Blog

When I first began painting seriously, I often heard the phrase “finding your voice.” It was usually offered as shorthand for developing a personal style, something that would distinguish your work from others. But as an artist whose work was still emerging, the concept felt perplexing. How could I find my voice when I was still learning how to paint?

Early on, a seasoned artist told me how important it was to maintain a “consistency of style and voice” in my work. At the time, that advice confused me. I was experimenting constantly, trying different approaches and exploring a wide range of subjects. It felt less like I had a voice and more like I was searching for one.

Workshops, demonstrations, and online tutorials became an important part of my education. They gave me valuable tools and expanded my understanding of what was possible with pastel. Yet something interesting happened when I stood in front of the easel. Even when incorporating lessons I had learned, I still painted the way I paint. My hand returned to certain marks, certain color relationships, certain ways of building a painting.

There was a time when this frustrated me. I admired the work of many artists and studied their processes carefully, hoping to capture something of what made their work so compelling. But no matter how closely I observed, I could never quite paint the way they did.

Over time I began to understand that this was not a limitation. It was the beginning of a voice.

One of the misconceptions about artistic voice is that it must be tied to a narrow subject. I have found the opposite to be true in my own work. I love to paint a wide range of subjects: city scenes, books, food and wine, landscapes, portraits, and figures. The variety does not dilute my voice. If anything, it expands it. Each subject becomes another way of expressing the same point of view.

For example, paintings such as Shantung Street, In Strength and Beauty, and Bound and Beautiful could hardly be more different in subject matter. Yet viewers often recognize them as coming from the same hand. The subject may change, but the sensibility behind it remains.

Voice is not discovered in a single moment. It reveals itself gradually over years of work.

You may also have heard the phrase “make it your own.” The idea suggests that we begin with the nucleus of an idea, a subject or moment that catches our attention, and interpret it through our own sensibilities. Technique can be taught and observation can be trained, but the way we ultimately translate what we see onto the surface carries the imprint of who we are.

I was recently discussing this idea with W. Truman Hosner, who spoke about the importance of finding and trusting one's own artistic voice. In that conversation he shared a quote from Nietzsche that resonates deeply with the artistic journey:

“There exists in the world a single path along which no one can go except you. Where does it lead? Do not ask. Go along it.”

Perhaps that is the real task for an artist. Not to chase a voice or force it into being, but simply to keep working. To observe, to experiment, to learn, and to trust that over time something unmistakably personal will begin to emerge.

And when it does, it may not look the way you expected. It may appear quietly, woven through paintings of city streets, shelves of books, a glass of wine, or the human figure. But if you follow that path long enough, you may discover that the voice you were searching for was there all along, waiting patiently to reveal itself through the work.