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Hi, wonderful humans. Welcome to another episode of the Curated Muse podcast. In this episode, I wanted to discuss with you guys a topic that continually comes up like a lot between working with emerging artists in our gallery alongside established artists, as well as lecturing and doing talks. One of the number one things that comes up, and I get this question a lot, is how do you find your own voice as an artist? And I want to be very clear before we move into me giving you some ideas and ways to look at your own art, which is really exciting because I was given this advice and then I used it, and it was extremely helpful. So I want to pass that on to you. But before I give you that advice, I want to preface this with if you have ever heard anybody say, if you do this and you do this and you do this, then you are gonna find your own voice and you are gonna be successful. If you do this and you do this, you will win the lottery. If you do this and do this, you're gonna have hundreds of thousands of followers. Anything out there that is touting having the end all be all information, the golden key, the perfect formula to get you from A to B is a bunch of BS. And so I want you to be very clear when you are out there looking for advice, tips, understanding that everything that you take in, it's gotta be taken with a grain of salt. It's also gotta be looked at that it probably won't work, but maybe it will, because there is no one answer. What there is is a bunch of different tools out there that you can put into your toolbox to somehow come up with your own arsenal of the perfect things that you need to get you where you need to go. So, my hope in this podcast is that what I give you becomes a tool and you can put that in your box of a bunch of other tools, and you can find some type of value in what I'm saying. However, if you do not find value in it and it doesn't resonate with you, then you need to not put that in your toolbox and you need to move on. So, what I want to share with you is that during COVID, I came across this podcast because as a podcaster, I love listening to podcasts. And this podcast is called The Draftsman. Stan and Marshall are your hosts. And I found them during COVID. I know that they took a break for a while, I know they came back, but I will make sure to link to an episode below that I'm going to talk about because when that episode showed up, it was very much an epiphany for me. I was like, this makes so much sense. And anytime someone asks me about style, I point them to that. And I also point them to a video by Ira Glass called, I think it's called Good Taste. Again, I will link both of those down in the bottom of the show notes on Hyperlux magazine under the podcast where you can find all that information about previous shows and of course this one. So in the episode, they talked about finding your art parents. And what I got from that, my interpretation, is that you find at least two people, if not three, maybe even four people that are doing things that you like. Now, as artists, when we start out or we're growing and trying to learn things, we mimic people. It is so common to copy, copy an exact style, or maybe an exact face, or maybe you'll find something that you just want to copy it technically, like looking at it and going, ah, I want to see if I can draw this eye or draw this landscape or this tree or this animal exactly how it looks. And that's great because we are learning hand-eye coordination. We are learning how to work with our tools and be able to put what we see in our head and what we see in the world to be able to put that on paper, which is great. But let's take that a bit further because doing that doesn't create a voice, right? You become a copycat, a copy of a copy of a copy. And we see that all over the internet, where you'll see stuff and you're like, is this person or this person? Their work looks so much alike. And there's nothing wrong with that. No judgment. You do you. But I think people that really want a solid career, people that really, really want to feel good about their work, want to come up with something that's just them. Like you don't want to look exactly like somebody else. So finding your art parents is really looking at, like I said, anywhere between two to three to four different people and finding the tiny ingredients in each that you like. Not looking at an artist and go, I love that entire style. I'm gonna steal it. It's like I enjoy that color palette. Looking at maybe another person and saying, I love it that they use round substrates. So maybe I want to do that. Maybe I want to add 3D elements to my work. I love this artist who adds bees to their work. Maybe I should do that. And so the general idea really is just finding these people that you admire and taking little tiny pieces of it that no one would even notice that you took. Because if you're like, I love this person's color palette, do you know how many people probably have the same color palette? It's not 100% exclusive to them. But if you mix their color palette with the way that perhaps you're like, I love this color palette, but now I'm gonna add beads to it. Now you've just created a formula that's your own that's not been done by either of these two parties that you're talking about. And then obviously a third or fourth, finding those elements, and it's creating this alchemy, this wonderful mix of interesting things to create your own. Now, when you do this, understand that you're not going to grab each of these ingredients from these people and it's going to create a masterpiece. You're gonna have to work on those things just like you would if you're making some type of, I don't know, I'm trying to think of something alchemical. We'll go ahead and go with, let's think about being in your kitchen. Do you need this much salt? Do you need this much sugar? Oh my gosh, it's so much flour. It tastes all bready, definitely needs more fruit, but it's the same thing. Like you're not gonna know until you put it together and then you taste it and you go, this needs more of this or needs more of that. And over time, give yourself six months to a year of playing with those different things to somehow come up with your own thing that is a hundred percent you where you know where they came from, but other people probably wouldn't. And I have to say, as an artist myself, I have been in this for 20 years. And over the course of my career, I really felt like I had my own voice. And people would say that I did. I would definitely hear words like, that looks like a you piece. I knew that that was your work. I saw it here, right? Like I had my own voice, but it still, it still just didn't resonate with me in the way that I wanted to. Twenty years later, I got completely fed up with what I was doing. It felt too formulaic. I had completely lost joy around it. And I went ahead and after years of hearing that information, I applied it. And I'm like, who do I love? What do I love? And remember, it doesn't have to be an exact artist. It could be a style, it could be the pre-Raphaelite style. Like I love pre-Raphaelites, but I absolutely love Art Nouveau. Well, what if I mix those two things together? You know, that kind of thing. And I just started to have fun, I started to play, I started to mix different things. I would never even mix together because what I love to look at was not something that I was doing. The things that I was creating was really visceral, it was historical, it had longevity, it had been around for a very long time, almost 20 years, so it has legacy, and it became repetitive, boring, predictable. And when I went completely off the deep end, and then I did a bunch of other interesting things, and all of a sudden it started informing my work, and it was a complete and utter style change. And I've never felt more home in my life. So, saying that, I just want to share with you that even after 20 years of feeling like I had my own voice, I still didn't feel that way. And I think voices evolve, and that's another thing I want you to take into consideration that you may feel very strongly through all of your playing and testing and trying and do things, that you have your own voice, but all of a sudden you have years under your belt and you realize like my voice has changed. Just like as we grow older and we change as people, the voice changes. The voice is not always the same. And I think a lot of artists think like if I get there and I find that one voice, I find that fine-tune ability to know exactly what I'm doing and that this is me. And it's original and interesting that you can't change that because it's so hard to find a different voice. That's why artists stick with what they're doing. Because once you find something that has even a little bit of success to it, it's terrifying to pivot because you're like, How am I gonna do that again? It took me so long to get there to begin with, which is exhausting. So, overall, I want you guys to listen to that podcast episode. I'll post it in the show notes. I want you to listen to that Iraglass video. I'll put that in the show notes, and just think about it. If you have not thought about your art parents, sit down, find two to four, figure out who they might be and what are the things. Again, like I said earlier, it doesn't have to be an exact artist. It can also be an art movement that you absolutely love. It can also be something outside of that, which could be design or style. Like I absolutely love this designer and I love that feel of what the designer's doing. Maybe I can bring that kind of energy into my work. So art parents can be style, it can be genre, it can be specific to a person, a personality, which is kind of awesome. And if you enjoy this episode, share this with somebody who you think it may help. And I will see you again in another episode.