Discovering your personal style

Critics and artists often talk about a particular artist's style. We know immediately what it means for familiar artists; if I mention van Gogh or Mozart and talk about their style, you'll almost surely nod your head knowingly. It's something we can discuss: how van Gogh used bold brushstrokes to create a visual texture, how Mozart used repetition and variation to develop a theme through a piece of music. And for artists with a truly powerful and unique style, you can almost always recognize their work immediately, even on your first exposure to it. (I can almost always recognize a Bernard Herrmann score even if it's in a movie I've never seen before, for example.)

But for those of us involved, directly or indirectly, in the creation of art have a different set of questions around style, because it's part of our own experience of our art. Is it something we can consciously pursue? Is it an expression of who we are and how we create? Is it something we have control over, or does it have control over us?

I've started a new set in my Flickr account in which I plan to illustrate some of the examples of what I'm talking about. The set, called simply Style, contains the few photographs I've taken where two things apply:

1. I had a specific vision in my mind for what I wanted the picture to look like -- what elements I wanted it to have, where in the frame the visual components would fall, what I wanted to focus on and what effect I wanted it to have.

2. It worked.

As of this writing, I have 187 pictures on Flickr and four in the Style set. Now, admittedly, many if not most of the other photographs were meant as snapshots of something I was doing at the time. (The Oregon Trail Rally set, for example, is meant to be documentary.) But I've given myself the background task of looking for opportunities to exercise that list: to notice places where what I see creates a specific vision in my mind of what I want a picture to look like, and then to execute on that.

For now I'm limited to my cameraphone, in part because it's always with me so I can capture anything anywhere. It's very limiting for several reasons, not the least of which being the lag between pressing the button and capturing the image. (It's a lag of several carlengths at even low speed, I've noticed, which is why there are no pictures of moving rally cars.) And I can't change aperture and shutter speed to vary my depth of field... heck, I can't focus it at all.

So I'm trying to use this as an exercise in composition and framing. Don't just point and shoot -- think about what the picture is going to look like. Where will each element be placed in the final image? How important will it be in relation to the other elements? Is there a natural "line" that gives the image movement, or is that not part of what you're going for?

Lots to think about.

But how about you and your art -- where are you with respect to your own style? Is it something you're consciously working on, is it starting to bubble up from the depths, or is it still something elusive and frustrating?