40 Days of Art: Styles
Apr. 13th, 2011 12:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tealinAs you develop as an artist, you tend to get drawn to certain artists who have gone before you, whose style you really connect with. Often people will ape someone else's style for a while, others just pick up influences. This is OK! It's how you learn. Humans are an imitative species – we learn by copying what others do – and copying of the work of masters who have gone before used to be a core part of a young artist's training. Our modern world is so obsessed with originality and individual expression that this aspect of artistic education has more or less disappeared, but that doesn't mean its educational value has. By all means, copy others' art, so long as you don't claim it as your own. Learn as much from it as you can!
The important thing is to keep moving on; don't identify with one artist alone for your whole life but move from artist to artist, picking up what you can from each of them. Gather enough influences and the pot will become so muddied the individual ingredients will be less apparent, and might recombine themselves in unexpected ways which might even appear new. Congratulations! You have arrived at your own personal style. Everyone's style is an amalgamation of influences: if you think someone is completely original, it's probably because you haven't been exposed to their influences yet. Ideally, your style should keep evolving, as you add new influences to the pot.
Another reason to keep moving on is that if you learn everything you know from one person, you learn their flaws as well as their strengths. This is artistic inbreeding! In broadening the gene pool you learn strengths from other artists that might compensate for weaknesses in the first, but of course they come with their own weaknesses, which you compensate for by finding another artist, and so on. Even if you emulate someone widely considered to be one of the best, you will only match them by about 70%, because you do not have their life experience, influences, or even their specific arrangement of nerves and tendons that causes them to hold a pencil a certain way and make this kind of stroke instead of that.
If you think of the world as white light, different artists' styles are like different coloured filters on it. You can project the world through a red filter or a green one, but keep piling on more of the same filter and the light just gets darker. Combine the two, though, and you get yellow, which really isn't very much like either of them. If you combine all colours, of course, you get white, i.e. the entirety of the world, but reality can be so much more interesting with a splash of colour.
The important thing is to keep moving on; don't identify with one artist alone for your whole life but move from artist to artist, picking up what you can from each of them. Gather enough influences and the pot will become so muddied the individual ingredients will be less apparent, and might recombine themselves in unexpected ways which might even appear new. Congratulations! You have arrived at your own personal style. Everyone's style is an amalgamation of influences: if you think someone is completely original, it's probably because you haven't been exposed to their influences yet. Ideally, your style should keep evolving, as you add new influences to the pot.
Another reason to keep moving on is that if you learn everything you know from one person, you learn their flaws as well as their strengths. This is artistic inbreeding! In broadening the gene pool you learn strengths from other artists that might compensate for weaknesses in the first, but of course they come with their own weaknesses, which you compensate for by finding another artist, and so on. Even if you emulate someone widely considered to be one of the best, you will only match them by about 70%, because you do not have their life experience, influences, or even their specific arrangement of nerves and tendons that causes them to hold a pencil a certain way and make this kind of stroke instead of that.
If you think of the world as white light, different artists' styles are like different coloured filters on it. You can project the world through a red filter or a green one, but keep piling on more of the same filter and the light just gets darker. Combine the two, though, and you get yellow, which really isn't very much like either of them. If you combine all colours, of course, you get white, i.e. the entirety of the world, but reality can be so much more interesting with a splash of colour.
