• During THANKSGIVING season here in the United States, we often list things we are grateful for. My thoughts were why not wait and tell you on our regular schedule the following: ♥ How BLESSED we are for your continued support! Thank you! ♥ Speaking of blessings, one of the most valuable each of us receives at birth is our individual uniqueness. With that in mind, here's an encore post from the Thanksgiving season three years ago. By their styles, do your recognize the artists who did these three portraits?. Even if you don't know the artists by their work, you can see within each work a distinctiveness, something that sets each artist's work apart, regardless of the era in which they
painted. By the way, the artists who did the portraits above are, left to right: Picasso, Van Gogh and Sargent. But I bet you knew that. All my life I've been fascinated by listening to the different ways various pianists play Beethovan's Moonlight Sonata. Even more fascinating is that when you familiarize yourself with a master pianist's playing, it's easy to recognize without being told who the performer is. The same is true for visual artists: when painters are guided by their inner artist's voice, their work is recognizable from
across the room. And it becomes even more so as they gain command of skills and composing principles. How in the world is this possible? IT'S ALL ABOUT BEING NATURAL An authentic style is not something we invent. It is our natural "handwriting." It is the result of being in command of our skills to the point that we no longer have to think about the "how to" and delve straight into responding to what we see, interpreting it in a way that feels natural to us. To try to force that to fit into
a trend or to how another artist might do it is to truncate our own artist's voice in favor of imitating a style. Below, the word "artist" is written by seven different people. The same word communicates seven unique interpretations. Each of these styles derived from thousands of repetitive strokes over the course of one's lifetime,
writing without thinking about how it's being done. At the time each person wrote the word, the mastery of the cursive writing skill created the word "artist" as a single concept in seven individual expressions. So it is with our painting style! Enjoy a delightful weekend! During my Language of Painting series, I explained the role of our visual elements. If you'd like to review those roles to better understand the behavior of elements, here are the links to each of those
discussions: Color --Value -- Shape -- Texture -- Size -- Line and Direction
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