From Decorative to Expressive Art
Last Friday, I traveled two hours by train to a yarn shop at Tampere. Not just to purchase new yarn, but to meet a famous knitting pattern designer Stephen West who had been invited to Finland. While I was attending his workshop, I was excited by the knits he showed and the stories he told. There were silent moments. We, Finnish women, counted stitches and pondered about what we heard. We Finnish can look very serious, quiet and occupied, even if we are about to burst with excitement. Stephen put it kindly: “Finnish carry themselves well.” That introvert attitude is also visible in this recent mixed media artwork, “Self-Portrait as a Knitter”. The person’s focus is so much on details that the inspiration, the yellow spot in the back of the head, doesn’t have room to show up.
From Over-Decorative to Expressive-Decorative
Sometimes similar kind of thing happens when we create art: the inspiration does not show in the result. There can be so much decoration going on, that not much room is left for the expression. We cover the background with little motifs and surface patterns, instead of enhancing what’s already there.
I admit it’s fun and fulfilling to work with thin brushes, pens, and pencils. Making a circle after a circle is like knitting a shawl, stitch by stitch.
However, it’s good to add a little more variety and contrasts so that the expression comes through. It’s like changing the yarn or needle size once in a while!
And like in handknits, just when you think your work is ruined, you need to calm down and do the finishing.
When knitting, you sew the seams, iron everything carefully and add the final balancing details.
When creating art, you bring up the most important details and connect the dots so that everything falls into its place.
You Can Create Both Expressive and Decorative Art
Sometimes there are debates whether decorative art can be expressive as well. But you can be both decorative and expressive. You can give meaning to your motifs. You can let motifs be pieces of a puzzle instead of covering everything evenly.
More decorative-expressive art with watercolors: Watercolor 101 for Intuitive Painting
If you are a knitter, check this out too: Folk Bag Workbook
Look Back to See Your Artistic Style!
We often search for something new: new art techniques, new ideas, new approaches. When I pulled out a worn-out cardboard box filled with my old drawings and paintings, they all felt very familiar at first. I saw only the obvious: a skill level, a theme or technique. But when I stopped looking at the pieces individually and started grouping them, new insights occurred.
1) Look for Repeating Elements and Themes
In 1988, when I was 19 years old, I made a watercolor painting called “Self-Portrait as an Artist.” Soon after that, I went to study computer engineering, and art didn’t seem so important anymore. But now, when working full-time in art, I love to compare these two paintings. There are 27 years between them, but they still relate to each other. It is interesting to see how my understanding of being an artist has changed. The importance of ideas, visions, and expression has grown, and the ego and stereotyped appearance have shrunk. I see similarities too: color choices, dynamic lines and dramatic atmosphere, foundational elements of my artistic style.
If you are hoping to find a new style, it is easy to miss that most of the elements are already there, just a little bit of fine-tuning is needed!
2) Combine Past Ideas
In 2007 I began studying industrial design. One of the courses taught us to draw various materials like glass, wood and plastic. After seven years I realized that I could use that kind of imitations for more expressive art too. I could play with the proportions and compositions. I also understood that I could use the things learned in the past, more widely and more freely. Instead of having only some ideas and simplifying those, I can have hundreds of ideas and combine most of them!
If you don’t know what to create next, combine what you have done before to a single artwork!
3) Embrace Your Roots
In 1985 I made this watercolor painting and remembered my family liking it. For me, it was important that this image came out of my imagination, it wasn’t made by following a photo or anything. It was born surprisingly easily, and I felt a bit puzzled: “So quick, and everybody likes it!”
In 2014 I worked with a similar theme and again, with watercolors. This painting contained more emotion than the old one. This painting was about leaving back a certain phase in life and entering a new one. However, when I look at both of them now, I think about my country, Finland, and its nature. This country is a land of forests and lakes and for Finnish, it is natural to use them as symbols in self-expression too. I can’t escape my roots and the older I become; I don’t even want to.
When you look back at your work, what kind of themes and changes do you see? Could you create collections showing art that tells your personal stories and your journey to your current artistic style? See also the post about stretching your artistic style!
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Add More Creativity to Your Art!
Here is my abstract still-life with watercolors, acrylic paints, and colored pencils, called “Harvest Stillife.” It’s created very intuitively, without any idea of the end result when started. But like so often before, when I selected images for this blog post, I found recent photos that must have been in my mind when I made this.
I love the complexity and the number of details that can be seen in these shots from my garden. Many who struggle with creating art overlook the complex nature of reality. In these photos, they only see a flower, bush, and some berries. Instead of labeling the obvious, you can examine all the color variations, different shapes, sharpness and blurriness of the elements, depth, patterns, the way each color connects with the next … Then you can try to summarize what the hierarchy of all these factors in the photos could be, how all this could be modeled. It seems too complex to describe in a simple way. That’s when creativity starts working for the solution, figuring out what things to bring out without losing the connection to all of it.
A big part of the visuals today has a simple, graphic look. If you get exposed to that a lot, you might think that simplicity is the key to creating good art. I believe it’s totally opposite: complex things are the best source of inspiration. Trying to see complex systems behind simple stereotypes feeds our creativity much more than trying to simplify the simple.
The same idea applies to painting: Embrace the complexity by adding a lot of variation and then bring out the essential.
Painting an Abstract Still-Life
Watercolors and acrylic paints:
Placing a plastic wrap over the wet watercolor paint to add more delicate details:
Ready for finishing:
A detail of the finished look, done with colored pencils and a black drawing pen:
Creating abstract still lives so that they appear naturally is so much fun!
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5 Steps to an Abstract Landscape
Let’s paint together! The idea for this painting came from nature. Have you noticed that when the sun shines after the rain, everything sparkles! It’s so beautiful!
Soil, the sun and rain – even if they are different from one another, they all work together to make plants prosper. In the painting, the soil is made with colored pencils, the sun with acrylic paints and the rain with watercolors. These art supplies are so basic but they also work so well together! Watch the video and create your own abstract landscape – “Soil, Sun and Rain”!
More instructions for watercolors: Buy Watercolor 101 for Intuitive Painting