Well, duh!

Hello Everyone,

Everyone has an inner voice that affects the way they do anything. The way you do your taxes and shop for clothes and participate in committee meetings all have something in common: You. And it is often only when you place activities next to each other that you realize a shared thread between them. That thread is your voice, and people who know you well can see it in you the way you can recognize a friend from far away because of the way he walks.

This is particularly true of your voice when you’re an artist of any sort, and even more so when you’re a commercial artist. You’re hirable partly because you have a consistency to your work that allows art directors, editors or companies to know what they’re getting. If I were hired for a project and the final art I gave the art director looked entirely different from what was in my portfolio, she would probably be less than enthusiastic about my spontaneous new artistic direction. When you buy a Beatles album, you want it to sound like the Beatles. When you buy an Eric Carle book, you want the pictures to look like Eric Carle made them.

For some people, the terms “voice” and “style” are interchangeable. Others think that your voice is relatively stable, whereas you can adopt different artistic styles as though you were changing outfits. My opinion is that it depends on the person. Some people really just draw one way and it reflects how they see and interact with the world. Others tend to draw in different ways, depending on the circumstances and on what they think that particular image needs. I think I fit more into the second category, which can be difficult when it comes to putting together a body of work that has a consistent style.

The fact that I have written about style several times since coming to SCAD reflects the amount of time I have spent thinking about it. Our program is designed to allow a fair amount of experimentation in the first year or so, and my work reflects a variety of techniques and approaches to drawing. I’ve been trying to narrow my focus this past year so that my work would begin to look more consistent. I’ve ended the last three quarters thinking that I have a good idea of where I’m going with my portfolio. I’ve then begun the last three subsequent quarters convinced that my work is all over the place and I feel like I must start completely from scratch.

This artistic oscillation comes in part from the many voices we have in the department. We often begin our courses by showing our work to the professors. “I like this one,” he or she will say. “Make your portfolio like that.” Then the next professor will choose a different one: “This one is great. Make your portfolio like that.” The variety of opinions among the professors is definitely a strength to the program, but sometimes I feel like drawing one of their names out of a hat and just going with whatever that one advises. This, of course, is the easy and inauthentic way out, but sometimes it sounds lovely.

The truth is, I’m somewhere between the two extremes: I certainly haven’t yet arrived at a style that is completely consistent, but I also am not completely lost. One thing that all my professors have told me is that I have good basic shapes in my images. My reaction is usually, “Well, duh! Isn’t that what the world is made up of?” But then I remember that not everyone sees the world as I do. Some people may draw a tree with intricate line work. Some may draw a tree by emphasizing a range of values. Some may draw a tree as a pattern of different textures. I apparently draw trees by plopping a short rectangles under triangles on the paper.

This sounds so elementary, so obvious. My inner cynic is saying, “You’re in graduate school, Mouse. You’re still getting excited that pictures are made up of shapes? What were the first 17 years of education for -- learning how to sharpen your pencil?” But for now, it’s helpful for me to think of my style in “Well, duh!” terms. It’s the very thing that I think is most blatant that best shows how I think and see.

At a teaching workshop last week, we talked about the personality types described in the well-known Myers-Briggs test. As I read the description of my personality type, I found myself thinking, “Well, of course. This isn’t saying anything about me. It’s just saying what the world is like.” And then I read that only 1% of the population falls in this category and thinks in this way. Oh.

Though it can be helpful to think through these issues (us INTJs like to do that, you know), they won’t ever be completely resolved. Plus, at the end of the day, there’s something to be said about just having fun with paint and trusting that your “You” will show up in the final result.

Here are a few examples of recent work I’ve done.

"The World's Largest Russian Doll (Or the World's Smallest Kremlin)"
gouache resist


"Savannah Bold," coffee bag design
mud, gouache resist and digital


"Whale Fountain"
gouache resist

"The Big Day"
mud and gouache resist

I’ve updated my website with more images from last quarter, if you’re interested. For the moment at least, I have been rather indiscriminate in my choice of what to include, so the variety of images I mentioned is reflected there. Eventually I’ll go through and prune it back to the essentials, but I’m going to make some more essentials first. It’s at www.clearasmudillustration.com.

Have a good week,
Sarah/Mouse