A few years ago I was invited to show my paintings to a particular gallery owner who was known as a trend-setter. My stomach was filled with knots. Would he like my work? Would he sign me to an exclusive contract and make me rich and famous? Once at the gallery I carefully presented my original canvases but was met with a situation I had not imagined: The gallery owner lectured me about how I needed to start painting in the style of another artist.

“Never mind what you want to paint,” he told me. “You should look at the way this other artist does it. Everyone in town is looking at this other artist. You should be emulating this other artist too, if you want success.” I was dumbfounded. The fact that he did not favorably respond to my own paintings was a drag. Yet, his immediate lecture that I begin painting like another person filled me with nausea. I had to go home and paint in “my own style” just to get the taste out of my mouth.

Years later, the art world and the pages of it’s trade magazines are filling up with artists who are intent upon emulating that other artist’s current style. I am sure, in fact, that the Gallery owner I met actually spoke to many of these emulators, setting them early on their road to emulation. It is as if the rush to be “new and different” in the last few decades was now being replaced with a rush to be “similar”. The pendulum swings both ways.

I love art history. I do not care about the dates and boring stuff. I care about the stories of individual artists - painters, writers, photographers, designers- who maintained their own voices even as trends, critics and public opinion decried, or ignored them. I also love hearing about artists who were wildly successful and still had the courage to find their own way of working, even when it meant redefining themselves.

Remember, friends, that art making is not a pissing contest. It may feel like it sometimes, but it is not. It is a journey. The cockiness and intoxication we feel, the joy and sadness, the love and confusion, the blindness and strength that make up our personal lives is all fuel for our art. Making art is the same as writing your personal diary. I cannot write your diary and you cannot write mine.

We gain inspiration from the art of others, but each of us has muses and angels, I believe, who wait patiently for us to learn to trust our own impulses. Making art need not be like walking a straight line at a sobriety checkpoint. It can be a romp. It can be a dance. It can be a somersault.
The fact is… ( and you can see it already, I think ) that years from now, art students will flip through the faded pages of art magazines and explore the web archives dating from 2009 and they will smirk. “How funny that so many artists were trying to make art in the style of someone else,” They will say.
“There was so much possibility and there was so much happening in the world then, with the climate, in politics, in the cities and in science. The family structure, the search for spiritual meaning, the quest to maintain individual vision and integrity…all of this was part of the landscape.” They will marvel that so many of our peers surrendered their voice in order to fit in.

And hopefully they will come across your work. They will notice with admiration that you stuck to your guns. They will notice that the individual voice was alive and well amidst all the rush to conform.
I am here to remind you that your unique way of seeing the world really does fucking matter. it really does.