years – you’ve now got your preferred medium which may by now be combined with some amount of your developing style, and you’ve also likely gotten your preferred subject matter, portraits, sci-fi scapes, pleasant flowers, rotting food… no one knows. Still not sure? Then really look at what other artists have painted, it might help. Not sure about your direction of style? Look at other artist’s style that you like and ask yourself what is the essence of it that you particularly like. The essence. Really look and ask yourself the question. Don’t answer the question to yourself quickly, as it won’t be enough… you will think it will be, but you’ll likely be wrong as you would have already known the answer without having to ask yourself the question, now wouldn’t you?
3. Step three is either the simplest step or the hardest, depending on which way you look at it: Just keep going. That’s all. That’s it. Keep going chipping away at what’s not you in view of art, and then, it personally seems to me that some kind of bizarre divine providence occurs… or maybe it’s just that you cover so many different variations of your own practice, that one day, and statistically speaking, you can’t not fail to come across something that resonates like a tuning fork struck within your own being. That’s really all. Something’s got to give, just make sure it’s not you. Good luck, because if you’re like me and art is at the intersection of patience and rampant impatience within your character, you’re going to need it. Remember though, your frustration is the grit in that oyster that will make your pearl. Anything else… is wholly irrelevant.