A Landscape Painter’s Guide to – Developing Your Own Style Easel Talk #49
Style is something I think a lot of painters starting out really care about: developing your own style. You can do it, and you will do it, if you stick with it.
I relate artistic style and influences very closely together. Style is one of the aspects of a painting that we can most readily perceive and sort of hang our hat on. As you mature as an artist, style becomes less and less relevant to you. Should do, I think. It becomes something that is just a part of your process and personality that is appropriate and desirable.
So what is style really? It’s many things at once. Style is actually many different things all jammed together that we sum up by one word: style. This refers to the media used, the techniques employed—this is all straight from my upcoming book—and to a large degree, the subject matter being executed. Style is something that people who are not artists can readily identify with. This is especially true of artists starting out. You’re looking at stuff and you go, well, that style is different than that style. I want a style.
My own style, especially as it refers to landscape paintings, shows my influences, namely the tonal masters. But it is uniquely my own. I haven’t seen any other paintings or work online that look like mine. That’s a blessing and a curse. You can’t escape it. When I look at my work, I can track the roots of my style all the way back to my drawing days. There are certain things that I do, certain approaches that I have that are intrinsic to the person that I am. I can’t really escape them. Style, however, does show your true outlook and reflects what it is that you want to achieve with your art. So it’s an important topic to broach.
You’ll Know You Have a Style When You Can’t Escape It
I had some students here, quite a few over the years. The main thing I’d always get with every new student is they don’t know what their style is, but they want one. My reply to this is always the same. I’ve said it on the channel for years. You’ll know you have a style when you can’t escape it, when you can’t get past it. That’s when you have a style. Otherwise, what you have is an affectation. And affectations definitely can get in the way of communicating your internal vision.
Everything you do has your fingerprint on it. You can’t really escape you. So don’t worry too much about style. Anything else is artifice. I should know, because I was a commercial illustrator for 13 years and made my living that way. I was in the artifice business.
While I was employed as a commercial illustrator, I was often required to ape the style of other artists. We want something like this, okay, give me the money. As an intellectual exercise, this can be quite fun, but it’s not very satisfying from the standpoint of being a true artist.
There’s no way to copyright a style, you should know that. If you come up with a really cool one, anyone can copy it and there’s nothing you can do about it. It can be especially harsh for the artist who’s being knocked off, to see the replicants of their approach in the marketplace.
One way that you can learn is by aping the style of other artists, trying that as an exercise. In fact, you should be doing quite a lot of that when you’re starting out. You don’t want to worry about end results when you’re just starting. You want to worry about building up your abilities and your artistic muscles. That’s what you want to worry about. That’s like putting the cart before the horse.
Don’t Think About Style When Painting
When painting my own work, I don’t think about style. I don’t think about it at all. I just think, gosh, there’s a reference and I want to make an interpretation of that with my painting that reflects my emotional response to the scene. That’s it. That’s everything. And that’s pretty hard to do already. When you start adding in style concerns, that’s another brick on the load. You got to be careful when you’re starting out. You got to support yourself and be gentle with yourself. It’s hard enough to just try and make something that doesn’t look all that bad, that actually represents what the scene you’re painting made you feel.
Make Studies After the Masters
When you set out to learn painting, you’re going to be attracted to this person’s style, that person’s style. I think it’s fine. In fact, I encourage you to make a study after George Inness. Make a study after Camille Corot. Make a study after any painter you like—contemporary or one of the old masters. Go for it. When you do that, treat it as an exercise, treat it as a learning. And the more paintings you do, the more what you are will start to coalesce and arise in your work. That’s definitely what you want.
When I make studies after the masters, I think it’s okay to make them because most of them are long dead. If you do contemporary people like myself, do some attribution there. Put that on the back of your painting. Paint it after M Francis McCarthy. Attribution is important. If you made a painting after a master, put that on the back there too.
Multiple Influences Create Original Style
Multiple influences create original style. You might really, really love one specific artist quite a lot. That’s okay, make some studies after their work, but don’t make that your sole influence. The main danger of just copying from one artist is that you kind of become a weak impression of that artist. You won’t be as solid.
I brought up the example in the comic book world of Neal Adams. He was one of the all-time greats. His work was always referred to in hushed tones. It wasn’t that long before there was a bunch of other artists that looked very similar to Neal Adams, some almost indistinguishable. But those guys, as they kept working, ended up evolving into their own thing. You’d be better off like one of my favorites, John Byrne. He was influenced by Neal Adams on one side, Steve Ditko on another, and Jack Kirby on another. So he had something far more unique that looked like him.
George Inness was very much influenced by Claude Lorrain, one of his major early influences. And a lot of the Hudson River guys, a lot of people were influencing him. You can see that influence in his work, especially when he’s younger. We often see in the early work of artists, we can definitely see their influences more clearly. Be influenced. But know that you shouldn’t just have only one influence. You should have several. George’s work, you can see the change after he was introduced to the work of Camille Corot. You can see the change in his forms and approach to the trees, mostly. It’s incredible. But it’s George’s take. You want to fall in love with a bunch of different artists? Maybe two to four.
Focus on Fundamentals First
Don’t chase style yet. Don’t do it. Don’t worry about it. When you’re learning to paint, too much concern with trying to create unique individual paintings. People used to just know that you would have to work hard to get to a point where you were doing something that was good. That’s still the case, although many of us are busy looking for the shortcuts. You can just type a prompt into an AI now and get an image. Why even make a painting? Well, because you want to make your own painting. And if you want to make your own paintings and you want to make them good, you got to focus on the fundamentals, my friend.
Composition. Do lots of little compositional sketches. That’d be way more valuable than trying to create some sort of masterpiece on your third or fourth painting. Value structure, color and brush handling—experiment with all that stuff. Try different things, see what resonates with you. It’s such a thrill when you do find something that works. And it’s a real thrill when you figure out what it is with composition that’s making some other artist’s painting work, and then you can translate that into your work very easily. Aping a composition from other artists is a really good technique, by the way. Far more so than the surface style, which is mostly the colors and techniques.
Get Underneath the Surface
When you’re trying to digest and understand another artist’s style, the best thing to do is to try and figure out what the soul of it is rather than the surface. You want to work with the body of it and try and understand that. It might mean that your approach to interpreting their style in a painting where you’re doing a study is maybe slightly off. But you’re getting much more substance from it and you’re feeding your soul by stealing theirs.
I didn’t do any studies after master paintings for the first five years of my painting career. And I regret that. I wish I’d started way sooner. I would be way better because when I did go after that hundred days of tonalism, I was doing some Corot. I was doing some Inness. I was doing Francis Murphy. I was doing Charles Warren Eaton and then a bunch of other guys I’d never even heard of. That all helped feed my artistic zeitgeist.
Let Style Take Care of Itself
Let the style take care of itself. Don’t worry about style. Let other people worry what your style is. You worry about doing a good job. Make your paintings clear, beautiful, easy to understand and appreciate, and let the style aspect take care of itself. After you’ve done enough paintings, you won’t be able to escape the style you’ve made.
The way to develop it is by doing a lot of paintings. Even if you don’t make a single study after another painter, if you do a lot of paintings, then your style will be concretized, if that’s a word. That’s what you want. When you have your painting in a group exhibition, you want your work to stand out and be distinctive. People go, whoa, hey, that’s an M. Francis there. I recognize that anywhere.
The way you expand your approach to style is by making studies after other artists. I wish I’d started earlier, not just because of the style aspect, but mostly because the main benefit from doing that for me was improving my composition. And composition is the tough nut. If you have an attractive composition you’ve come up with, your interpretation of a scene—just the big compositional shapes with some nice gradations of color—people will like it. They will think it’s awesome. And all the tweaky details that you find challenging, that’s all gravy.
The Greatest Use of Time
If you’re inclined towards painting as an activity, it’s the greatest use of time that there is. There’s no better way to spend your time. That feeling of evolving, that feeling of creating something that is really good is awesome. It doesn’t happen for me with every painting. I have arrived at a point as a painter where I’m a lot more consistent at consistently doing good things. But there are some places where I came upon new techniques or approaches that looked amazing. And if you do a painting like that, that you just enjoy looking at, that you think is really good, what a great feeling that is. How can you feel better?
Take good care of yourself. Stay out of trouble. And fight the power.
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