How To Develop A Consistent Art Style
6 Illustrated Strategies & Advice
Introduction: Style & Consistency Explained
A consistent art style—or a consistent artistic practice—is a necessary pretext for a prosperous career as an artist. However, finding a unique and personal style is not something that falls from the sky, nor does it mean that you have to create the same thing repeatedly. In this article, we will discuss six proven strategies for how established artists created consistency in their oeuvre or developed a unique and intriguing style that made them recognizable and successful.
If we look at the most successful artists today, one can notice they all have a very distinctive and personal style or consistent body of works. As you might have heard, galleries and collectors are looking for artists with a clear vision, identity, or visual style—for commercial purposes, but also, from a critical point of view, these requirements are valid. To achieve high-end quality and in-depth expertise in a topic, technique, issue, or medium, we need to focus and explore it thoroughly—and this takes time and repetition.
However, it is also important to realize that these successful and consistent artists are not one-trick ponies. On the contrary, it would not only be very boring to create the same thing repeatedly, but it would also be rather dull to follow, collect, or represent an artist with the same works, year in and year out, with nothing new to discover. So besides being recognizable, you must also be versatile as an artist—a tricky play of balance between change and consistency. So the good news is we don’t have to pin ourselves down to one particular medium, subject, style, or technique. If people say you have to, they are wrong! However, being all over the place and hopping from one thing to the next won’t help us either—that’s not the versatility we are looking for.
So, let’s illustrate this play of balance by discussing some real-life examples of successful artists mastering consistency while maintaining an intriguing development and versatility throughout their oeuvre. By doing so, we have identified six strategies you can implement in your artistic practice, so you can develop your style and recognizability, elevate your artistic practice and increase your chances for success. Please note how most of these artists combine various strategies throughout their artistic practice, creating consistency on different levels, resulting in more possible connections with their previous work when taking on a new series or project.
1. Technical Consistency
We’ll start with the most straightforward strategy from our list; technical consistency—dedicating your life and career to a single medium, or even more, to a single technique within a particular medium. It is clear that finding a personal and rather unique technique is a great way to achieve consistency in your oeuvre, but also versatility, by exploring the possibilities and limitations of the technique in question.
However, finding a unique and personal technique is easier said than done, especially in an era where it often seems as if everything has been done yet. So let’s look at some successful artists who succeeded in finding a personal technique, resulting in technical consistency.
Case Study I: Bram Bogart’s Unique Mixture of Paint
Bram Bogart’s abstract paintings are marked by his ongoing exploration using a unique mixture of paint he developed throughout his career. He boiled and riped poppy oil with pigment powders and zinc white and mixed it with water shortly before applying it to the canvas. Bogart explored the possibilities and limitations of his process, resulting in a varied abstract yet recognizable oeuvre, ranging from textural monochromes to colorful geometrical compositions to abstract landscapes.
Case Study II: Mircea Suciu’s Monotype Technique
Another great example is Mircea Suciu‘s personal technique, combining acrylic paint, a type of monoprint he refers to as monotypes, and oil paint. His often edited photographic material is transferred onto the canvas with several monoprints, creating a vibrant grid-like effect, before reworking the image with paint, resulting in a recognizable technique and aesthetic. Suciu creates even more consistency by using a recognizable color palette, marked by blue and black-and-white, but also by tackling recurring concepts, such as pain, power, identity, existentialism, religion, and psychological issues rooted in the contemporary human condition.
Please note how they all experimented with the material attributes, revisiting the process and methodology of their medium before finding their trade. Find your own technical combination by experimenting with new surfaces—think Claire Tabouret, who paints on rugs, or Rémy Hysbergue, who paints on velvet—new mediums—think of Marco Reichert‘s machine-generated ink structures or Maya Makino‘s indigo dye for her panels—and new materials—think of Richard Serra’s recognizable steel patina or Fred Sandbacks use of colored cords. Numerous examples and numerous possibilities to explore.
So do not always go for the easy option, using the most predictable surface and the most convenient medium. There are already too many painters who paint with acrylic paint straight from the tube on a pre-stretched traditional canvas. Think out of the box, experiment, and elevate your art’s technical value and story, resulting in a unique contribution to art, a unique and recognizable technique, and a technical frame in which you can be free and continue to develop your oeuvre.
2. Visual Consistency
You do not always need to find a unique technique or reinvent a medium to achieve consistency from a visual point of view. Even more, you do not even have to confine yourself to a particular medium or discipline. There are various ways to achieve visual consistency across your artistic practice while using traditional or existing techniques. Once again, the best way to illustrate this is by discussing some clear examples of visual consistency by renowned artists.
Case Study III: Luc Tuymans’ Palette & Brushwork
Luc Tuymans is a contemporary oil painter examining historical narratives, themes, and icons from a contemporary and painterly perspective. Even though working in a traditional medium such as oil painting, Tuymans’ oeuvre is marked by tremendous visual recognizability due to his characteristic muted color palette and rather nervous brushwork—a perfect example of the personal écriture of a painter.
By doing so, Tuymans is as free as it gets to explore his conceptual undercurrent (which also results in conceptual consistency; cf. infra), going from painting a political portrait examining Belgian colonial history, to a metaphorical still life contemplating the trauma of 9/11, to an abstract landscape which is actually dirt thrown on the floor illustrating the deceiving nature of painting, or a conceptual series of lifesize numbers contemplating the calculated representation of death and sickness with statistics during the Covid-19 Pandemic. Varied in genre and subject matter, but unified by his visual consistency and conceptual undercurrent.
Case Study IV: Yves Klein’s IKB (International Klein Blue)
Yves Klein’s multidisciplinary practice—working in painting, sculpture, drawing, performance, installation, and photography—is unified by the constant appearance of his iconic ultramarine, International Klein Blue (IKB). Klein was in search of communicating universal truths by making those invisible traces visible in art.
Think of his monochromatic painting liberating the spiritual notion of color, his pure pigment installations, but also anthropometry using the human body as a brush or revitalizing classical sculpture in contemporary art. Yves Klein’s bluer-than-blue hue enabled him to take on any artistic discipline while maintaining a strong sense of visual consistency.
In addition, it is essential to identify what comes naturally to you when it comes to developing your own visual language. What is a recurring visual element you could amplify in your practice and make it an essential characteristic? For instance, the use of color—think of Ugo Rondinone’s use of fluorescent colors—the process of applying the paint or the artist’s écriture—Michaël Borremans‘ baroque-inspired painting process—or a distinct way of depicting your subjects—think of Fernando Botero’s chubby figures and even chubby still lifes or Georg Baselitz‘s upside-down figures. Identify your visual desires and attributes, focus on them, and develop that voice to be yourself more radically.
Further, please note how this visual consistency will also allow you to be freer regarding the subject matter. If you have identified your visual trade, you can connect the dots visually, moving between different genres and even disciplines.
3. Consistency in Presentation
An often overlooked strategy for consistency in the realms of the visual and the material is the presentation of the artwork or how it is finished. A common mistake numerous artists make—arguably preventing them from having an actual impact in the art world—is how they finish or present their piece. Let’s illustrate this with some examples.
Case Study V: Rinus Van de Velde’s White Borders & Titles
A great example is the use of white borders and a blank space preserved for the title or story of Rinus Van de Velde’s charcoal drawings depicting fictional narratives. His drawing-based practice is incredibly versatile, working in sculpture, installation, film, and drawing, yet everything is connected. His sculptures and installations are actually attributes and full-scale decors for his films and drawings, exploring fiction and reality.
Even more, due to the presentation of his drawings using artist frames and the natural frame of the surface with these white borders and the title at the bottom, the artist can draw any scene or narrative imaginable without losing visual consistency. This is proven once more as he recently allowed color to enter his drawings, first with colored pencil, then with oil pastels, allowing himself to develop further and keeping us at the edge of our seats in a recognizable visual frame.
