How I Found My Artistic Style

Making Body-Led Judgments Translates to Good Art, The Value in the Production of Art, and Why You Have Taste - Bonus Notes from a Personal Training Call

“Oh, one more question—how’d you find your artistic style?” asked one of my personal training clients over Zoom.

We had just wrapped our weekly meeting where I had given him some individual tweaks to his routine, particularly around rest periods, understanding exercise volume, protein intake, and exercise selection. (I added in some comments about tracking lifestyle factors—more on that at the bottom of this article, if you’re keen on reading the notes from our meeting.)

“Let me call you right back,” I told him. I grabbed my phone and switched to FaceTime so that I could navigate around my apartment to showcase some paintings.

We got back on the call and I did my best to answer his question:

“Initially, I considered my painting something like ‘action painting.’ I truly was just slapping paint on canvas without too much concern over what it would look like. I just wanted to inhabit my body and see what I could create. I did this for a long time without understanding anything about drawing or painting and I think I started to build an awareness of how oil paint interacted with itself, either blending on the canvas or on my palette. I tinkered with colors and techniques but I was primarily letting my body lead.

“The most important thing that I found was that your body and your gut will make certain judgments between completed pieces. When you finish two unique paintings, you will make the call—not in a negative or a critical way—but you inherently know which of the two paintings you prefer. It’s the same reason that you gravitate towards certain art and ignore others, right? And you’re not necessarily aware of why but you absolutely have a more positive reaction towards one piece over others.

“Most often, that feeling comes from our bodies. It’s a gut feeling. The trick to improving, and how I consider that I ‘found my style,’ was that we have to translate that ability to make discernment in taste, those small value judgments, and apply them not between two completed pieces but between the moments in an active, in-progress piece.

“Very little of my ability to paint stems from particular techniques. I don’t know how to draw for shit. I think this is why some people have a massive artistic repertoire of techniques, but they don’t know what makes good art because they’re ignoring their subjective judgments. You can draw two lines and prefer one over the other. You can throw two ceramic mugs and feel that one is better. I just mix two colors and think that one sits better next to the red I’ve already applied than the other, then I use that. There are certainly objective ways around the same thing—you can use color theory to make the process ‘objective,’ but I prefer an intuitive understanding of ‘what I like.’ The trick is that you have to pay immense attention to what your taste is telling you in any given moment.

(As an aside, this is the exact same principle I teach in personal training regarding tracking. There are objective measures to put guardrails around what we should do to hit our macros or exercise with the right frequency, and tracking is a great tool to help you along the journey. Eventually, you’ll build an intuitive awareness of whether or not the actions you’re taking are correct. I can listen to my body and know that I need to hit the gym twice more this week or hit more protein-rich meals, rather than relying on an objective system like tracking.)

“Painting requires planning, but most of it is just putting one foot in front of the other and making little judgments along the way. And these judgments don’t need to be technically based—just use your gut. I’ve certainly improved by studying Impressionism and other styles that I like, understanding how to put a framework around the planning, then I just let my body lead the process.”

I explained further that I added representational tools to my skillset—countless hours with a palette knife and mistakes in accidentally mixing a horrendous gray instead of a calming dull violet got me closer to the paintings that I have today. I pull inspiration from historical and contemporary artists, but the primary vehicle for my artistic growth was body awareness.

Body awareness is the reason you have taste. Why else would you choose one piece of art over another? Objective measures only take you so far—the whole reason you hang art in your home is because it makes you feel a certain way. You can only narrow in on specific feelings if you’re aware of how your body feels and what it’s telling you.

This is why I prefer to make and hang art that is calming or positive to my environment. The impacts of our environment are immense—if I was to hang up scenes of war, violence, or other tense, harsh paintings, I recognize that my body would trend towards such negative states. The mind will follow the body. I think that these paintings and expression have their place, but I generally choose to invite calm and warmth into my home.

• I’d love to hear from you—which of my paintings make you feel this way? Perhaps other art that you have in your home? Can you pinpoint why?

Even if you’re not an artist, I want you to understand the value in the production of art. And I don’t mean the value that art has after it’s produced (although important); I’m talking about the value of the individual moments in the chain of producing a piece. This process and its effects are not constrained to simply art production—they apply to any creative endeavor, and I encourage you to focus on how this applies to your particular scenario or work.

The most intriguing aspect of art is the moment of synthesis between what is “known” in our heads (in an abstract sense) and our ability to translate that to something concrete. This “concrete” may exist first in our heads, then on a canvas, in a sculpture, or as any other piece of work.

The “concrete” might be a visual representation, it might be a line that represents a tree or a figure. I “know” what the mourning doves look like on my walk through the neighborhood in the desert in Phoenix. But am I able to take any aspect of that experience and “put it into words,” either visually or emotionally? Can I truly “see” the form of the doves? Going further, am I able to take what’s in my head and apply it to my medium? What’s a line that I can start with to capture “mourning dove?”

There are two interesting steps in the production of art. The first is the moment where we take an abstract visual snippet or idea and solidify its representation in our heads. The second moment is the action of making it permanent in our environment.

There objective and subjective measures of quality along both of these two steps. Some artists are more capable at translating what they “see” in their head onto paper or canvas. Some are better at taking an experience and blending it into the right composition to capture the emotion that they’re grasping to understand or express for themselves.

I personally choose to prioritize my expression of the latter—the subjective judgments from my body to determine if I’m on the “right” path in either step. Even if I don’t visually capture the dove, am I successful in creating something that satisfies the sensations that I had when “knowing” the dove? I certainly don’t ignore objective measures/technical skills, but I’m far more intrigued by the sensations that arise to tell me if I’m true to myself, the subject, the final painting.

Sometimes we miss. If we have gaps in both technique and in our subjective assessments, the art will fall flat. This is where volume comes in to save us artists—the answer is always to make more. We can’t always adequately capture (or sometimes we ignore) those incremental judgments and the piece will tell us that we failed. This is not a “mistake” in that it’s a learning experience to lean further into our gaps—whether that’s to build our brushwork skills or to actually listen to our gut feelings. Again, there’s so much value in paying attention to the sensation that one completed piece is better than another—we don’t know why we like one more, but it builds our taste, and we can only hope to apply that taste in individual moments of creation.

• What’s something in your life where you make these subjective judgments? Perhaps it’s photography, swimming, or programming? What form of expression can you apply this towards?

Bonus - How This Relates to Physical Fitness

I start most of my personal training clients with a system to track lifestyle factors which contribute to success in fitness. I explain to clients that tracking is not the goal. Intuitive awareness is the goal.

Both are tools which contribute to success in physical fitness. I work with these clients to showcase that tracking is an objective tool which has a low barrier to entry and an easy learning curve. The better tool, more difficult to acquire, is to let your body tell you if you’re doing things correctly.

I want all of my clients to achieve a state where they are driving the process. They build autonomy after our lessons, learning why we do exercises a certain way and why we should take sufficient rest periods and supply the body with the right nutrition. Much of this is only achieved after they pay attention to what their body is telling them. You can discern the difference between how you feel after hitting the gym once per week versus three times. You can learn to identify if you’re suffering because you didn’t get the right level of sleep, or if you ate Raising Canes twice in 24 hours (guilty)—then you can use that body awareness to make informed choices in the future.

Tracking is beneficial because it gives us guardrails to look back on the causation between what we did -> how we feel. I personally don’t enjoy tracking and I encourage people to build intuitive awareness as quickly as possible. Body awareness as a driver for success is the more advanced tool (up to a certain point—elites likely need tracking—I think of it as a bell curve) and I encourage you to see how this applies to your own exercise journey.

If you feel frenzied around what’s contributing to your success or failures in fitness, I encourage you to start by tracking. After enough repetitions on making judgments around what I did -> how I feel, you’ll stop needing the objective tool.

Reach out—I’m taking clients and offering free design consultations!

If you’re looking for help along your exercise journey with some personalized application of these tools, subjective or objective, please contact me by replying to this email.

I’m also available to help you format your environment with art to encourage warmth, foster positive feelings, and instill creativity in your space. The value of physical art is tremendous—I’d love for you to experience the feelings that a textured oil painting have given me.

Thanks for reading!