What’s my style…?

…on artistic style, and how I don’t seem to have one.

what in the world am i up to now?

I went to another “out-of-my-comfort-zone” art workshop the other day — a Dot Mandala class. Our small group laughed a lot, learned quickly, practiced and played with new tools, attempted techniques that are simple on the surface (and subtly challenging underneath), and ooh-ahh’d at each other’s creations for a good two hours.

I don’t think of myself as an artist. My mother was an artist. Van Gogh was an artist. Modigliani was an artist. My friend Liz K is an artist. I think of myself as a creator who loves to learn new things. Ever since I moved myself to Albuquerque in the middle of the Covid Lockdown, I’ve been exploring various methods of making marks on paper.

…early days, mostly painted on my own, the apple was a class

After the Lockdown, when it was safer to go out into a populated world, I started keeping an art journal of sorts. This was without classes — just me messing around, recording the highlights of certain days, practicing with water and pigment and brushes and fine-line ink pens.

my attempts to art journal the good days...

Online classes and workshops have been a blessing. I thank the Cosmos for Zoom, and Teachable, and Skillshare, and Patreon, and Kajabi… and for the talented and brave artists who have created workshops and multi-session courses, easily accessible and affordable. I’ve found two online painting teachers I especially like, and I follow a bunch of artists on YouTube. I’m steadily improving my technique in watercolor and gouache.

…more recent… this is me, trying on my own...

I also collage in all sorts of ways. I’ve been learning how to bind my own (very simple) sketchbooks and journals. I’ve tried my hand at block printing. I continue to “slow stitch” little bits of fabric onto a long, long strip of fabric… just because. And now — the dots! Super fun, very meditative, and I hope to graduate to painting dot mandalas on rocks sometime in the near future.

Watercolor and gouache have been my main focus, and I think I’ve come a long way from where I started. There’s a forever way to go, and I don’t mind that. In fact, I am glad there will always, always, always be more for me to learn with paint and brushes.

That having been said (at great length), I am still 80% tutorial dependent, and 20% ok to just sit down and paint something on my own. I’ve made some really nice paintings during live, two-hour online paintalongs with one of my teachers. When I try to use what I’ve learned to paint without the online guidance… I stumble. (It’s all learning, I know, but it does upset me somewhat that I still need my brush-hand held.)

When I paint along with a teacher and my painting comes out well, I feel pretty proud, but I’m always aware that particular painting’s in the teacher’s style, not mine. I don’t know what my style is!

I feel like there’s an ingredient missing — in me. Maybe some of us don’t get to have a style? In my current muddled thinking there are two ways to become an artist.

Way Number One: You are passionately driven to paint and draw and render the world with pigments, water, and brush strokes, in your own way. From the moment your pen/pencil/brush/charcoal touches paper, you fiercely and beautifully make the marks the way only you can — uniquely and individually.

Way Number Two: You decide to do something you haven’t done since you were a young teen and learn to paint with watercolor. You buy the cheapest elementary school type paint set, and “make marks” 15 minutes a day for 100 days. You search for — and find! — online teachers who are non-threatening, supportive, good communicators, and you begin regular lessons. Occasionally, you paint something small, using what you’ve learned.

Way Number One is what I fantasize real artists do. Way Number Two is obviously me.

I do believe that, as my skills get better, and I gain internal and muscle memory that makes it easier and easier to put my learnings on paper independently, some sort of style may, at last, emerge.

Or will it?

And if my style arrives, where will it come from? How does it even happen? Should I be thinking about it as much as I evidently am?

Meanwhile… the art table keeps calling me back.

Zero AI was used in the creation of this post and everything in it. I’m human — I just happen to love em-dashes.