And why it’s damaging our art
If you are a part of the online art community you will probably have heard of the most prized after quality all artists are aspiring to acquire; style. Style, like a rare and precious gem, a secret key that artists from all over, are breaking their backs to try and get their hands on, because with it, it would mean our sad, desperate attempts to try and ‘make it’ in the art world would be over — we’d have a portfolio of beautifully consistent work, ready to sell to the masses, and they would love us for it.
So what is style and why is it so important?
Having a level of consistent art, where people know it’s you, whether you stylize eyes, noses, hair or it’s the colours that you use; people can see it’s you. This has mainly been a consistent theme that dominates ‘Instagram art’; cartoon-ish styles, illustrations, and concept art — is where style seems to be the currency of choice. Even fine art, or paintings from life, have been contemplating style, and it’s slowly been seeping in little by little, if you want an online presence being recognisable in the work that you do is quintessential.
So why am I so against this new rising trend?
Well for starters that’s just it, it’s a trend, a buzzword, artists seem to be fixated on getting this right, because lack of style means our grids are inconsistent, which is detrimental to our followings and likes, and those are our tickets to hopefully selling our work to devotees. There are thousands of videos and blog posts telling you ‘how to find your art style’, with veteran artists telling you the magic formula to make your work really pop and stand out from the crowd, but what happened to spontaneity?
Experimentation, personal development, technique and just plain old having fun with the canvas seems to have been shoved quite aggressively to one side in order to dedicate our time to getting style right. Development in our abilities and just drawing for the sake of drawing especially, has taken a downturn, in favour of finished pieces that all look deadly similar to one another. For me personally, style is stifling the art world, suffocating artists and sticking them in niche boxes — where followers can not seem to get enough of Procreate anime girls. Artists are becoming influenced in how and why they do what they do.
Style through history.
Lets go back a little to when art was highly elite; painters locked themselves up for weeks, chopped off their left ears and presented unmade beds to the world. Art was progression, it was fluid and ever changing; after all Picasso himself had many periods; the blue period, the rose period, cubism, surrealism, modern art, all of it separate expressions of the same person.
“Colors, like features, follow the changes of emotions” — Pablo Picasso
However, when you translate this over to social media; it means fewer followers, and people are less inclined to click like let alone buy your pieces. Style throughout history did not exist, artists were finding ways to blow people’s minds, to make them look at the world differently, to say something, and to keep creating new movements, but a consistent, niche style? No.
So how about we stop trying to “find a style” and get back to being in tune with ourselves, where we can take those feelings and translate it to the page in our sketchbooks, we can play with different art mediums because we don’t have to be experts in just one, we can share a portfolio of original ideas, where we aren’t influenced by what others do to gain a following. We can get back to being artists.
