Finding Your Creative Voice
Journal Entry: Monday, August 29, 2022
The problem for many artists is to confuse the difference between following your own creative vision and making ‘marketable’ stuff that resembles art that you think will sell on a market. The first and foremost thing an artist must do is develop and follow their own inner intuitive drive and creative vision and frankly, their own peculiarities.
Following your own authentic trail is your product, your intellectual property; not trying to follow a fashion or a trend you see happening out in the market. What’s happening out on the street has nothing to do with you. What you are doing in your studio, that is what is meaningful to your personally, the thing that makes you get up in the morning, that’s where your attention must be. That is what gives your work value in the long run. What everyone else is doing is of secondary importance.
When it comes to designing how you are going to work as a creative, the consideration of how and with what materials your artistic production will be created is a part of your personal language that conveys something about your philosophical quest and approach of life. Often, this arises unconsciously, sometime out of necessity, sometimes out of serendipity. But it is a good idea to be very cognizant about these choices.
Just the fact of working with different tools changes the character of the work that will happen. If you are writer, the difference in writing with a pencil on paper, ink and quill, using an old typewriter or a desktop computer or writing on your smart phone all lead to subtle changes in how you express yourself and, in their very use, can suggest something about your approach to life.
If you draw something, choice of medium alone will cause different results. To draw with a crayon or charcoal or pen and ink or brush and ink or a pencil will all lead to different forms of expression merely because of the limitations or possibilities of each.
These different choices are part of your creative voice. Imagine your artworks on a museum wall in the future with any other great work of art. Will it be able to hold its own next to any other masterwork and participate in that trans-temporal dialog? Aspire to this possible eventuality. Art is a dialog of artists speaking to each other through their work across the centuries.
Artworks are often commenting or speaking to other artists’ works and the ideas embedded in them. You have a voice in this conversation just as if you are at a gathering of other artists all discussing their ideas about what art is or could be. What do you have to say in that conversation? That is your creative voice expressed through your work.
How do you have something to say in that conversation? When I was trying to discover my creative voice what I did was study what everyone else had been saying through their work and learning how to hear it. At that time, in the 1970’s there were two sources, books at the library and art magazines. It was impossible to be up to the moment on what was happening like you can today with the internet. I would go to the art section at the library and take stacks of books to a table and just page through them front to back until I had laid my eyes on every image in each book. I would spend days on this activity until I had seen everything I could take in. This made me generally familiar of what had happened visually in art history. I would make notes on who’s work, what style, what period or what region I found especially interesting for myself and print copies of the images that really attracted and intrigued me. Today you can do this in a much more sophisticated way with a pinterest.com account.
Then I would look at, study, and analyze these images and try to find the common denominators in the works to try to figure out what exactly it was that attracted me to this collection of images that I had gathered. After this I would then dig in and study the particular artists who had made these works and see if there was anything in common among them and figure out what they were thinking about, what the conversation was that they were a part of. I would make my own visual studies and notes based on what I was discovering. In this way I slowly figured out where my own strong interests were.
There is a lot to discover and to sort through in the art world or world of literature or music. Each is its own territory with its own tribes and villages, traditions, customs and languages. Among them there is a home for any of us. Once we find our ‘people’ so to speak, then we will immerse ourselves in that group and gradually figure out the subtleties of it. In this way, we become a traveler through the realms or a hunter/gatherer looking for what will nourish our mind and creative spirit. In that process we find our voice and our community.
At a certain point, we come to realize that everything we do has our unique mark, our atmosphere, our rhythm in it. That is our creative voice, and we are speaking through it. After all of the thousands and thousands of small choices we make and small insights we gain and subtle decisions we arrive at: ‘This but not that’ in the evolution of our ongoing body of work, then more and more our body of work becomes clearer and more distinct and easily identifiable to others as being our specific voice. ‘Oh that’s a Matisse’ or ‘That’s a Picasso’ or ‘that’s influenced by Miro’, or ‘that’s an abstract expressionist work’ or ‘that’s a Warhol’, etc. Each artist or writer or composer has their own specific concerns that they are working on and a certain way of expressing them. That is their creative voice. And each of them is participating in a certain conversation in concert with a group of other artists. The astute and well-studied viewer can easily see all of the subtle influences, references and ‘tips of the hat’ in the established artist’s oeuvre. We want to be that astute and well-studied viewer.
To find our unique creative voice is not a matter of remaining ignorant of everyone else’s voice. There is no need to be an isolated lone voice in the wilderness. Life is a symphony of diverse voices and creative communities that all work together in harmony on some level or other. To harmonize with the cohorts of our own generation around the world brings a certain satisfaction and sense of belonging. The creative culture is engaged in an ongoing set of conversations. Figure out what those are and participate in the ones that align with your own interests.
You will no doubt see some particular artist that inspires you and that you can learn something from. And that might be an artist or artists from any time in history or from anywhere in the world. Fashion is for the moment; art is for the centuries. It is a different kind of time. The deeper you can reach inside to discover, understand and express yourself and find a way to work from your timeless center, the longer your creative voice will reverberate into the conversations of future generations of artists. This is the voice of the masters.
Thanks for reading. This is a completely reader-supported publication. If you’d like to support my work, buy my books and/or become a paid subscriber
How do you think about your creative voice? Comment below.
Wow. What a phenomenal piece. Definitely bookmarked to revisit again.