This week has seen a lot of people sign up for my stARTs course.  Some are experienced artists looking for an inspiration injection and others are newbies.  Fledgling artists who have recently discovered they’re weird.

I think everyone’s a little weird – even though most of the time we try to hide it.  But artists are especially weird.  I mean, it’s a bit looney-tunes to get really excited about a dribble of paint, or a torn edge of paper or a smudge next to a lump.  Those are some of my pet loves, I wouldn’t mind betting you could match mine with a few of your own.

Yes, you’re weird.  I’m definitely weird.

Allowing yourself to get weird is the secret really to finding authenticity in your art. 

Over the last week, people have been doing my Free Workshop and following a course of step-by-step directions.  At the end of the week I read comments remarking on how they’ve never worked like this before, they’ve never created art that looks like this, but they like it.  They don’t understand why they like it because it’s new and slightly foreign from anything they’ve done before – but strangely they like it.  It’s DIFFERENT and they like it.  You could say the work looked weird to them.

I’ve been telling them to notice what they like doing while they work on their art, and also what they like the look of in the work they produce.  All these weird little preferences that are so unique in every individual are the building blocks of finding an authentic style.  Nobody will have a matching set of preferences. 

To my new beginners, allowing themselves to get weird and try out new techniques and methods of working can feel very uncomfortable.  But they’re not alone because the experienced artist who is used to producing a level of accomplishment in their work can look at the results when trying something new and feel they are back at the beginning of their artistic journey all over again.

Midway through, however, I did hear the cry “Oh, my work has never looked so ugly…”  Some responded to this by taking a speedy trek to the nearest garbage bin, while others were prepared to hang in there and see where this journey was taking them.  It’s funny how intolerant of the inevitable ‘ugly’ stage some people are.  I think it stems from the traditional process of creating a painting taught in schools.  You plan, and you execute.  All the way through the creation of the work, you have an endpoint in sight and while the painting might not be finished there is usually enough that hints at the successful outcome you had planned for.

Painting intuitively doesn’t follow such a predictable pathway.  I liken it to raising a child.  My experiences of raising children have encountered a number of ‘ugly phases’ – those explosive mustard nappies, that 2-year-old who forms an idea that they have to play out “all by myself” in the middle of the supermarket, the 10-year-old with a full complement of adult teeth, the teenager who has discovered how more advanced they have become in EVERY way than their parent…. Need I go on?

And as a parent did you hurl that child onto the scrapheap at any one of those phases?  I didn’t think so.

You looked for the best in the child while coaxing the nasties away.  Just like our painting.  We look for what we love – those lovely accidental marks, combinations of colour, textural yumminess that arrive as we build the layers.  The painting begins to tell us what it’s about, what is its strength and so we then par back all the distracting elements so that its strength becomes more clear to the viewer.  Then the painting is done – it can stand strong, with clarity, and be exactly how it is.

The ugly stage is underneath and a necessary part of its final evolution.

Feeling a little uncomfortable and awkward is part of the territory when you’re a weirdo.  Weirdos are used to doing stuff that other people don’t generally do, they revel in the awkward, strange and bizarre.  This is what we must do as artists too.  We have to see awkward and uncomfortable as normal.  Well, normal for us as we make our art. 

Accept that you’re weird, look for what makes you your type of weird, unlike any other weirdo on the planet, and celebrate that your art is an expression of how strange, bizarre, unique, and original you are.  One weird puppy!!

If you didn’t take part in the workshop last week and would like to hear about it next time it runs sign up here.

Or come and join a big bunch of weirdos in The Upbeat Artists Group – they are making a fantastic range of wonderful art.