Find Your Artistic Voice in 10 Weeks

For 20 years, Mike Bailey taught the same class, designed to help students find the path to their own personal style of art — their voice. “A developing artist needs to understand how a really good painting is structured. You need to know about unity, conflict, harmony, repetition, variety, and structure. It’s more than just a feeling behind your navel.”

So how did the discovery of an artist’s voice actually happen in Bailey’s program? “During the 10-week course, the students developed 20 large paintings around a single still life,” Bailey explains. “By confining their choices of point of view and preventing the option of moving items in the setup, they are forced to manipulate various elements — lines, values, sizes, shapes, and colors. The truth is, you could develop 20 paintings based just on color schemes or value schemes.

“What happened was, six or seven weeks into the course, people just started going off like popcorn and making huge breakthroughs in their work. They became bored and began to respond to the urges that called them to break the boredom, which showed up in their work. Their mental images of what a painting should look like took a back seat, and they started opening up to their new ideas. It was a crucible, but by the end they couldn’t believe what they had accomplished.”

What did they end up doing? Their work got more abstract. “A lot of the minutiae, the little details, were lost,” Bailey says. “The students focused on design, values, and composition instead of making a pretty picture. It was really amazing to watch. At the end we had the big reveal, where everybody took their 20-painting series and laid them all out with mats in the order they were painted. “You looked at these 22 x 30-inch paintings and you could see where the breakthroughs happened. You could see where they showed an inclination toward color, value, or texture, for instance. You noticed a magnetism toward some aspect of painting, an inclination toward it. And that’s how they began to crystallize their personal style.”

Need more inspiration? You can’t do better than this month’s Watercolor Live! Join 25 of today’s top watercolor artist as they share their best tips and techniques, and start your creative year off on the right foot.