11. Find Your Artistic Voice
Show Notes
Big 3 Ideas from this episode:
What is an Artistic Voice? Do I have one? Do I have to find it, or do I already have it?
The 3 Stages of Artistic Voice: Essence, Evolution, Edge
What are some steps to finding and nurturing my artistic voice?
EPISODE No. 11
How do I find my Artistic Voice?
3 simple ways your can nurture your artistic voice:
Listen - to yourself, to mentors, to teachers - and then to yourself again.
Be - with your ideas, your work, with nature. Spend time so you can gain insights - take it slow.
See - Look deeply at your subject, and see what you are not able to see at first glance.
Speak - Be brave - draw, paint, speak with courage and self-love.
“I prefer effortless and clumsy lines over fine lines. There’s a Japanese term called Heta-Uma. Heta means bad, but Uma means good.
So my clumsy lines may look really bad, but somehow it’s actually good.”
JOOHEE PARK, AKA STICKYMONGER, INTERVIEW WITH HYPEBEAST, 2018
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TRANSCRIPT:
Episode 11 - Find Your Voice
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[00:00:00] and this is episode 11. Find your voice.
[00:00:44] That's Molly Shannon from Saturday Night Live. I love that clip. I started making art seriously when I turned 50, so it feels like I've been on this quest and I know a lot of other artists who are on a lifelong quest to find our artistic voice. I've been thinking a lot about this. What does having an artistic voice mean?
[00:01:09] How does it. , do you actually have one? Do you need one? Today, I'm going to take this idea apart and talk about it so we can have a little more insight into artistic.
[00:01:24] George Bernard Shaw said, we do not find ourselves, we create ourselves. So when it comes to artistic voice, I really feel like it's a combination of the two. Finding yourself and creating yourself.
[00:01:38] when I look at artists who have a very strong style, a very strong. I think of Lisa Conan's definition. She says, your artistic voice is your point of view as an artist. It includes your particular style, things like your own color palette, symbols, lines and markings, your skill, your subject matter, your medium, and the consistency with which you use all of these things.
[00:02:07] I asked people on Instagram
[00:02:09] to contribute to this idea, what is your artistic voice? And my friend Teresa Smith wrote, You get an artistic voice by painting for 10,000 hours, and I know she has done this.
[00:02:21] And then she says, keep going through this lifetime. And perhaps the next,
[00:02:26] another artist Susan Slapin wrote,
[00:02:29] follow one's, gifts and passion. Explore, build, grow, change it up. Be true to the Muse
[00:02:36] and Elsie Sepulveda wrote in Spanish. I had to respond with my very limited Spanish,
[00:02:44] when you create from consciousness to show your sensitivity, it is art.
[00:02:49] The artist is born, grows, reproduces, and doesn't die. His works are embodied in his painting, music, and design.
[00:02:59] My [00:03:00] friend, the artist, Pamela Hoax said,
[00:03:01] I have had to work on the acceptance first that my artistic voice is always changing and evolv.
[00:03:08] So the process of discovering my natural artistic voice actually lies in the process of letting go of some of the limited thinking created by modern human stories and letting in the natural creative flow modeled to me by nature and allowing myself to sense it fully as a mirror to myself.
[00:03:28] Thank you so much for all of these wise insights.
[00:03:31] if you follow me on Instagram at Shannon Borg,
[00:03:35] I would love to hear your insights about this topic and any other,
[00:03:39] and I would love to read them on my podcast as well.
[00:03:41] I have come to for myself
[00:03:45] three stages to an artist's creative voice. Voice from the Latin Vox is a sound, a cry made with a mouth.
[00:03:55] the voice includes the. and also the body.
[00:03:59] That first stage of the creative voice I call essence.
[00:04:03] essence comes from the Greek word to be. This is who you are at the center of the circle.
[00:04:10] When you're a child and you pick up a crayon and you make a mark, or you sing a song,
[00:04:15] What that mark looks like has to do with your physical body, how you hold the crayon, how you sing, how you stand or sit, how hard you press, how soft you move. It's your chi or your key, the inner energy that it is innate in your body
[00:04:32] in a sense. You can't help
[00:04:33] but have this voice.
[00:04:35] So this is the voice of our.
[00:04:39] Many artists when they say, I want to find my voice, what they really mean is I want to lose my voice
[00:04:46] when I was younger, I didn't like my innate voice. I didn't feel like it was good.
[00:04:54] I didn't trust it. I didn't
[00:04:56] understand it. I wanted to lose my voice. I wanted to make art like other people.
[00:05:02] So if I want to lose my voice,
[00:05:05] I am seeking something else. That is not my innate bodily cry, that sound or that mark that I make when no one is watching. We'll come back to this.
[00:05:16] Stage two is evolution.
[00:05:18] The evolution is the shell as it curls around and around
[00:05:24] curl of the snail shell
[00:05:26] is when you start to grow outward,
[00:05:28] the knowledge you.
[00:05:29] The education,
[00:05:30] this is the creative voice.
[00:05:32] When you start to imitate your
[00:05:33] mentors, when you learn by copying as the Victorians did or as the Greeks did, doing master copies, taking lessons, going to school, studying with a mentor, going to museums, practicing, gaining experience, all of these things are a large part of the evolution of your creative.
[00:05:54] Billy Collins, the poet says, that's one of the paradoxes of the writing life, that the [00:06:00] way to originality is through imitation.
[00:06:03] This time is necessary to develop your skills,
[00:06:06] and many artists spend most of their. In the area of evolution,
[00:06:11] This is growth making, learning from imitating mentors and mastery.
[00:06:17] stage three is edge.
[00:06:19] The edge of your voice is where you push yourself outward into new and unknown work.
[00:06:26] We think that a shell, like a
[00:06:29] snail shell
[00:06:29] grows from the outer edge,
[00:06:31] A shell doesn't grow from the edge outward.
[00:06:33] It is pushed from the snail,
[00:06:35] the body
[00:06:36] and the shell grows from there.
[00:06:37] So the edge is that place where you inevitably are learning and developing
[00:06:42] You're always pushing. Outward into a new form trying something new outside your comfort zone. This is the edge of your creative voice.
[00:06:50] So you can see that this process is a spiral,
[00:06:53] like this shell growing outward. There's you at the center. That's your body. That's essence. . the main part of the shell is evolution. It's that wheel that goes around and around. It's that spiral that gets ever larger as you grow and learn and it becomes a resonating chamber for what you know and all of the growth that is happening in your. And then at that edge, you're exploring new areas,
[00:07:24] artists who spend a lot of time in the center, in the essence zone. May really just be working with their body, painting with their body and not their brain. People who spend a lot of time in evolution are always learning new things, always mastering and studying and grow.
[00:07:42] and people who spend a lot of time at the edge of their voice push it through experimentation. So it's very interesting to think where are you right now today and where do you want to.
[00:07:53] And where do you spend most of your time as an artist? it can be scary to be at the edge. Carol Cox on her podcast speaking your Brand. Talks about the three stages of finding your voice in public speaking for her.
[00:08:07] Stage one is called promise. This is when you discover what you want to say. There's so much positivity and potential here, and for me, this is essence once you decide what you wanna say, then moving. Can be very, not only frightening, but sometimes dangerous if you are saying things in your art or in your speaking that really challenges authority and challenges the way that people think.
[00:08:35] There will be a lot of people that don't like what you say, we have to be prepared The peril is where the edge of your voice pushes outward, and sometimes it doesn't feel like you.
[00:08:48] It's the undiscovered country. That place on the old maps where it says there be dragon.
[00:08:54] This is the voice you discover and you choose through courage, which is my word of the year, by [00:09:00] the way. And courage is interesting because it has heart at its core. The French word coeur is at the heart of courage. So that heart is inside your body. It's the essence, it's the center. And by using that heart center, , bravery and courage.
[00:09:19] You can push that edge further. This week I had a chance to attend and read at a memorial for one of my most beloved mentors, the poet and essayist, Adam Zagajewski.
[00:09:30] The memorial was organized by my friend, the wonderful
[00:09:32] poet, Cate Marvin,
[00:09:34] who talked about Adam as a mentor, that helped her stretch her voice to get bigger, to create difficult images,
[00:09:42] to really stretch the way that she wrote
[00:09:44] This is what she needed, and that evolution
[00:09:46] was what helped her push to the edge.
[00:09:49] This morning I opened Adam's book Canvas
[00:09:52] and read the first poem called Lullaby,
[00:09:55] about not sleeping, about the need to stay awake to the struggle and pain and humanity of the world.
[00:10:01] If you do maintain this state of awareness,
[00:10:03] it can be painful,
[00:10:04] but as he writes in this poem,
[00:10:06] you'll think of someone who is no more and someone who is living so, That her life at its edges changes to love.
[00:10:15] This line meant to me that the edge, the painful place where we are pushing outward,
[00:10:20] becoming bigger and using our full. It all comes together, the essence, the evolution, and the edge, and spirals back into your essence, yourself. It's all connected. You move freely within this shell. The home you carry on your back,
[00:10:40] your voice.
[00:10:41] So I encourage you to just spend time with your essence. Just draw with your body, not your brain. Just make marks. Just do what your body wants to do in your art.
[00:10:54] Two, spend time in evolution. Learn and master your craft. And three, spend time at the edge
[00:11:01] so you can expand your ideas. Get uncomfortable and grow back towards your essence to your power and your love, where you have the courage and confidence to create and speak, write and paint in your own artistic voice.
[00:11:19] Picasso said it took him four years to paint like Rubens and 40 years to paint like a child.. . So he was trying to get back to the essence of who he was.
[00:11:29] in 1957, Picasso made several
[00:11:32] master copies of Velazquez's painting las,
[00:11:36] you can see that Picasso was trying to
[00:11:39] create a master copy
[00:11:41] in his own
[00:11:42] essential voice.
[00:11:43] I encourage you to look at those
[00:11:45] images.
[00:11:46] So you can see
[00:11:47] how Picasso worked with his essential voice
[00:11:51] with all of the learning
[00:11:52] in his evolution
[00:11:54] and how he was pushing the edge of his voice.
[00:11:58] thanks everyone and have a [00:12:00] courageously creative week.
[00:12:18] Metaphor Mindset Studio. Think like an artist work like a boss.
