Lisa Congdon is an illustrator and author of eight books including Art, Inc: The Essential Guide to Building Your Career as an Artist. I came across her book Finding Your Artistic Voice: The Essential Guide To Working Your Creative Magic recently and immediately bought it. But so many times you read a book and forget the message within a few days. So I summarised what I learned from the book and rather than keeping the notes in my digital folder, I shared them here.
Although Lisa talks about art, everything she says and every piece of advice she gives can be applied to writing.
#1. Conformity Is For Birds
The book starts with Lisa’s story. When she was a kid, she wanted nothing more than to fit in. She wanted to buy clothes from the same store her friend bought her clothes from, studied with devotion Official Preppy Handbook, and attended the Catholic Mass even though she was not catholic or religious so that she would feel more accepted and be part of the crowd.
But when she was twenty-two years old and moved to San Francisco, and was exposed to art, she realized she was surrounded by diversity. She started to appreciate the value of being different and putting one’s own ideas — however weird they might be — into the world. She began to value nonconformity not only in others but also in herself.
Nonconformity is profoundly important for artists. While in mainstream culture, idiosyncrasies and differences are often seen as flaws; in creatives they are strengths.
They are part of what embodies our artistic voice.
# 2 As An Artist, Your Work Should Communicate Your Own Version Of Truth.
Your artistic voice is your own point of view as an artist. It includes your particular style, your skill, your subject matter, your medium, and the consistency with which you use all of these things.
It reflects your unique perspective, life experiences, identity, and values. It is a reflection of what matters to you. Ultimately, it’s what makes your work yours, what sets your work apart, and what makes it different from everyone else’s.
Your voice is formed over time through continuous experimentation and intentional practice, and from following spurts of inspiration and intuition down long paths of development.
Your work mirrors your deeply held ideas about the world. Those ideas could be sometimes really simple like:
- Tulips are pretty.
- The sunset is the most beautiful moment in the day.
- A simple grid is the most visually satisfying image.
Or they could be complex and complicated things like:
- I am oppressed.
- The universe is chaos.
- There is light in struggle.
As an artist, you should never forget that ultimately, your work should communicate your own version of the truth.
#3. Making Art Is An Enormously Personal Experience, No Matter Your Style Or Subject Matter.
Ultimately, as you work to find your voice, all the elements of your voice (style, skill, subject matter, medium, and consistency) become inextricably enmeshed. Your work simply becomes yours.
In fact, how the elements of your artistic voice play together is what gives your voice a personality.
#4. Enter Your Own Orbit
Lisa points out that “finding your voice” is a misleading term because it sounds like arriving at something final. It implies that once you have found your voice, you have made it to something final that will remain unchanged.
But the voices of all artists continue to change over time, simply by virtue of the fact that when they work consistently, evolution happens. They have new ideas and new inspirations, they develop new skills, and they try new things out of sheer boredom. Sometimes these changes are very subtle, and sometimes they are intentional and quite dramatic.
For that reason, instead of arriving at a final destination, think of finding your voice as entering your own “orbit,” where you are floating around in your own circular path as a planet orbits around its own sun.
Your sun is your aptitude and skill, your ideas, your style, your perspective — all the things that make your voice yours.
Your sun’s gravity keeps you steady, but you are also not in a fixed place; you are always moving and shifting around inside your orbit. And yet, because your sun has been formed over the course of years, you never lose your true artistic essence, no matter what shifts you make in your work.
Your Voice Is Your Story And Your Story Matters
How could you live and have no story to tell? — Fyodor Dostoevsky
When she was in her mid-thirties, Lisa didn’t think her life mattered much or that she had anything interesting to say. Making art changed her relationship with her story. One of the outlets creativity gives us is the opportunity to discover and then to express what’s inside us. And everyone has something inside to express.
Your story isn’t necessarily the liner retelling of your life’s path, though it could be. Your story is simply everything about you.
Your story is simply everything about you: what has happened to you, what interests you, what you are passionate for, what you find yourself wanting to read about, and what you find yourself thinking about as your mind wanders.
It is also your struggles, your fears, your regrets, your hopes, your dreams, and your aspirations. Your story is your background, your identity, your culture, your ethnic or gender or sexual identity, the color of your skin, and how you’ve been treated by society, and the privilege or lack of that you’ve experienced in your lifetime because of all of those factors.
“Discovering your story requires raking through your life to figure out what’s important to you.” — Ayumi Horie, ceramics artist.
# 6. Fear Is An Integral Part Of The Creative Process.
Making things and putting them into the world are requisite acts to finding your voice, and these acts often feel scary.
Fear doesn’t disappear as you venture down your creative path. As we advance, we grow new hopes, dreams, and goals that create new standards for how we think our art should be received and the quantity and volume of work we think we should be making. Those new goals and standards can lead us to new fears about what might happen if we don’t meet them.
But if we think, “If I don’t work at this, I won’t get anywhere with it.” This way, fear can motivate us to work hard. Fear can actually be helpful on the path to finding our creative voice. But fear of failure or exposure or criticism can also paralyze us. Fear can pop up suddenly at unexpected times, just when things seem to be going smoothly. It thinks it’s helping us: helping to prevent us from doing something that will embarrass or humiliate us or cause us stress or disappointment. But, in reality, what fear does is trigger quitting, procrastination, and numbing behaviors that distract us from showing up fully to engage in the creative process.
For some people, fear takes the form of panic attacks or hear-racing anxiety. For others, fear is subtle and under the surface, always looming. If we can learn to ignore it temporarily or if we could simply distract ourselves from it, we can create.
Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark places where it leads. — Erica Jong
#7. There Is No Perfect Moment
As creative people, we have lots of ideas. Our minds are swarming with them. But we also know that getting from our ideas to the final piece of art is a messy process. And that knowledge can make us feel overwhelmed, sometimes downright terrified. And we sometimes wait for just the right moment to take action on our ideas.
But there is no right moment.
The creative process is usually messy, no matter how hard we try to make it clean and smooth. And sometimes, “getting set up” becomes just an excuse not to begin.
Having some good tools, some basic skills, a routine, and a quiet space to work are awesome and super helpful. But they do not prevent failures, challenges, and expected twists and turns.
“Risk and failure are essential components of meaningful creative achievement and really, of any creative work.” — Kaufman and Gregoire.
Once we dive into the abyss a few times, we learn that what we feared is not actually that horrible after all. The challenge of experience might even feel really good.
So take a deep breath, summon enormous amounts of courage, accept the messiness and begin anyhow.
# 8. Embrace The Suck
When Lisa was at the beginning of her creative journey, walking around the streets of San Francisco taking pictures, she spotted a sticker slapped on a telephone pole that said, simply, “Embrace the Suck.” She instantly knew this was her new mantra.
In order to become a fully developed artist, she had to, not just accept but to embrace all the weird, annoying, inconvenient emotions that come with the creative process, including fear, self-doubt, vulnerability, and shame.
Moving through fear and other negative feelings and experiences requires accepting that they are a normal, natural, human part of the creative process.
Self-doubt is trying to keep us small and out of harm’s way. But the problem is that if you succumb to fear or self-doubt, your creative journey will move either very slowly or it won’t move at all.
Instead of shoving fear out of the way, Lisa recommends giving fear a big bear hug. She writes, if we look our fears straight in the eye (instead of pretending that they don’t exist) and give them some love (or boss them around a little), they will lose their control over us.
Anybody can learn how to draw. It’s what you do beyond the technical skill of drawing that makes you an artist. Your voice is what you can do with those skills and tools in your toolbox. Your voice is your ability to think critically, to question things. In order to make your voice grow, you have to keep feeding and taming it at the same time. — Libby Black, painter and sculptural installation artist, Berkeley, California.
#9. Ten Steps To Building A Skill
To build a new skill you need to follow ten steps:
- Begin
- Practice
- Keep showing up.
- Practice more.
- Stretch yourself.
- Practice
- Practice
- Note your improvement.
- Practice more
- Repeat.
#10. Strategies for Developing Your Own Voice
To find your voice, you need to show up, make art every day, practice the stuff you want to get good at, and give your fears a big bear hug.
But Lisa also makes some practical suggestions to change your mindset that will nurture and possibly even speed up the process.
- Make art every day, even for a few minutes.
- When it gets hard, don’t stop — keep going.
- Embrace the monotony.
- Create challenges for yourself and stick to them, no matter who is paying attention.
- Go outside into the world and be mindful of what you see.
- Find a space to be alone to create.
- Find a feedback partner or form a critique group.
- Take classes.
- Brainstorm
- Develop your vocabulary and become an expert.
- Get out to support and learn from other artists.
- Stay open to all experiences.
“Find Your Artistic Voice” is strewn with interviews and Lisa Congdon’s colorful sketches. It is a lovely read. Something to keep and read when you need to lift your spirits.
