I am not a very social person. I seem social, since I like people and am warm and friendly; but I rarely go to social events, since I never seem to be able to find the time. Painting is very time-consuming, and if I don’t prioritize it above everything else, it simply doesn’t get done. As a consequence, outside of my open-studio hours, I don’t interact with people very often. Nonetheless, it sometimes happens that I meet someone for the first time in a place that is not my studio, and they ask me, “What do you do?” I answer, “I’m an artist”. The next question is, invariably, “What kind of art do you do?”
I hate this question. I hate it, hate it, hate it. And everyone asks it.
You may think that the person is asking me whether I’m a musician, an actor, or a dancer. I thought so, too, at first. But if I say, “I’m a visual artist”, the question gets repeated as “What kind of visual art do you do?” If I say, “I paint in oils” (which is not all I do), I get back, “What kind of oil painting do you do?”
The first reason I hate this question is that most people who ask it are not really interested in the answer. They are just making small talk. They are trying to be polite and pretending they are interested in me and in art. But I don’t like making small talk. I am a very serious person. I take everything very seriously. It takes a lot of energy to form sentences and explain things, and it’s always disappointing to put in this effort and find that the person who asked the question isn’t listening to the answer.
Sometimes, however, the person asking the question really is interested. Even then, I find the question annoying because it is impossible to answer in a satisfactory way. As I’ve written before, visual art is a visual medium. It is a way of communicating visually. Drawings and paintings are not meant to be explicable in words. The artist has a mental image and tries to form a similar image in the viewer’s mind through the use of a drawing or painting. If this were doable in words, there would be no need to go to the trouble of drawing or painting. A drawing or painting is not a sentence. It is not an elevator speech. It is not a poem, an essay, or a novel. You have to see it in person. If you are not willing to go to the trouble of seing it in person, there is no point in asking about it. And if the artist is foolish enough to try to describe their work in words (as I have done countless times) and somehow convinces you to see their work in person (as I have never managed to do by explaining “what kind of art” I do), the words you hear will spoil your subsequent visual experience.
The third and most important reason I hate this question is that I don’t do “a kind of art”. I do art. Period. I do the same thing Rembrandt, Van Gogh, and Edvard Munch did. Why is that so hard to imagine? The idea that an artist only does one kind of art is a modern invention. It comes from the belief that specialization is necessary and inevitable. But in art, specialization is unnatural. It stifles creativity.
Art galleries and art societies are most to blame for the expectation that an artist should specialize. There are countless web pages online advising artists that if they want to get into a gallery, their work must be uniform in medium and style and instantly recognizable as their work and no one else’s. Societies of professional artists also list this requirement among the things they look at in deciding whether to admit an applicant. (“Consistency in subject matter, style and medium” is literally one of the criteria for membership in the Ontario Society of Artists.)
Many if not most of the artists out there want gallery representation. (One might wonder why, since most galleries don’t do much for their artists these days.) In an attempt to be attractive to galleries, they limit themselves to one medium and style. This is why you see so much art out there that is repetitive. Many artists just do the same thing over, and over, and over.
I don’t do the same thing over and over. That would be boring, and I would quickly lose my passion for art. I have been told more than once that I have a style and that my work is recognizable as mine, but I don’t consciously aim for this, and I am not sure that it is true. I draw and paint what I want to draw and paint, and what I want to draw and paint is almost always something new. Even when I try to paint the same thing a second time, the result ends up being different. And I am not going to limit my expression in an attempt to appeal to a gallery or an art society. My independence is too important to me. I don’t want a gallery, or anyone else, to tell me what I am allowed to do and what I am allowed to say. My goal is not just to sell art. It is to make great art. I find it amazing that I can produce something that will last for centuries if treated with a reasonable amount of care. I want to create art that addresses the human condition, art that is universal, art that not only speaks to people today but will still be speaking to people a long time from now. I therefore do what the great artists did, not what galleries tell artists to do.
The great artists of the past did not limit themselves to one “kind of art”. Sure, when one thinks of Claude Monet, one thinks of impressionistic landscapes. But that is not all Monet did. He also painted still lifes and portraits of his family members. Similarly, Corot was a landscape painter, but some of his most touching work is the paintings he did of his models. Rembrandt did not just do oil portraits; he also did etchings and ink drawings, as well as a small number of silverpoint sketches. Sargent is best known for his oil portraits of wealthy people, but he also did portraits in charcoal, landscapes in oils and in watercolour, and murals. An artist who does just one “kind of art” is going against their natural desire to experiment with different media and to tackle different subjects. They are holding back their own growth and development as an artist.
As Kimon Nicolaïdes wrote in “The Natural Way to Draw”:1
The great artists, even if they developed a way of painting which was recognizably theirs, never really stopped experimenting. Titian, for example, continued to use different techniques until the end of his long life. Renoir grew even more experimental as he grew older. It is not that the artist is consciously trying to change his technique. He is changing his attitude to form and color—in fact, to life—and his technique naturally changes, whereas if he were bound by considerations of technique his development would become cramped. Committing oneself to a technique causes stagnation.
I have been too passive in the past: too eager to please and too afraid to cause offense. The next time someone asks me “what kind of art” I do, I will say the following. I don’t do a “kind” of art. I am an artist. I draw, and I paint. My preferred drawing medium is ink, and my preferred painting medium is oils. But I also do watercolour paintings, especially when I travel. Beyond that, I will not tell you any more, because art is not meant to be talked about. It is meant to be seen. So come and see it, if you care.
- Kimon Nicolaïdes, The Natural Way to Draw (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), 100. ↩︎