Hi everybody,

Do you think that an artist must have only one style, his own style or is he richer if he can touch every style an come back when he wants on his own style?

I feel myself to pass to differents styles because for me, Art allows me to do what I want.

Friendly

Herco

You want our personal opinions or an opinion that will make us look good? 

Hi friend,

as you want. My question was general.

I have my own opinion but to have sevral ideas allows to be better perhaps.

Nobody is perfect and must stay modest.

So it's open way to answer, normal.

Friendly

Herco 

I think style is something that evolves naturally. As individuals we are all drawn to different visual stimuli, and as artists I think we are all influenced by a number of factors - Other artists, the environment we live in etc.

I think it's probably useful in terms of the creative process to work through a variety of styles until something sticks and you develop your own unique visual language.  As I said I think this happens fairly naturally. I think it's very important to study and learn from what artists have done before and see what you can take from them, be it an idea or a technique.

In my own work I started out with fairly simple geometric  shapes arranged in a basic manner, then moved onto engaging more with some degree of surrealism and automatism, and then more recently engaging with some aspects of graffiti and street art, as well as incorporating some degree of (Stylised) representational figures / objects.  I tend to swing between the graphical and the painterly , am trying to mix both currently.

So in answer to your question, I work in two distinct styles, which I would like to merge into one,  and I think it's useful to dip into experimenting with other styles as a way of developing your own.

The idea of a singular style is something rooted in Western civilisation over the centuries. This is because Western art was for a long time influenced by Plato's ideas of universality; that there was a single ideal for everything, including art. So the truth of any matter could not be two things at once but either/or. This idea persisted in Christendom and even after the Enlightenment, through the Modernist period. The various manifestos made during the early Modern art period are remarkably like religious creeds. They are rigid, dogmatic with an emphasis on correct ways of approaching art (orthodoxy) versus incorrect ways of doing art (heresy).

The world (or I should say 'worlds') we live in now is post-modern. It is characterised by eclecticism, pluralism, multi-culturalism and relativism. All of these traits involve a belief that there is more than one right way of doing things, more than one culture worthy of respect, a subjective rather than objective understanding of truth and a frequent recourse to many influences when creating music, art or drama. I think that life has been this way pretty much constantly since the late 1980's and early 90's. Before that, movements could easily dominate and unify cultures. Now it is much harder to be part of something that most people relate to. Everyone has different interests. Everyone has different worlds and even within ones own local community there are a multitude of them.

Nevertheless, there seems to be a resistant urge to unify ones creative output into a singular recognisable style. Why this is I do not know, but I think it is definitely a Western phenomenon and centuries of ideology, manifestos, dogma and creeds (which are quite alien to Indic cultures) has left its mark in everything we do, say and see. Most of the time we don't even recognise it.

I think eclecticism is nothing to be frightened of. Picasso was eclectic and he even said that God was an eclectic artist. Some artists are more eclectic than others, allowing the subject matter to dictate the style. Their works are not instantly recognisable and only identifiable by the signature, so broad is their creative output.

So my advice would be, don't try to homogenise everything. You are living at a time when eclecticism is commonplace. Some of my work, resembles cubism, german expressionism, neo-expressionism, symbolism and surrealism. I have certain themes or favourite subjects and ways of depicting them, but I don't want to be one of these artist's who paints the same thing over and over again with minor variations. That is boring. Eclecticism is the spouse of creativity. Style can quickly become an envious and posessive lover. Beware.