The style is your personality

by Tissa Hewavitarana

There comes a time, after you've struggled to control the paints, brushes and water for a year or two that you really begin to work with a reasonable amount of fluency and confidence. In other words, you're becoming efficient in your craft. This is where the next stage in the struggle begins – to be able to stamp your own personality on your work so that people will recognise your paintings even without your signature.

Once I took my paintings to a private gallery for an exhibition. The owner gradually went through them and put about eight paintings aside. I thought that they were the best of the collection. “They were”, he said, “all reasonably competent, saleable paintings but those eight had a reasonable quality. They all looked unmistakably as though they had been done by the same person.”

Inspiration

He also said when a viewer at once glance over a painting he should be able to recognise his work at once. His words had quite an effect on me and since then, when I compared the work with other members. In the annual exhibition the uniqueness of approach has always appeared to have been the secret factor – quite apart from their skill with the brush.

Every painter has their own style and you may get much inspiration by seeing a particular artist's work.

However, as you progress you may change your style. But I could see during his early years he had been influenced tremendously by one after the other of the famous painters of his day until, inevitably, his own strong personality completely takes over.

A style is an inevitable growth of both the artist's skill and his own philosophy. The style should not be restricted to a very narrow selection of subjects.

Flexible

Your style should be flexible enough to encompass all types of subjects and different ideas. A style will take a long time to develop. It needs concentration, careful observation of your technique. Study the painting reproduced have titled ‘Fisherman’ mending his net. Observe the mixture of burnt sienna with warm blues and gradually to the strong tones.

To make the picture lively a boat in a very light tone is painted. It was my intention to first express the quality of strong light using transparent pigments thus increasing the impression of light and luminosity. The light wash indicates the fisherman's met. The scene is a typical wet-into-wet painting with sharp touches added for contrast and depict my style.