Harvey, transparent watercolor on Yupo, 14 x 11 in.

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George James

How do I find my personal voice? It is a common question young artists ask. I do not think there is a specific answer. Rather, it comes from a number of things that happen to artists as they grow and evolve.

First comes the work. Make a commitment to the doing of the work. That means paint. I don’t know of a single mature artist that has not made painting the most interesting thing they can do.
Then practice. Every day you learn something about painting, your ideas, your esthetic responses, and technical information. And as you gain insights, practice what you have appropriated. As you learn about yourself, these thoughts and skills become part of your daily activities.

Then something magical happens. As all this is appropriated, let it go. It will be a part of your fabric. Walk on the beach and look back at your footprints—they are yours. No one else made them but you.  

Target I, gouache, charcoal and pastel, 30 x 40 in., by Alex Powers

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Alex Powers

Nothing in art is more important than finding one’s personal voice or style.  When we think of artists, we envision their style: the controlled realism of the Old Masters, the colorful dots of the French Impressionists, the bold gestures of many of the Abstract Expressionists.  Most of the great painters not only found their passionate preferences, but those preferences related to the time in which they lived.  Michelangelo Buonarroti perfected representation from more primitive beginnings.  Claude Monet extended Modernism from objects and earth colors to light and brighter color.  Willem de Kooning's brash gestures were less about the external than about 1960s internal angst.

Being a part of the time in which one lives is usually a good idea.  There are always, however, those who want to paint in a time other than their own.  Actually the three artists mentioned above painted, not in their present time, but about a future time.  That is why their work was not immediately accepted.  And there are artists who choose to paint in a style of the past.  Andrew Wyeth comes to mind.  He is a great painter.  I suggest one criterion for those who choose to paint in a style of the past: make sure that you have actually been involved in contemporary society before negating it.  Do not choose the past because it seems nostalgically simpler and easier.

Let's think about finding a personal style.  It is a long and winding path for most of us.  In an era of instant gratification, that sentence may not be satisfying enough for many of us.  The musical rock stars who find their path early in life usually burn out quickly.  And then what do they do?  Life for them is then more difficult than for the rest of us who are chugging along, getting lost sometimes and then finding our way again.  The rather long and winding path is not a bad thing.  Not only is there no glorious celebration at the end of the path, there is no end to the path.  The artist Max Ernst said that the worst thing an artist can do is to find his way.  The glory is in the seeking – in the process of painting more than in the product produced.  The inner glow of winning a big art award lasts a week or two, and then it's all about the studio again.  So we want to enjoy, most of all, the making of the art.  That's the real joy.  Arrange everything in your art life, as best you can, to make your studio time the best it can be.

Nothing to Come Home To, gouache, charcoal, pastel and collage,
30 x 40 in., by Alex Powers

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All of Creation Groans, oil, 48 x 72 in., by Wayne Forte

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Wayne Forte

I guess the first step in finding my personal voice was to find a personal painting style in which I felt that I could communicate powerfully, yet comfortably. Only later did I find a subject matter about which I felt a deep personal conviction.

I should credit a teacher I had named Ling Chun. She knew how to push me, to challenge me artistically. I met her at the local junior college, where she taught figure drawing.  She always stressed "structure," and was not easily impressed. She challenged me to find a way to put power into my work. It took me about two years to develop a sense of scale, a tension between the figure and the format, and a shallow space that kept the figure pushed up against the picture plane.

Next, she challenged me to put more energy into my work. I started working larger and with the paper tacked to the wall. I used my whole body to draw with big gestures, dancing in front of the work. I counterbalanced this strongly gestural style with a distortion of the figures that allowed them to accommodate themselves and even rest tranquilly amidst the tangle of lines. This took about a year.

Finally, she challenged me to find a sense of spirituality within my work. This was hard. One day she asked me if she could paint on my painting. I consented, and she mixed together a few cups of the colors I was working with and scumbled over the large paper tacked to the wall from top to bottom, essentially defacing the image. "There," she said, "Now much better."  From this rather zen-like experience I understood that destruction can be as creative a force as creation. I recalled a video I had seen years earlier of Picasso painting and repeatedly demolishing the image and re-drawing it in a new way, right over the old image. These layers, though often barely perceptible underneath, afforded a sense of time and evolution in the work. The sense of time passing, like the feeling one has in an archeological tell, gave me a workable metaphor for spirituality.

As for subject matter, Philip Guston said something to the effect of "the problem with modernity is that there is no story that we all share." It is true, and the result is that most all narrative in art today is personal, which is fine but hardly the universal narrative that powered the great masterworks of history, "the art of the museums," as Cezanne would say. An artist friend of mine named Ed Knippers says that "if your art is all about you, then I'm bored." In a sense, all art is about its creator but I know exactly what Ed means. I felt that I could tell a visual story powerfully. All I needed was a powerful story to tell.

About 1986 I started doing paintings of the Biblical narrative. I realized that it was financial suicide, but I had deep conviction in its truth. It is full of nuance and metaphor, inexhaustible, and, in today's secularist culture, politically incorrect, which fits my artistic temperament. One might object, saying that this has been the most frequently painted subject in Western art. I concur. My only defense is that I believe that this story merits being re-interpreted and re-visualized by the contemporary artist in a fresh, new way that speaks compellingly to his or her generation. That it is a great challenge makes it all the more worthwhile.

Hat Tree, oil and acrylic, 70 x 50 in., by Wayne Forte

The Man in the Mirror, oil and acrylic, 38 ½ x 41 in., by Wayne Forte

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