Style, the Bridge from Theory to Practice

Some things you can do something about and others you can’t.  For example, you can’t change when and where you were born. Whether  he/she wants to or not, every artist reflects his/her time. All of us carry the accumulated baggage of our time and culture, and there’s not a thing we can do about it.

Still, art is always about making choices.  The sum of the choices that the artist makes  equals his/her personal visual idiom or style.  As long as those choices are reasonably consistent, his/her style will be recognizable and personal.  This doesn’t mean the artist is locked into those choices forever; skills can always be improved and taste and interest are always subject to change.

You don’t have to draw well to produce pretty good art.  The invention of the camera did away with the need for traditional academic drawing.  Looking at the mature work of Klee, Miro, Pollack, and Chagall, I don’t see much in the way of traditional academic drawing skills.  Like many artists with the skills to work anywhere on the concept-related/image-related continuum, these artists deliberately chose to work at the simpler, concept-related end.  If you don’t have much confidence in your drawing skills, work closer to the concept-related end of the scale.

Conversations in Paint– A Notebook of Fundamentals by Charles Dunn

” A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.  Emotion is the starting point, the beginning and the end.  Craftsmanship and technique are in the middle.  – Paul Cezanne_