Art from Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice

By Kate Kretz

This book guides artists through the discovery and development of the art that they alone were born to create. Through real-life examples and exercises, we tear down the cultural, educational, and psychological obstacles to finding authentic visual voice, stripping away years of assumptions, external and self-imposed limiting parameters.

We learn how to listen to the Universe and get out of the way when work wants to come through us. We construct a core foundation, unique to each artist, one that will grow along with them in their artistic
practice. Artists will discover their own singular visual vocabulary by mining their personal history, psyche, and world view to reveal new creative directions, and learn how to intensify and develop their core ideas to make them more resonant and complex. We explore methodologies to tap into the subconscious, cultivate breakthroughs, create environments to maximize the gestation of ideas, instill bravery, and do meaningful research to produce deeply layered works of art.

While designed for college students, professional artists will also find it allows them to get to that illusive
“next level” in their work; the one that calls to them, haunts them in their dreams, yet remains unarticulated in their practice.

In addition to helping undergraduate and graduate students who are looking to identify, articulate, and hone their vocabulary, it can serve as a tool for more established artists to step up or refresh their practice. It is the kind of book that artists will keep on the studio shelf, to pick up time and time again, as their responses to the exercises will change throughout the course of their career.

There are extensive lists, exercises, and questionnaires, anecdotes of art-historically significant artists and detailed descriptions of the methodologies they employ to tap into the subconscious, various types of research on creative breakthroughs (and how to apply it to your own process), helpful suggestions to create an environment / lifestyle to maximize the gestation of ideas, and how to do meaningful research to produce deeply layered works of art. While the tone of the book is often earnest and spiritual (in an “art is religion” kind of way), Kretz is aiming for a straightforward, accessible, kind-but-no-nonsense tenor, with some humor, and nurturing “tough love” when needed, to say some of the things that artists need to hear, but few people have the guts to tell them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: Feb 8, 2024
• ISBN: 9781789386639

Book preview

FUNDAMENTALS OF VOICE

1

The Art You Were Born to Make

What the really great artists do is they're entirely themselves. They're entirely themselves, they've got their own vision, they have their own way of fracturing reality, and if it's authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.

(David Foster Wallace [author] cited in Piirto, 2002: 145)

How do you become ‘entirely yourself?’ As artists, we dream of realizing the work that we were put on earth to articulate: the embodiment of our essence that we will leave behind. We want to discover, step into, and fulfill our own glorious potential, the best version of our human selves.

Yet, we rarely expand to take up that space. We lack the conviction to claim that spot as our own because, to do that, we must know who we are, identify our uniqueness, and discern how to manifest our most potent visions. Many of us have no idea where to start. We usually commence in a familiar and somewhat arbitrary place. Our course is frequently set by the teacher whose class we happened to land in, or the first artist who excited us. Often, over the course of our lives, we take tiny steps away from that starting point, while persuading ourselves that we are taking great leaps. Tragically, some artists end their creative lives ten paces from the random place where they began. They never experienced those giant bounds they always intuitively felt were possible—the ones that would have brought them to the manifestation of their splendid, singular nature.

Some artists are blessed by knowing who they are from the start. But many famous creatives found their true identities later. After letting go of their one-size-fits-all baggage, they homed in on what worked for them, as they gained a stronger sense of themselves. The arbitrary influences affecting artists’ vocabularies are many and not necessarily all good. The limiting trends of the day, the biting criticism, or the instruction insistent upon getting us to conform against our temperament can affect the work in profound ways, sometimes stalling us for decades.

Speaking historically, the notion of having a truly limitless choice about what we want to say and how we want to say it is quite new. Consider the limiting variety of landscape, figure, portrait, historical, and still life genres that were popular until 100 years ago. In addition, these days, art can be made from almost anything, but up until Duchamp, there was a very short list of traditional art mediums.

Following the narrow Eurocentric art historical model that functioned as gospel until a few decades ago, it was often possible to look at an artist's work and tell who they had studied with, or where they had gone to school. The training of each (white, male) disciple traditionally began by copying the work of their (white, male) mentor. The techniques passed from one generation to the next were often one step up from a paint-by-number set. Art history has been a false and myopic narrative of European patriarchy, complete with ‘fathers of’ Impressionism, Cubism, etc.

Studying landscape painting under a great landscape painter might have been good enough 150 years ago, but now we expect art to offer more in terms of expressing each artist's unique sensibilities. Most powerful work contains a conceptual base, yet students are expected to find their own by having arbitrary examples of other artists’ concepts thrown at them. We hope that one or two might resonate and ‘stick,’ even though the referenced artists led very different lives in wildly diverse contexts.

The very language used to discuss visual voice can limit a deeper understanding of its potential. When reading aesthetic objects and experiences, many use the words ‘style’ and ‘voice’ interchangeably, which is intensely problematic. ‘Style’ that does not evolve as a result of a natural process is the embodiment of ‘fake it till you make it,’ referring to the way something appears, not the way it fundamentally is. It is a veneer, a hollow afterthought technique hung on the artwork to dress it up. In many cases, it comes off looking like a clever trick, because viewers intuitively perceive its lack of substance and authenticity. The professionalization of artistic practice has created pressure for young artists to find ‘a style,’ to ‘brand’ themselves as early as possible. These efforts are almost always premature. It is like urging them to design a compelling cover for a book that has not yet been written.

I prefer to speak in terms of the artist's voice. Voice is deeper, manifested from the very core of your being. You earn it through research, experimentation, and discovery. It is a synthesis of the experiences, intellectual concepts, and aesthetic interests you possess, executed in your distinctive way, in the formal, emotional, and intellectual language of your chosen medium. When successful, the realization of your voice follows the gestalt principle. The combination of your ideas and the work's physical embodiment is greater than the sum of its parts and distinguishes your outcome from everyone else's. If we wrote down a single concept and handed it to a dozen artists, we would get very different responses from each of them, and some works would be a stronger synthesis of idea and execution. As Frank Stella once said, ‘There are no good ideas for paintings, there are only good paintings […] the painting IS the idea’ (Saltz, 2020: 42).

The art that we recognize as having singular, identifying features, those formal aspects that allow us to immediately see a work as ‘a David Wojnarowicz’ or ‘a Julie Mehretu,’ were not the product of a singular flash of brilliance. These qualities evolved as part of a sustained, life-long, ever-deepening investigation to articulate their specific and singular vision. Our voice comes from tapping into the depths of our own consciousness, then distilling the most powerful aspects of that awareness. Voice also expands and deepens over time. It evolves along with the artist.

Art programs spend years teaching history, theory, technical skills, and professional practice, yet when it comes to visual voice, students are often left to find it on their own. Most studio programs base their curriculum upon assignments prompted by teachers. Students often become lost once this guidance disappears. While skills are easy to share with a large class, it is impossible to ‘teach’ voice en masse, because artists are diverse and individual in their inspirations, motivations, process, desired outcomes, and effect upon the viewer. The standard process is that students generate ideas through trial and error. Professors tell them if something is ‘working’ or ‘not working,’ give them a few suggestions, or provide them with a list of artists to peruse.

When advanced students are left to come up with concepts and develop artistic vocabulary, these are often chosen in a cursory fashion. They expand on a professor's earlier prompt that intrigued them or repeat variations of previous work that were deemed successful by others. They often mimic an admired artist. While this is a great way to learn, if they never move beyond that point, it becomes like trying on another artist's clothes and forgetting to take them off. These arbitrary paths can remain a default artistic focus for years, even decades. Time passes, and the artist starts to intuit that something vital is missing. That ‘something’ is their self: they never really established a solid core or home base that belonged exclusively to them.

As a result of your singular life, you see the world differently from anyone else. Why would you aspire to paint conventional portraits or create found trash sculptures that resemble all the others? Your heart and brain are full of the memories, feelings, and experiences of an original life, at a specific historical moment. Most of the work I see in tired genres exists because these are default choices. The creators wanted to make ‘Art,’ and this is their idea of what ‘Art’ is supposed to be.

Even if you have never painted a barn and never will, you grew up with your own ideas of what art should look like, however contemporary or sophisticated. That is your default. We all have contexts that have determined our ingrained aesthetic/conceptual choices. But, as Chuck Close once said, ‘If it looks like art, chances are it's somebody else’s art’ (Lang, 1998: 165).

‘What's wrong with other people's art?’ you might ask. ‘I love Monet! I want to paint like Monet!’

Consider then ... what do you love about Monet's water lilies? The gorgeous pastel palette? The confident, efficient brush strokes? The tactile squishiness of the paint? The quality of the light? His command of color temperature? The placid, reflective, and abstracted surface of the water? The unabashed beauty and romanticism of the subject? The fantasy of a privileged, private garden? The exoticism of a lush, unfamiliar locale? The ability to capture a lucid moment? How can you take the specific Monet qualities that speak to your soul, make them your own, build on them, and leave the rest behind?

Those paintings owe their existence to a magical convergence of time, place, mindset, will, ability, circumstances, and vision brought forth through Monet's heart, mind, eye, and hand. He conjured them with the handmade brushes he chose, and the paint colors then available, on a day in the early 1900s. Photography was new (and achromatic), so painting was still the way to capture a moment. He made them at an hour when the light was perfect and specific to Giverny, France. They were realized in a garden he created, giving him a rare relationship with the waterlilies. If Monet was creating today, you would not recognize his work, because the influences upon it would be completely different.

Reading artist biographies reveals how circumstances surrounding each artist shaped their work. The historical contexts include time, place and contemporaneous thought. Influences related to personal environment, family of origin, intellectual encounters, and life history also shape each artist's voice. Even abstract work is influenced by these forces, whether it be impending fascism or hip-hop.

So, while you could try your hand at copying Monet's work and certainly learn a lot in the process, you will never be able to conjure Monet's inspired confluence of circumstances. Your attempt will be a shallow, affected mimicry. The good news is that you can create your own confluence of circumstances, and it will have its own magic. Many of these conditions are already established: your place in history, your origins, your life experiences, and your current environment are part of you. Together, we will unearth and cultivate these (along with other) elements.

If you desire, go ahead: try to paint like Monet, then try to paint like someone else who speaks to your soul. When you are first starting out, or when you want to make a change, try as many different ways of working as you can. Get inside other artists’ heads, hearts, and hands, make them your teachers, and you will sense which aspects feel right to you. Your job is to expand your creative possibilities. Do not rush to establish your voice, or it will look forced and contrived. Spend as much time as you need to ‘try on’ as many influences as possible but remember that they are only springboards. The end goal is to sculpt, perform, or embroider like the purest version of you, alive in this moment. You often hear famous innovators say, ‘I could not do it in the conventional way, so I simply did it my way.’ What they brought into the world would not exist if they did not trust their own vision.

It has always been a challenge for creatives to find artistic identity, but it is more difficult now than it has ever been. Global Internet access is homogenizing our experiences. Billions of people across the globe have the same memes, season finales, or perfume advertisements burned into their brains. The algorithms developed to keep our social media feed full of content based on previous behavior and preferences limit our creative diet. If we do not actively work to expose our minds to imagery and information that is off the beaten path, it will fill up with the daily, default environmental clutter of advertising and mediocre ‘art.’ The result is creative regurgitation: all those tired images chewed up and spit back out at the world. Innovative output is born of innovative input. We need to feed ourselves from unconventional sources to make groundbreaking connections. We need to gain the self-knowledge and confidence to create directly from our own center.

We are a sum of our unique, individual life experiences. The trials we have faced, the causes we fight for, the fears that haunt us, the oddities of our minds; all of these and more become the food for our spirit. The universe does not need repetition from the past; another pretty, but pointless reclining nude, sunlit but stale impressionist landscape, or old and cold minimalist cube. It needs you. It needs you to strip away all that clouds your genuine sense of self. It needs you to unearth and unabashedly own your messy, honest, and magnificent truth. And it needs you to deepen and shape that truth into an authentic core, one that will nourish you and your work for a lifetime (Figure 1.1).

An image of repetitive script writing, that reads, 'I will not make any more boring art. I will not…''

FIGURE 1.1: John Baldessari, I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art, 1971. Lithograph, edition of 50. 22 inches × 29 inches. Courtesy of Sprüth Magers. © John Baldessari estate.

THE ART YOU WERE BORN TO MAKE EXERCISES

If you are new to this art-making process, write in your sketchbook about the aspirations you have for your work. Even if the ideas are still vague about what kind of art you want to make, try to articulate them as succinctly as you can. Where do you think these aspirations came from? Think back to the art that inspired you to want to create in the first place. What did it look like, what kind of experience did you have when you encountered it? Did it relate to your life in any way?

If you have been creating for a while, write about how you arrived at your current work. How did you come to your subject matter, concepts, mood, or intentions? How did the work come to look or feel the way that it does? What were your influences?

If you have a favorite artist or artists, do some research on their life. Then, make two lists, comparing your confluence of circumstances to theirs. Compare geographical location, historical time period, families of origin, class or financial status, artistic influences, skill levels, education levels, popular thought, limitations, mediums, subject matter, tone or mood, inspiration, objectives, etc. Note similarities and differences.

2

How to Listen to the Universe

This is the eternal origin of art—that a human being confronts a form that wants to become a work through him. Not a figment of his soul, but something that appears to the soul and demands the soul's creative power. What is required is a deed that a man does with his whole being: if he commits it […] then the creative power is released and the work comes into being [...] and the work is imperious: if I do not serve it properly, it breaks, or it breaks me. The form that confronts me I cannot experience nor describe: I can only actualize it. And yet I see it, radiant in the splendor of the confrontation, far more clearly than all the clarity of the experienced world.

(Martin Buber [philosopher] cited in Calarco, 2003: 80)

There are moments in our lives when something extraordinary moves through us. We get chills, and our hair stands on end. Our chests expand as we hold our breath, in an attempt to stop time and prolong the feeling. We experience it when looking at a beloved, or when witnessing extreme acts of vulnerability, kindness, or bravery. But these moments can also occur when confronted with creative genius: searing words on a page, an exquisite work of art, a poignant note hanging in the air, or the glint in an actor's eye. Even if they call it by another name, artists live for the moments when they can become conduits for the transcendent divine.

I remember the first time I heard an artist speak of their creative practice as ‘channeling,’ describing how their work came through them, from somewhere else. I am certain I rolled my eyes and dismissed them as ‘flaky.’ Did we not all want to be masters of our own ideas? Yet, over the years, I noticed that all the artists I admired seemed to be tapped into some common source that I thought I had little or no access to. These creatives spoke about the importance of ‘following the work’ above all else. I began to suspect that this could be an inside secret, but, at the time, I was only able to relinquish limited control over my own process. I was making what I needed to make, but now, I realize that I also had other, competing goals. I wanted ‘success,’ tenure, and art world validation more than I wanted to find my true voice.

Then, in 2012, I launched a quest that seemed to come out of nowhere. I began research to comprehend the psychology behind every horrible news story that kept me awake at night. I started reading books and watching documentaries on misogyny, homophobia, racism, factory farming, trophy hunting, gun culture, and corporate sociopathy. For the first time, I kept a bibliography, because I sensed that I was building a kind of thesis, and might need supporting evidence.

A few years later, armed with a tremendous amount of processed information, the ensuing studio work began. It resulted in a series called ‘#bullyculture,’ which explored all the common denominators between these seemingly disparate issues. I had always been driven in my practice, but I felt a new urgency: suddenly, there were not enough hours in the day. What I produced surprised and shocked me. I repeatedly said, apropos of nothing, ‘I just want to finish this work before I die,’ as if my going off to the studio had a new, entirely different purpose. I had a string of studio visits, to ask friends, ‘What is going on here? What do you think?’ It was as if a meteor had crashed into my studio, word spread, and friends came to survey the situation. We would stand and take in this work together, wondering where these pieces had come from, and what to make of them. When I finally exhibited early work from the series, viewers remarked how prescient it was, foreshadowing the #metoo movement, as well as the ‘surprise’ US election of 2016 and the ugly aftermath of intensification in overt racism and misogyny (Argento, 2018). I had always allowed little signs from the universe to guide me, but this was different. A profound shift had occurred, one I was following, rather than leading. Although the pieces made everyone uncomfortable, it was unfathomable to stop. I felt in my bones that I was finally doing what I was meant to do.

In hindsight, I see that I had finally let go. I stepped aside and followed the work that wanted to come out of me. What I made was not about my ego, career, exhibitions, or reviews. It was not about the kind of work selling right now or being discussed by critics. It was certainly not the next ‘natural body of work’ in a progression that would make sense to people following my artistic trajectory. It was about the objects that needed to exist in the world to address the reality of this time, and I stepped up, ready and willing to materialize them. I recall thinking, ‘Somebody's got to make this work, now ... it might as well be me.’

If I was not open and receptive at that point, this series would not exist. What I created was the result of a perfect confluence of circumstances. After a few decades of workaholism, doing everything by the book in my career, yet not being where I wanted to be, I finally did not care who might approve of my work. I had nothing to lose, so anything was possible. At the time, I had an ample studio, allowing me to make the anchor paintings, and to work on many pieces simultaneously. I was extremely productive because I had easy teaching semesters. When not painting in the studio, I could embroider or burn wood at home. Years of research gave me a deep, wide understanding of the subject matter. I had developed my skill sets enough to actualize what was needed, in the most effective medium for each piece. I had dealt with several bullies in my own life, so I worked from an authentic emotional place. A few years into the series, in 2016, the United States installed the embodiment of my artistic thesis (#bullyculture) in the White House. I began to process his daily aggressions through my practice. Everything aligned to produce this particular body of work at this precise time.

If I had made that first aggressively confrontational work and scared myself off, if I feared people calling me an ‘angry feminist,’ if I worried about gun fetishist threats, or if I simply had another agenda for my practice in mind, the work would not exist. I was not looking to make a dramatic change to my creative direction. I was finally ready to relinquish control.

I think many of us live with this nagging sense that we could go deeper. That there is some elusive ‘next level’ in our work that calls to us, haunts us in our dreams, but remains unarticulated in our practice. I believe that the dreaded ‘creative block’ is not necessarily a lack of ideas, but that you recognize the ideas you are having are not what you were born to make. You can feel deep in your gut that you are capable of great things, that something wants to come through you, but you are blocking your core, the brilliance of your own spirit as it wants to be manifested through you.

Enigmatic concepts, specific to this moment in time, swirl around in the stratosphere, looking for a creative person to lasso them. People immersed in looking at contemporary art know that the zeitgeist of a moment generates work produced by artists tapped into it, who are ready and able to catch the ‘something in the air,’ and give it form, each in their own way.

Sometimes, the universe calls us, gift in hand, saying ‘I think this one has got your name on it,’ yet we keep shooing it away. Artist Philip Guston manifested one of the most notable breakthroughs in art history when he eschewed abstraction for a return to figurative painting. Consciously, he was growing tired of abstract expressionism's ‘purity,’ and wanted to respond to what was happening in the culture. Yet, he also described how over the course of ten years, certain figures repeatedly tried to appear in his work, and he obliterated them every time: ‘What I destroyed five years ago, I'll paint now, as if when the thing first appears, you're not ready to accept it’ (Blackwood, 1981: n.pag.). He described the struggle of what I refer to as ‘the baby steps phenomenon’: perceiving small advances in our work as monumental jumps (Figures 2.1–2.3).

Human consciousness moves, but it is not a leap; it is one inch. One inch is a small jump. But that jump is everything. You go way out and then you have to come back—to see if you can move that one inch.

(Guston, 1965: 153)

An abstract painting with a very little contrast, primarily a field of soft blending with more raw brush strokes in the center.

FIGURE 2.1: Philip Guston, Zone, 1953. Oil on canvas. 46 inches × 48 inches. Courtesy of Hauser & Wirth. © Estate of Philip Guston.

An abstract painting with a strong linear element that appears to be referencing concrete objects and space, including a buried shape that looks like the top half of a Klan hood.

FIGURE 2.2: Philip Guston, Close Up III, 1961. Oil on canvas. 70 inches × 72 inches. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. © Estate of Philip Guston.

A painted image of two figures with Klu Klux Klan hoods with a single light bulb over their head, and an alchohol bottle in the foreground.

FIGURE 2.3: Philip Guston, Bad Habits, 1970. Oil on canvas. 73 inches × 78 inches. National Gallery of Australia, Parkes, Australia. © Estate of Philip Guston.

He doggedly removed the emerging figures from his paintings over and over again, until he finally let them win.

It was 1954. All of Guston's contemporaries were Abstract Expressionists, and ‘everyone’ knew, that in painting, ‘the figure was dead.’ But his figures wanted to break out into the world. Remarkably, the very force he fought over the course of a decade was ultimately