A Question of Style

Hydrangea 2

I have been pondering on what my style is and what is style and how important is it.

It has been a very busy few weeks, but so interesting.  I have been joining in the fun of my class with the Journalling Girls at Mermaid Circus which has been a lot of fun.  There have been loads of inspirational videos to download for this on-line course and a Facebook group where the members of the group have been posting examples of their work.  The Melbourne members of the group even got together to have a catch up in person and some art supply shopping.

While journalling is not something that I  usually do, (though I did have my journal for my trip to France last year.  Big sigh, to think I was in Sancerre this time last year) I have found this course really fascinating and insightful in other ways.

Sancerre

One of the best things from the course is when Jane Davenport and Teesha Moore, both spoke about style, and how you create your own style.  When I was doing art in high school and uni in the early eighties my lecturers where always on us to create meaningful art and develop a style.  While many of my fellow students had robust political ideas which influenced their art, I did not and began to feel that my art was not serious or worthy because of it and it really stifled me in what I did.  I also wanted to try lots of different kinds of art work and medium and felt because I varied it so much that I could not develop a style of work.  Although I worked my way through these issues they were still in the back of mind.

Both Jane and Teesha tell their students don’t worry about style, you naturally have a style and it will always come out, especially when you let go and just create.  How you make marks, the colour that you choose and the mediums that you use are all part of your style and you cannot but have a style when making these decisions.  Such a simple insight was so liberating for me, I knew that I had developed a style, but still the old ghosts hang around from the past to haunt you, but this one I have now let go and I feel freer in my art practice which can only be good.

So you never know what you are going to learn about when you do a course, but you always learn something and it just may not be what you thought.  Of course when I go back through my different art work that I have posted to this blog, maybe it is more than one style, and that is also ok.

Karen

My Relief Printing course has started and I will share some of the work I am doing in that next week.

Landscape

Here is another of my earlier works.  I painteded it around the same time as the Rosemary work, when I was experimenting with oil pastels.  It is a landscape of where I used to live in Central Victoria near Castlemaine.  It is a small painting about A2.

I enjoy this painting’s simplicity, just three main colours of green, blue and white.  It was painted on a clear autumn morning, when the sharp frosts seem to make the colours (as well as everything else) clear and sharp.

Taking Stocks

This is another of my earlier oil pastel works in the same series as Rosemary Twigs and Magnolia.  This is the most abstract work that I have done, which makes me fond of it.

I am wanting to push my work further away from realism.  While I admire highly realistic work, I would rather but more of my vision and how I see and interpret the object into my work.  I also like pushing coloured pencils into other areas as they are mostly seen as a medium for the realistic work.

Magnolia

Another of my earlier works.  It was done at the same time as the Rosemary.  It is from a photo I took of an amazing Magnolia tree while I was holidaying in New Zealand.  It is A1 size done in oil pastels.

Sprigs of Rosemary

Sprigs of Rosemary   Oil Pastel A1 size

This is one of my earlier works.  It is from a series of oil pastel works that I did in the early 2000.  I had not worked with oil pastels before and had a lot of fun with these works.  It is not so different from my pencil work as they are a build up of layers.  With the oil pastels I would add a layer of pastel then blend it together with turps then add another layer on top.  I loved the depth of colour this gave me and it was interesting to work with oil pastel as you had to work in a bolder manner as I was not familiar enough with the medium to gain much fine detail.

This is one of my favourite works.  I really struggled with the composition as it is just a mass of rosemary, but I like how it worked out.