You've Either Got or You Haven't Got Style


When it comes to matters of style, it almost goes without saying that there are as many ways of working and ideas about style as there are artists.  Some may seek a tried-and-true style to polish over the course of decades, others prefer constant experimentation, others still might try to cultivate an intuitive approach, and so on.  I personally seek both a sense of continuity and steady growth, a balance between the two, so my goal is usually to try something new in each piece without sacrificing elements of older pieces that I found appealing.  I like to think that a quick look through the archives of this blog shows pieces that are each different, yet fairly recognizable as my own.

Even so, upon completing Jupiter [above], a piece whose theme was decided through a poll on my Facebook page, I realized that my current stylistic directions had changed even more than I had thought.  I was deliberately trying to recreate the feel of, say, my self-portrait from 2007, but I kept rebelling against myself.  As Kandinsky once said, trying to resurrect a style that one has moved beyond is mere aping. . . so Jupiter took new turns with an unusual colour scheme, experiments with metallic paint and glass bead gel medium, and the end result is the piece above.  Since I have become increasingly interested in painting imaginative portraits, the way I handle paint is evolving; strong, abstract geometry is still present, but it seems to be getting more precise, with smoothly blended values, and I seem to be more conscious of how clearly I am telling a story and setting a mood with every aspect of the composition.  Attempting to revisit an older style with Jupiter has made it all the more clear to me that I have turned onto a new road in my art and that there are going to be many good surprises along the way. . .

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