Style Is Not Art

Against the artist’s self-betrayal in the name of recognisability 

I think we spent enough time “finding our style”. If you open any social media and click on one “making art” video, the algorithm will soon enough bombard you with the latest of the art influencers, the “how-to’s” of the internet.

There’s too many of them to count, but two particular artists stick out. One of them who became quite prominent now swears that life is so much easier, ever since she found her style. This article is my attempt at figuring out why this makes my blood boil. 

The second artist, also quite prominent on these platforms, swears by her marketing techniques: find a style and stick to it forever! Everything else you can do on the side, but your brand must stay clear of it, she strongly advises.

The idea being that, once you have a recognisable brand, this would make marketing it easier and the sort of thing to “be known for”. So you can be one of those people that can be described in one sentence, in some imaginary elevator: “The guy with the thick black lines”, “the guy with the double eyes”, “the girl with the pink underpaintings”, the mad skills charcoal girl...

But what damage does that leave behind?

Style vs Language

Perhaps the most important aspect of art is almost never discussed anymore: the language of art.

Instead of a “style” every artist should develop their own language, which involves vocabulary and grammar! When I think of style I think of accents, like regional dialects of a language. But what is the point of spending your whole life finding your own twang, when you still don’t know what you actually want to say?

A language is a means of communication. It is descriptive, interpretive and above all: not certain! Language has the beautiful attribute of being flexible. Words and concepts change meanings and flavours through the ages and through our preferred interpretations of them.

Artists have always been the ones to push the boundaries of language, to contort it, to give it new meanings and new dimensions. However somewhere along the way we have lost our connection to this natural pursuit and have been steered off into the realms of surface over depth. 

Perhaps because of this disappearance of substance or meaning, the next best thing was to hold on to packaging: the style in which you communicate … nothing.

Certainty kills art

Nothing could kill the joy of art and art itself more efficiently than: Certainty. Art is a reflection of life itself, and much like life itself, it cannot be certain. 

Art should not be safe.

If I could draw a line between decoration and fine art, it would be: art must be alive, and anything that is alive cannot be safe, certain nor fixed.

Peter Esterházy, the famous Hungarian writer, made the remark that thinking cannot be merely ‘positive’, because ‘positive thinking’, as a concept, is not thinking anymore. In his view, thinking has the attributes of being alive and lively: it twists, turns, contorts, before it settles, if it ever even does settle! 

Likewise, art and a fixed “style” cannot coexist in the same breath. Style is the promise that all life can be expressed through this one certainty. This promise is so very alluring and seductive that clearly too many artists have given in to it.

Somewhere along those lines, life itself has been forgotten.

The Forest of Art

Art can’t be executed like a checklist of instructions, but rather felt and allowed to happen. 

Art is a place, not an action. 

I like to think of it as a forest that you can visit. There’s meadows, and light, and depths, and chaos, but most importantly: mystery! And it is all incredible!

Art-works are recordings of moments spent in this forest, in the presence of mystery and wonder. Something we bring back with us. It is a mistake to believe that a painting is all there was to it. It is usually but a small glimpse of what the artist experiences fully, but it is also a well-chosen glimpse. An artist will curate and choose which moments to show, and which not to. This is part of the practice.

Therefore having a “style” is saying a twig is a whole forest, and forcing a whole forest into an arrangement of twigs, because well, your inner marketing team says that’s all you can ever sell now.

Perhaps this is a sort of historical trauma that artists have to work through: exploration and enjoyment of mystery have been historically punished, whereas “certainty” and polished answers have been overtly rewarded. But answers cannot stand on their own if questions have never been asked. 

So, is that enough of a reason to give up on the forest of art itself, and the questions that naturally arise within it? 

Nature vs cleverness

We have seemingly given up the discovery and the infinite inspiration that nature, mystery and life are, in favour of ... cleverness.

Instead of finding new ways of enjoying the same shared reality, tricks and gimmicks have now been artificially promoted to the point where more and more people seem to believe this is the only type of art left. 

I myself have been pushed in such directions, and was told by one gallerist, in her words “to NEVER do this ever again”, as she pointed with her finger at one of my figure pastels. She then went on a whole lecture about how “only conceptual art is given gallery space these days” and that I was therefore wasting my time studying the human form.

I refuse to believe that observing life is a “waste of time”.

Studying life is and must remain the most fundamental building stone of any artist! Not because figurative or naturalistic art is the end all be all. That would be yet another certainty. And I know how traumatising all those academic exercises can be when they become rigid applications instead of living practices. But the point has been missed entirely. The problem was never the encounter with life itself, but the deadening of that encounter into obedience. 

Therefore, the finished result of life studies isn’t and shouldn’t be the goal, but the act itself: experiencing life and trying to describe it using art as language. That is the most important practice we have as artists, for what other substance can we offer humanity or society if not our very observed presence?

This is where the difference between novelty and discovery must be made. Cleverness seeks difference, novelty and uniqueness. Whilst in itself not entirely bad, it is mostly ego-driven and shortsighted. 

Now discovery seeks truth and its mechanism is curiosity and questioning, which is open and free. The ego cannot grasp onto the process of discovery, because it cannot know what comes next. Thus mystery itself is the only antidote to narcissism and cleverness: the illusion of having answers. 

World view vs labels

I firmly believe that it is the responsibility of an artist to have a world view. To share it is a personal choice but to have one is not. And I don’t mean this as, again, one of those superficial artist advice “as an artist one must…”, but rather as a natural consequence of a real practice.

For example you may or may not have a political opinion or view. However, if you had a habit of watching the news every single day, it would be almost impossible not to have a political view after a few years. Not because you forced yourself into it, but merely because it is a natural consequence of being present and watching so much of it.

Likewise, if one spends enough time in the forest of art, or mindfully present in life itself, it is impossible not to have a distinct view on life. It is, after all, you who is there. 

If however, one doesn’t spend any time at all in this space of infinite inspiration that mystery offers, one apparently must resort to cleverness and labels, rather than lived experiences.

This is the tragedy of art reduced to labels: it becomes clickbait-y. It can make you go “aha” for a second, impress you, or shock you in some perhaps novel way, but it’s gone as quickly as it appeared. And too often, this is exactly the direction artists are pushed towards, under the name of advice, maturity, or market readiness. 

A world view however will stay with you. It lingers and haunts. It may inspire or disturb, but it is never dead.

The practice of life or still painting is and will forever remain the most effective way of creating that world view. Not because naturalism is the goal, but because drawing from life is the practice through which an artist learns to encounter reality. Art without the practice of seeing, much like writing without language, or music without sound, is not art, but merely an argument. It only becomes art through the dialectic with reality: the struggle between what reality wants, what you want and ultimately what a painting wants. This is for me a wholesome art practice. 

Reality exists outside our imagination, and our cleverness. It can take us by surprise, and it should. Art without a reality-check, quite literally, becomes a self-validating closed system, and that is ultimately engineering, not life.

Finding your style vs finding your meaning

One last observation must be made. Artists who chase a “style” are seemingly quite unable to land anywhere at all. They try this style or that style, in search of that holy grail: their “own style”. 

Conversely, artists who don’t prioritise style at all, but rather, meaning or intent, tend to have naturally distinctive flavours. This isn’t random: a handwriting is something we naturally have, not something we spend our whole lives “searching” for. 

I keep being told that I myself have “a distinctive style”, which by now you will correctly assume that it is almost insulting, even if meant as a compliment. Style has and will never be on my mind, because my mind is full of life and mysteries that I am trying to work out and work through.

These discoveries get expressed through vocabulary that I develop over time and for me my paintings couldn’t be further apart from each other, and yet people can identify them as being mine. I can only hope that they are right, because I will not jeopardise any single work in favour of a mere style, over the necessity of that work, in that moment.

Imagine the incredible loss of culture, if the greatest artists of history had merely chased branding, rather than truths: a “Rembrandt style”, a “Bacon style” or a “Grigorescu style”, as opposed to the vast worlds of exploration they have all left us with. 

Thus style cannot be the ultimate goal of an artist, but rather a natural consequence of a deeper practice:

Life which leads to Encounter, which leads to Observation, which leads to Worldview, which leads to Language, which leads to more Life.