When does repeating oneself become a style?
Sometimes, I feel like I must be living in a new Renaissance, only in this re-re-birth the “re-renaissance men” are a lot less talented. These days, some artists are dabbling—and I mean dabbling—in every last medium available, whether or not they have any training in it. I applaud the effort: I like to stretch myself too, but I don’t call my creative frolicking “art.”
To my mind, art should have both content and delivery.
More delivery than content? The piece is craft.
More content than delivery? It’s probably really creative activism at best and an incoherent eyesore at worst. It’s also all the rage in this new Renaissance.
My beef with the “re-renaissance men” has everything to do with what I see as the undervaluing of the delivery end art—the craft of art, as it were.
There’s a good reason for fully learning a craft instead of jumping all around, and the logic goes something like this: COMMUNICATION. A salient example is this very blog post. The better I craft these sentences, the better I get my meaning across. I think that’s a generally well-accepted view of words. Why then isn’t that applied to visual media as well?
In my own work, I note that the more I learn about the craft of painting, and specifically the craft of painting a portrait, the more I realize that there’s infinitely further ground to cover in my explorations. It seems like a paradox, but by narrowing my means (by focusing exclusively on painted portraiture) the ends open up. Doors appear in hallways that didn’t even exist a year ago for me. Painted portraiture is an ever expanding world of communication.
Does a person change her-his style of clothing every day? Then why should an artist change her-his style/medium/genre with every piece?
I, for one, refuse to do so.
The beginnings of my style are rooted in two Continuing Education classes I took at the PNCA when I was a teenager.
Before those formative classes, I was sketching like this. (It’s a caricature of a teacher I quite liked, believe it or not!) I was fifteen and interested in the possibility of line as a tool for both delineating an object and making mass, but I lacked direction.
When I started Michael Southern’s printmaking class, I began to understand the real potential of line. I discovered that one of the ways of creating a tonal area in intaglio printmaking is by crosshatching. Copper plates and dry point made me an obsessive crosshatcher, and, in every way that counts, I learned to draw at the same time as I learned to printmake.
A few months after the printmaking class and a year after the first sketch, I was drawing like this. (And I was volunteering at a retirement home and sketching the residents, like Eugene here, as we chatted.) Line and I had a whole new relationship.
When I started Alex Hirsch’s painting class at the end of 1997, I simply translated the crosshatching into color without thinking. Crosshatching had become my way of making a mark—with a pencil and a drypoint needle, and now with a brush as well.
But while crosshatching provided the foundation to my style, it never would have amounted to anything if Alex had not watched me as I worked. She suggested that, whenever I had a color on my brush mixed for one area, I put a dab of it on the opposite side of the composition too. As crosshatching was to my mark-making, Alex’s advice was to my understanding of composition. Because of her, I work the whole composition at all times. It’s the only way to maintain coherence when using as many colors and shapes as I do.
My style continues to evolve and develop. New tools affect my mark-making, and then too every face I paint is a separate kind of adventure. I feel like I’ve only just honed my ability to compose a work around a face, and, with that, I am beginning to learn about including more in the composition.
There is only so much re-birthing a person can do: at some point, baby steps are the only way to make progress.
