Establishing your style in the arts

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art project, artistic style, Artwork, Dorset

‘I’d know your work anywhere!’ So said my sister on spotting the dancing ammonites design I had submitted to Lyme Regis museum as part of their Museum at Home project, when it was displayed on the museum’s website. I presume she meant it kindly!

We all have our own style, certainly as far as the arts are concerned: the way we string words together, or approach a drawing, or compose a melody, is very much our own. Still, it can take time to establish. The early works of great writers or artists, although they may contain recognisable features, can still seem very different from their mature style. That’s true of us all, I think.

Beginners can be very anxious to establish a recognisable style – something that’s all their own – but, really, I think it’s something you only gain with experience. You need to go through the process of experimenting with different ways of doing things before you find the specific mix of techniques and ideas that both works for, and represents, you.

My own art style is only a few years old, and still a work in progress. When I look at artwork I produced long ago, I can see signs of this style trying to get out. It took its time maturing, I have to say, with many spaces where I did no artwork at all. Would I have got there sooner if I’d persevered? Well, maybe. Or maybe it just needed the right degree of maturity in me to bring it to the surface. It feels like the sum total of all the years I’ve spent observing and loving nature distilled down into simple black and white. Or sometimes simple colour. I can’t seem to get interested in working any other way than this.

So, my advice to beginners? Take your time, try different ways of working – borrow from sources that delight you; your own individuality will bubble to the surface. Don’t rush it. Find it and cherish it. You’ll know when it’s right.

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Completing a Lockdown Project

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art project, Artwork, book, flowers, painting

It’s fitting, I suppose, that the art project I devised to see me through yet another lockdown here in the UK has been completed in the same week I received my first dose of vaccine. I’m deeply grateful for the jab – administered with great cheerfulness in an almost holiday atmosphere at the local theatre – because it begins to open up possibilities for the future. It seems a long time since we had any of those.

I set out to produce twelve little plant paintings, one for each of a set of stories written in the first lockdown last spring – so this is entirely a lockdown production. Like many other people, I found it hard to stay motivated, and struggled to make the pictures work. It would have been so much easier to give up and sink into depression. I nearly did. It was the sheer habit of completing things that kept me going, and, well, now I have my little collection all finished. I might yet do number eleven again, but basically, it’s done, and I’m proud of it – not only of the paintings, but of all the things I learned along the way about paint and colour and proportion and balance and contrast. I’m glad I made myself keep going. I can only say to anyone else who is struggling with their creativity – hang on in there, folks. Get it done. Even if it’s less than perfect, you’ll feel such a sense of achievement, and that’s the sort of boost we could all do with right now.

So, if I can just get my head together and sort out the editing of the stories, I’ll have created a little book. There’s always another challenge, eh?

The Perils of Paid-for Critiques

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critiques, self-confidence, writing

It’s always painful when someone is critical of your work. It undermines your self-confidence – and it can be really difficult to know what to make of it. Are they being casually dismissive of something they may not fully understand? Or (whisper it) might they be making a good point? Everyone’s a critic these days, of course. We are all invited to give our free and frank opinions of everything and anything, whether we know what we’re talking about or not. And it’s uncomfortable to be on the receiving end. But what if you’ve paid for a critique of your writing?

The eternal writers’ paradox is that we all ask for an honest appraisal of our work – but none of us really wants to hear anything bad. We want to be told how good it is, or, at least, that’s there’s nothing wrong with it that a spot of thoughtful editing couldn’t fix. Deep criticism, especially from a professional source, is disquieting. Particularly when you’ve paid good money to get it. One of my writing friends, working on a memoir, shelled out 50 Euros or thereabouts for a critique. She was unimpressed with the result. As an example, she told us during a writers’ zoom meeting, that the reader had picked up on a point of fact (easily checked with a bit of light Googling, and perfectly correct) and dismissed it as unlikely. We agreed this was sloppy work on the reader’s part, and my friend was inclined to write off the whole critique (and the 50 Euros!). My friend is an experienced writer, and able to shrug it off – but what effect might this have had on a beginner?

 I suppose you have to remember that a critique is just one person’s opinion, and it’s difficult to know how experienced they are or what their literary prejudices and preferences might be. If the critique comes from a publisher, they will undoubtedly take into consideration the saleability of the writing which might skew their response considerably. In all fairness, some people are very good critics and make suggestions for improvements without demolishing the writer’s confidence – but it seems a bit of a lottery to me.

So what about you, Kath, you ask. Have you ever paid for a critique? No, I haven’t. If I had done so in my early days as a writer, and received an adverse reply, I’d probably have given up there and then. I’ve had my rejections, of course, as every writer has – but I didn’t pay for those, so injury wasn’t added to insult. I should add that I have actually given critiques, as gently as I could, but I’ve never much liked that dependence upon one person’s opinion. Even if it’s mine.

So, I don’t think I’d recommend paid-for critiques to a beginner; we are so much in need of encouragement at that stage, that an input of bald criticism – even if it’s justified – can be soul-destroying. I know it’s tempting to ‘ask an expert’, but I’d suggest you don’t, unless you really can take criticism on the chin. Better to spend your money entering a few writing competitions, I’d say, which provide a less direct criticism – you take part with many others, if you don’t win you won’t be the only one, and you can see what the judges actually did like, and learn from it. It’s a gentler way to assess the quality of your writing, and a lot less perilous to your confidence than an all-or-nothing critique.

Believing in the power of song

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Arts projects, Dorset, heart of stone, Portland, singing, zoom

A week or two ago I wrote about the joys of being involved in an online arts project – without leaving home. That was the Lyme Regis Museum-at-Home project, and I’m glad to say it’s going very well, and is proving inspirational for me and the many others taking part. Drawing and writing lend themselves to online activities, of course, but I’m also involved in another project – one that’s rather trickier to deal with via the internet.

Heart of Stone is a music and drama project, one that requires an actual performance to complete it. My community choir, Island Voices, is going to be providing the background music element to this play about the quarrying history and culture of the Isle of Portland here in Dorset. We hope. Singing has been one of the activities worst hit by the pandemic, and the choir hasn’t been able to sing together for nearly a year now. Some of us are now doing the best we can, using zoom, to rehearse. It’s difficult, of course, since we can’t actually hear each other – only our leader Su, or a pre-prepared background recording. But we can see the joyful looks on each other’s faces when we sing along with past recordings of ourselves. I’ll admit it brings a lump to the throat, too, to hear those songs, and our recognisable individual voices, happily attuned to each other, in a time when the idea of being denied that simple pleasure for so long was unthinkable. We’ve probably fallen out of tune as a group, and some of us have ‘lost’ our top notes from sheer lack of practice. It’s incredibly sad.

But now we have Heart of Stone. It’ll take a lot of effort to learn the new songs for the project (they’re stunningly beautiful, by the way), and a lot of belief in a better future when we’ll be able to sing them together. Myself, I’m prepared to believe we can do it. Or at least I’m going to try. We have beautiful recordings to sing with, whenever we like, and, from mid-February, we’ll be rehearsing on zoom weekly. Use it or lose it, they say, and it’s never been more true of our choirs and singing voices. I’m not much of a singer, but I’ll be using my voice, tuning it up and stretching it a bit against the day when we can come out and complete the Heart of Stone project together. In person. We have never needed the uniting power of song more.