What Are Your Art Influences?

It’s a funny thing about influences.  How many zillions of impressions bombard our minds on a daily basis, from what flavored coffee to order in the morning, to the sound of footsteps when we get home at night. And yet somehow our brains seem to filter out the extraneous material and save what’s important.  Or maybe it’s our soul that recognizes what’s important, what to keep and what to throw away.

I like to think of influences as unexpected friends we keep running into, over and over again until we know their names and recognize their faces on sight.  And maybe this is the way it’s supposed to work.  While we’re busy running around with our lives and worrying about what’s for dinner, something else keeps track of what ought to matter.  A painting that jumps out while you’re searching the internet.  Another that shows up in a magazine, and more paintings and more until suddenly you realize that, hey, the same guy painted all of these.  Or the same bunch of guys.  Somehow, while we were worrying about our artistic style or how to game the market, something else was taking notes and pointing out time and time again what we were really supposed to do.  And sometimes it just takes seeing another artist’s work over and over again until we realize that there’s probably a good reason why our paths keep crossing.  And that’s an influence.  The good kind.  The kind we shouldn’t take for granted when we finally recognize it.

All this thinking about influences came about because I was cleaning my studio.  I have stacks of magazines, going back years. Dog eared copies of Fine Art Connoisseur when it was still called that, American Art Review, all of them with these colorful post-it flags marking the pages I wanted to remember.  And over and over the same artists kept appearing – Isaak Levitan, Fechin, Bongart, Wilson Hurley, William Merritt Chase – and contemporary artists, too.  This was back in the day when I couldn’t have pronounced these names in a conversation, let alone think about my painting style. But something kept prodding me to pull out the little post-it flags and mark the page.

In this world of ours, when you think about the millions of ripples of influence sent out by all the human interactions, the odds of something just randomly showing up in your life more than once are pretty slim.  To have it show up enough to recognize it, and give it a name ought to give us a reason to pause.

 

Comments

[translation companies]

I have never really though of who really are my influences on my campaign to art. It never really occurred to me to how important influences are in art until the time you realize that you are getting hooked to it. But I think my major influence was my parents because they are the ones who really put me in it. They influence me on how fun it is and awesome to be involved in art when I was still young.

[Kathy Hodge]

I find my influences are often not other painters at all, it could be objects— manufactured or natural—I feel compelled to start collecting, or a scene I pass daily, but the recognition is the same. I love how the brain sorts and stores. Like you say, it knows to put it away safely until it's just what we were looking for!

[Sue Smith]

The challenge is identifying what it is that I'm seeing in a work that interests me - for years I admired Richard Diebenkorn's abstract paintings, thinking it was his style that attracted me. Only recently I realized the ideas he was exploring regarding color relationships and line quality were what really got me to think about painting. When I look at the painters that continue to interest me I'm not really looking to duplicate their style but to understand something I haven't yet mastered, so I agree with your point about personal development having a lot to do with whether we are still curious about an artist or not.

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[Michele Kirkman]

I wonder how much a person draws on their art influences typically? How many artists adopt a style that they like or simply admire it and take note of it. I have a ton of old art books going back years too. It's interesting to look again at something I liked 20 years ago and not be as keen on it years later. I guess that has something to do with personal development though.

[Sue Smith]

Kathryn, I just warmed myself up enjoying your lovely website andthe Southwest paintings! Thanks for the Robert Henri quote - its so true.

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[Kathryn Willis]

I have been reading Robert Henri's "The Art Spirit" for about the tenth time. He says, "No knowledge is so easily found as when it is needed." It's our job to keep our eyes open.