A student recently mused about how to find their style and I replied: “When it feels like cheating, you’ve found your style” – creating, naturally, can feel like that.Orson Welles said: “Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.” The German-British modernist Frank Auerbach: “Real style is not having a program – it’s how one behaves in a crisis.” (Oh, I have quite a lot of Style then!)
For the American artist and educator Robert Henri: “Your style is the way you talk in paint.” And Bert Oudendag, “Style is what you’re doing wrong.” (I like that too!)
It may be mistake to rush headlong into “Finding your Style”- save some time for the road less traveled. Picasso summed this up nicely with: “The different styles I have been using in my art must not be seen as an evolution, or as steps towards an unknown ideal of painting. Everything I have ever made was made for the present and with the hope that it would always remain in the present.”
Break-a-Brush!
David
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“I had to develop my own style. I began to dig out places of my own… I loved to paint villages, and I’m glad, because they’re pretty much gone now. They’ve all changed, fallen down or been destroyed.” A. J. Casson
“Fashion fades; only style remains the same.” Coco Chanel