Someone asked me recently to help them develop their work in a more abstract style, which led to me reflecting on the word ‘style’. We all identify with other artists depending on their style, we are drawn to their way of working and want to experiment with it in our own work, but whilst that’s a great way to learn about what we like and what we find exciting, we ultimately need to develop our own unique marks and ways of manipulating paint. Your style is not something that can be forced or learnt, it just develops over time. To start with the aim to create work in a style would lack authenticity.

Equally artists are expected to select a genre; landscape, portrait, abstract, still life and creating work away from thier genre can create confusion. I recently demonstrated a still life painting for an online lesson and someone commented “That’s different for you”. My reply was that I teaching a range of ways to create in order to enable students find their personal path. But with that said why would it be a surprise to find an artist moving between genres? Until the early 18c artists had to choose a genre, and were paid accordingly: historical and biblical artists were paid a higher rate than portraitists. Surely we have more freedom now, we shouldn’t have to choose!

But what I want to discuss is when do we refer to an abstract artwork in terms of genre and in what context do we refer to the style of this work?

Let me begin with the premise that genre and style are slippery terms. I liken their closeness and confusion over when to use which term to that of realism and naturalism. Or perhaps the Internet and the web. Even in historical contexts, realism and naturalism belonged to separate artistic movements and have (slightly) different characteristics. Yet practitioners the world over refer to realism and naturalism as one and the same. Similarly, we often use the words Internet and web as interchangeable terms, yet they are not. The web only forms part of the larger Internet and the two are not one and the same. So it is with genre and style in art.

When I taught in college I used to explain genre to students in terms of films or music in a store. Every movie gets categorised by its type into one section in the shop; comedy v crime, as with music; garage v hip hop.

When I explain the difference between genre and style to more mature students of art , I often use the analogy of Marxism and Communism (though probably an oversimplification). In a way, one is the theory and the other is this theory in practice. So genre should refer to the literal subject of the work, it’s content, and style should refer to the manner in which a work is produced, it’s form.

These definitions may help:

Genre: kind, category or sort, esp of literary or artistic work

Style: the manner in which something is expressed or performed, considered as separate from its intrinsic content, meaning etc.

But as with all things it’s not simple, can we refer to abstract art as both a genre and a style? Often someone will say they want to work more abstractly and I know they mean they want their work to be looser, freer, more expressive. They are thinking in terms of HOW. I tend to correct them and say “ah, you mean more painterley!” Why the distinction ? My personal view is that abstract art is too important a genre to be regarded as simply a style. It is a complex, meaningful and complicated genre with a long historic context. Like any genre it involves an understanding of the main principles of colour, value, line and shape. It’s creation is a struggle, decisions have to be made, problems need to be solved. These aspects concern far more than how the paint is applied, or the size of brush we use. Like all creative journeys it brings both joy and angst purely because it’s not just about the HOW, it’s as much, if not more about the WHY and WHAT.

Within abstract art the WHAT can cause confusion as there are artists who work from a visual reference, this is often called organic abstraction, and those whose subject is purely shapes, lines and colours; non-objective painting. There are also those, myself included, who respond to both! I often don’t think of my own work as being abstract because I can see the visual references!

… if you leave one of my classes with more questions than answers, that’s a good thing!

One could rightly argue all this doesn’t really matter and that debating over terms is just semantics. But such debates have certainly created some lengthy discussions in my art classes in recent years and I would hope have enriched my students’ understanding of art. As I often say if you leave one of my classes with more questions than answers, that’s a good thing! There are solutions and formulas, but there is no easy solution, no magic formula, no recipe for a style, the nature of creating is always worthy of thought, debate and discussion.

I run a scheduled course called Approaches to Abstraction where these aspects are investigated further! If you are interested click on the link to sign up for an alert when it runs again, and get priority booking & early bird price!