Finding your own style as an artist.

Many years ago when I first began to create flame worked glass beads and jewelry I worried that as a new artist I didn't have a 'style'. I didn't have a body of work that someone might say 'oh, I know that artist!'  I did not yet have a collection of pieces with an identity or a discernible similarity in each piece. A cohesiveness.
 I've since learned that acquiring a style of your own as an artist is a natural and certain evolution.

I spent some of my growing up years on a ranch in the Upper Halfway area of the Peace country in British Columbia, Canada. We moved there while in my teens so I wasn't really crazy about being there at the time, yet there were things about it that I grew to love. 

We lived on 2400 acres of pristine land that sat next to the long and winding Halfway River.  There was a natural spring of water that bubbled ..happily, it seemed to me,  up out the ground on a hill above our house, even in the dead of winter! Like some great amazing life force.

Some days I would sneak away with my battery operated radio [have I mentioned that I am 100?] on the back of Brumbee..a gentle gelding who was happiest when his nose was pointed toward the barn. Until then, he could only muster a plod, or if he was feeling generous a [resentful] trot.
I'd find a pretty spot, tie my horse to a bush, and while he munched on the grass I lay listening to the birds and the music on the transistor radio, watching the treetops move with the drifting clouds. Plotting and Day dreaming. 

My own photo of the Peace River in northern British Columbia, Canada

The countryside in the wilds of British Columbia are compelling and beautiful. The colors of the earth are always changing. There's a distinct perfume to each of the seasons. The new sap running through the birch in the spring, the heady, sweet scent of fuchsia colored rose hips in the summer, the slightly acrid smell of the decomposing undergrowth in the fall and somewhere, always a faint smell of smoke hanging in the dense, icy air of winter.
All of these elements have somehow carved their way into my bones and no matter how far I travel or how many years pass, they'll forever be a part of me.

~❁~

In time, the basic process of bead making became second nature and I found that as I relaxed, my own unique style began to emerge.  The simple things that made me happy began to show up in the jewelry. I used rods of glass in the same subdued colors you might find in nature. Rich ochres, sage greens, the tender robin egg colored blues. I designed using texture and movement, petal and leaf curved line.

 

Deborah Lambson bracelet 'dreaming'

While living in the Middle East with my husband, I took a small silversmithing class. The teacher is a master who has designed jewelry for some of the wealthiest Sheiks in Qatar.  He told us stories of rooms built for the sole purpose of holding row upon row of cufflinks. 
I enjoyed the class and began to take satisfaction in the construction of my own organic style clasps that mimicked the organic style that I love. The act of hand fabricating the closure lent another layer of crafting to each piece.  

I don't think we need to struggle too much with finding 'our style' as it easily lies within each of us as unique and as hard to abandon as our own fingerprint. 
Our 'style' is simply an outward expression of those things that interest us, bring a smile, pique our curiosity or add joy to our day. 

It may be a struggle to fearlessly express ourselves without any editing but it seems to me that once we can do that we'll quickly see our own unique fingerprint of work. Identifiable and unmistakably yours.

Paul Coelho in the Alchemist says it this way,

" You will never be able to escape from your heart. So it is better to listen to what it has to say."