If art is a conversation, then style is the personality. When I think of style, I only consider authentic style.

N. C. Wyeth and J.C. Leyendecker come to mind. Their illustrations had distinctive touches that really work.

For a brief time I followed an old fashioned commercial art curriculum at a community college before digital tools were available to anyone with the money and means at home. We learned calligraphy with pen and ink, steel pen and ink drawing, soft pastels, oil pastels, paints and all that messy hands on stuff. It’s what I still use to this day, additional to drawing and painting on a Cintiq.

Students in the first year often got tied up by their desire to have a signature style. They ignored instruction that threatened them to  create outside of it because that was their ‘style’ and their selected identifier.

Me, I figured that a person talks as they talk, walks as they walk, and otherwise connects as they do. So I didn’t waste much time trying to make up a style. Instead, I created things and let the final appearance simply reflect my ability, resources, and interest.

Yesterday I began to see a characteristic pattern in the appearance of my larger studio drawings using graphite.

Maybe I have actually begun to develop a style! Not deliberately though. I think when one brings art into the world, it comes with some personality of it’s very own and the rest reflects the circumstance of it’s birth and the ability and temperament of the artist.

Look at these recent drawings. Two of them are only days old. One is months old.

The newest ones are on Murillo paper, a stiffer heavier toothed paper that takes aggressive pencil work well. The other is on  a lighter smoother paper, either Lenox or Stonehenge.

Larissa. I love the vibe of this. I wanted to complete this with greater detail but was so happy with it as is that I got it mounted on foam board and behind glass in a frame and got it on the wall.

Larissa again and I have drawn and painted her upside down with that cascading beautiful hair before. The inside tidbit on this one is her shoes which are designed to mimic the above the belt line contours of a Series 2 Lotus Europa car.

Kayla E. the dancer who I earlier depicted in the Natarajasana pose. Her beauty against the patterns of tile, wood, and leaf make me smile. I am not so pleased with the way I rendered the skirt, but it’s framed and sealed behind glass.

The things I love to incorporate in the graphite drawings are delicate lines, bold outlines, soft transitions, patterns, and the play of two or more graphite formulations.

The final sketches were photographed again but these tell enough of the story to show my point which is that a style seems to be developing. Not for it’s own sake, but just as a natural course of  experience and circumstance.