Possible Reasons You’re Confused about Your Artistic Style: You Haven’t Made Enough Stuff Yet
You may feel confused about your artist style and identity because you just haven’t created enough, yet.
Getting Stuck in the Contemplation Stage
In my recent posts, I talked about how MBTI Intuitive Feeling types like INFJ’s (most of my clients) can really struggle to start projects for fear that they’ll miss out on something more perfect.
In behavioral psychology, this is called getting stuck the Contemplation Stage, which is the first of the five stages of change. Contemplation is where we’re just thinking about doing something. We consider ideas and weigh pros and cons. Once we start to believe there are enough pros to make it worth trying, we move on to the planning stage, and then the action stage.
Style Shows Up Through Action
The action stage…the stage where you’re actually experimenting and creating stuff…is where an artist starts to see who they actually are in their creations. This is where style truly begins to emerge.
Here’s what visual artist Lisa Congdon has to say about it:
Experimentation is where creativity comes to life. When you are experimenting, you aren’t just thinking or talking about your ideas — you’re actually trying them out. We don’t just buy the supplies or watch the video tutorials and then stop. We actually create something. And we don’t just do it once or twice. We do it over and over and over until we’ve developed some skill, or our desire to make that thing is satisfied, and we move on to experimenting with the next creative urge. Sounds easy enough, right? If it were, we’d all be highly prolific.
The truth is, when we first start something, it can feel wholly uncomfortable. It can even feel risky! What if we fail? When we have an idea for what we want to create (perhaps related to whatever gave us the spark and the urge to make something in the first place), the end result we envision is often so far from what we have the skills to do. So we get overwhelmed and feel almost immediately defeated. That’s why many people, even when they first have the urge and begin to experiment, quickly abandon projects, because their taste level far outweighs their skill level.
Fortunately, most artists who have the stamina to work through the first few years of experimentation do become stealth experimenters. We not only become comfortable with the discipline of experimentation and the importance of failure, we also begin to crave it. It becomes part of how we work.
(Lisa Congdon, Finding Your Artistic Voice)
You Don’t Need to Know Your Style in Order to Make Stuff
Since so many of my clients are interested in figuring out their own unique style, this is something I talk about a lot. I even wrote a Guide to help my clients think through many of the aspects of being an artist.
But I want to be clear that you don’t have to know your style before you start being an artist. In fact, waiting until you know your style before you start creating stuff may be part of why you’re not making stuff.
I love the way visual artist and Creative Pep Talk host Andy J. Pizza talks about this:
Think of your artistic voice as the swag bag or reward that you get for attending the art party, but not as the ID that you need to get in.
A lot of creative people think that they have to have their artistic voice sorted out before they start making art. In other words, before they go to the art party, they think that it’s the ID that lets them in past the bouncers, so they can feel legitimate.
And one of the things that happens is that because people think they have to have their artistic voice sorted before feel like they are a “real” artist, they either (1) give up and never start making art, or (2) they pretend to find their voice before they really have it. And that negates their ability to ever really find it, because you can’t find something you already think you have. I think it was Epictetus who said something like, “You can’t learn what you think you already know.”
So instead, we need to shift our thinking. You don’t need to have found your voice to attend the art party. Finding your voice takes years. Your voice is simply the reward, the swag you get eventually from attending the art party.
(Andy J. Pizza, interview from Finding Your Artistic Voice)
Balance Dreaming + Reality-Testing
Creativity coach Eric Maisel calls the contemplation and planning stages “dreaming” and the action stage “reality-testing.” He says that the only way we’ll be truly satisfied as artists is if we do both:
We must dream large, and we must also reality-test well. It is imperative that we do both. A person who dreams large but doesn’t effectively test reality ends up living in a fantasy world. A person who tests reality well but doesn’t nurture large dreams lives paralyzed in the ordinary world. A person who manages to do both occupies the only heaven heavenly enough to suit our creative soul, a heaven where creative projects are incubated and made manifest in the crucible of reality.
(Eric Maisel, Coaching the Artist Within)
I’m here to help.
If you’re feeling stuck about taking action, making stuff, experimenting, and reality-testing as part of figuring out your style, I’d love to help coach you through whatever’s getting in your way. Apply to work with me here.
