Hello friends, I hope you’re all having a wonderful start to the new year, and a peaceful January.
This month, we had a new moon in Capricorn, among many other planetary movements, and it should encourage the pursuit of new projects, given the workaholic natures of the astrological sign. And while energetically the month was a little chaotic, I still tried to take advantage of this new moon by giving myself a deadline to complete illustrating a full deck of Lenormand cards (36-card cartomancy system). It was my way to kickstart my creativity for the new year.
As someone who can’t really sit still, I’m always looking for a new project during my off-time from work. In December, I needed one that had enough boundaries and limitations that I didn’t need too much brain space, yet gave me the excuse to creatively explore. Since Lenormand cards are illustrations of a single object, it became the perfect exercise for experimenting with digital illustration.
While painting and other analogue artmaking methods were an intuitive process that was tactile and grounding for me (even watercolour, with all of its flowy and spontaneous glory, was grounding), I’ve always struggled with finding the same tactility and intuition in digital painting.
And though I’m definitely far from being done with the project (it’s only the 12th of January at the time of writing this), the few friends who’ve seen the works came back with the same comment:
“You changed your style.”
Yet I was immediately thinking “I’ve never had one.”
Nine of the currently ‘finished’ cards.
To be honest, it’s only since 2015 that I started thinking it was important or a necessity to have a style as an artist. I had been setting up a little showcase of about six paintings at a university hall dinner when a middle-aged man who was on the organizing team came up to me and told me that I had too many styles. He didn’t even mention if he liked any of them, and the only comment was that being inconsistent devalued my work and therefore I wasn’t an ‘artist’. That encounter made it a little difficult for me whenever people comment on my style, no matter how positive or negative the comment was.
Then over the years, I can’t help but notice on Instagram how a strong visual identity or at least a consistent one seemed to do better than those that didn’t. And I started obsessing over the fact that I can’t seem to find a consistent style, or settle into one — the worst part was that I couldn’t even control it.
This wasn’t a problem, or even an issue worth mentioning before. No one would question whether I had a style or not. But suddenly, at the age of 19, some random stranger (who I later learned was a computer engineer) would make a snarky comment, as though he knew better. And it pissed me off to no end that I still think about it.
For years, I struggled to understand that in their eyes, having a style was a marker, a label, an identity for an artist who had apparently already gone through all the stages of growing and evolving. In other words, a ‘grown-up’ artist. They wouldn’t mention it before because physically, I was a child, and therefore still growing.
But the truth is that people don’t stop growing ever. And you don’t only grow up, you can grow deep, grow wide, grow bigger — there are all sorts of ways to grow, and you can do all of this simultaneously.
So in my case, I’m finally learning that I’ve never had one style. I have different styles for different projects because artmaking is a solution. The styles, forms, and even methods become the solutions to the “problem” of wanting to express something, to document something, or even just make something that the artist likes. That the process will evolve as many times as I continue to evolve until I drop dead.
So in conclusion, I just wanted to say that I’m finally giving up on consistency and that I’m gonna do whatever the hell I want and not care what you think of it.
Again, as always, thank you for reading my long-winded rants that are really just my way of therapy.