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Hunting for An Artistic Voice
Where my evolving style has taken me
Writing about art has become one of my most rewarding endeavours, but long before I ever started to think seriously about the history of art, I was a painter.
What kind of painter, I find it hard to say. Blessed with the proclivity for artistic indecision, my archive — to give it a grandiose title — is inconveniently varied. For all the years I’ve been making paintings, I’ve found myself pulled between different mediums and subject matters with a kind of irresistible magnetism.
Commercially, I don’t think it helps.
To sell art, it’s undoubtedly beneficial to have a style, or to put it more prosaically, a brand. It’s useful in order for people to recognise your work at a glance, and if they purchase a piece of it, to know that what they have is representative of a slice of a bigger pie.
Yet when you work across so many different styles as I do, the consistency that branding requires never quite materialises.
Unrestrained by genre or medium, I’ve painted portraits and self-portraits, landscapes, abstract paintings, realistic, impressionistic, hard-edged, soft-edged, monotone and multicoloured works. I’ve dabbled across all of these in both oil paints and watercolours.
