I think every artist at some point wonders what their art style is, whether that’s before they begin their artistic journey and the early painter thinks they have to know everything and be everything before they have even put paint to brush, or the artist is long into their career and have reached a point where they are wondering how to move forward.
To become consistent in your art and develop a style, yet not be defined by it is one of the biggest hurdles artists go through throughout their careers, but the truth is, rather than worrying about this question you’ll most likely answer it when you least expect it.
So how do you find your art style? The quickest answer is simply paint and do it a lot, try new things and play as much as possible. Paint little and often rather than spending hours on a single piece of work that is more likely to leave you stifled than inspired.
The long answer, at least for me, is that over the years I have worked with different styles, different mediums and different surfaces throughout my artistic journey and continue to do so at regular intervals as a matter of course. In my early years I followed in my father and grandfather’s footsteps and worked primarily with watercolour because that was all I knew. Acrylic was unknown, gouache was misunderstood and oils were for this elite artistic being that I couldn’t possibly ever be. Of course that was ridiculous thinking, but probably what most children think of when they start painting, but being stuck with watercolours as my main medium I quickly came to realise that it wasn’t for me and became irritated with the lack of vibrancy in my work. I found myself using the paint directly from the tube to create the art I wanted to create. So as I grew older and realised that I could actually use other mediums I quickly progressed into acrylics. I actually inspired my father to do the same and he now is also primarily an acrylic artist although I do still use watercolours from time to time, but now in the capacity they are designed for.
Discovering acrylics I was immediately satisfied with the change in colour and vibrancy in my work. It was like a weight had been lifted. This important step was my first move into finding my style and all I had done was swap one medium for another. This is the key to beginning your art style journey and that is to try different mediums. Of course in that time I have also used mixed media, gouache, charcoal and pastels amongst others, although never quite committing to the challenge of oils, I have always returned back to acrylics as they allow me to comfortably create the type of art I want. I love how they dry quickly and that was one of their fundamental benefits as they allowed me to quickly work up layers and textures the way I wanted to. Watercolours were too wet and oils I knew to be too slow to dry amongst other things, but this could easily be in reverse for you. If you are feeling stifled by acrylics because they dry too fast for example, but you enjoy the flow of water in your art then maybe watercolour is a medium that may work better for you or perhaps you are somewhere in between making gouache a great choice to try. Experimenting with many different mediums and not being afraid to create ‘bad art’ is the key to finding what works for you and subsequently your style.
Step two is to look at other artists’ styles and see what you might like to encompass into your own art. This doesn’t mean outright copy an artist and upload it as your own, that’s another story altogether, but taking inspiration from other artists has been done for years and using this as process in your art journey will help you to discover what you enjoy as a subject or style. It will help you understand what you hate to create, what you find difficult or easy to implement and this can apply to both abstract and traditional landscape art.
At the beginning of 2020 I used palette knives for the first time, I’m not sure why I hadn’t before, but it is most likely to be because of habit, a typical trap that many artists get in. It’s very easy to get stuck with using the same mediums and tools in your art because it is what you know and feel at home with and of course might be what is selling so you can become scared to try anything new for fear of losing customers or revenue streams. For me, I had reached a point where I was simply painting what I perceived the public wanted and somewhere along the way I had lost my artistic identity and passion for painting.
Although I did develop a style during this time, it was one I had begun to hate. This tragic progression in my art journey culminated in 2008 with me churning out a series of paintings for this awful exhibition where I was exhausted, demoralised and stood back looking at these paintings wondering what the hell I had been thinking. I had been simply filling a space. My work was flat, emotionless and lifeless and this exhibition ultimately ended with me giving up painting altogether for over a decade to avoid the expectations of others who thought it was good and still wanted to buy it. Crazy you might say, but I was completely uninspired and lost. So when I started sketching and painting again in 2019 spontaneously after the passing of my grandfather, I was keen to avoid these old traps and to try new things that spoke to me, not other people.
Of course I’m not saying you need to take a decade long painting hiatus like I did, that was a bit extreme, but I will admit my stubbornness at not painting for so long gave me plenty of time to forget a lot of the old habits I had gotten into. For the first time in years I was excited to try different tools and surfaces and I felt free to experiment. I began painting on wood and painting tiny canvases and using palette knifes for the first time as I mentioned before.
At first it felt completely alien to drop the brushes for these uncontrollable tools that wouldn’t bend and weave itself in the ways I wanted it to, but that forced me to look at my art differently and once I had stopped trying to use it as a brush and actually use it in the way it was intended I began to create some really interesting pieces that spoke to me and which I still like looking at today. I hadn’t felt like that in a long while and even writing this now I’m thinking I should go back to working with them again.
I did return to my brushes eventually and for a while enjoyed painting water and seascapes with realistic detail, which made me understand that using acrylics and brushes and being able to form detail and structure within my work was becoming a very big key ingredient to my style. So, putting down your usual materials and picking up something new is a really good way to find what you enjoy doing the most. It doesn’t matter if you make a mess or ‘fail’ at this new way of creating art because all it needs to do is to help you understand what works for you. It may inspire you to continue on that path, you may really love what you begin to create or it may remind you of where your heart lies and what you want to reflect within your art and that is one of the most important aspects to finding you style, finding what speaks to your soul.
My style has now settled on a mix of realism and abstract, two very different ends of the art spectrum, but both a reflection of how I am. The realism within my water paintings allowed me to enjoy a sense of order and control within my art that I think is a fundamental aspect of my personality, but by using that within an abstract framework with geometric lines and shapes has meant I could also explore deeper emotional subjects, allowing my subconscious to come forward because it was no longer bound so tightly to earthly bound expectations of reality.
This doesn’t mean I am settled on a style by any means, I still play with watercolour now and then and enjoy some simple sketching too, but this is fine. It’s important to know that there are no rules you have to stay bound to as an artist. That any rules that have appeared in your art only exist because of you and so are within you to change. In fact, it’s good to question if you are still creating what speaks to your soul even when you think you are creating what speaks to your soul, because it is so easy to think we have settled on a style and are happy with that because we become used to it especially when we commercialise what we do.
Inevitably though, because of these transitions and changes within your art journey you slowly pick up techniques and formats that creep into your art no matter what you create because you can’t change them, they are inherently
you. You won’t necessarily even know these elements exist within your work or have appeared. It could be others who may first notice them by saying, “
I can tell that’s your work”. And it’s these tiny fragments that slowly come together over your lifetime that form your style. Small elements of your soul that ebb and flow, but always coexisting in some form without any effort on your part.