Why does an artist choose to work in a particular style?
Artists learn everything they can about other artists' styles and techniques throughout history, filter this information through their own experience and temperament, and produce a style entirely their own. It can take years for an artist to develop a signature style, reflecting his or her artistic range and personal temperament. But an artist's work does not stop there. Artists must constantly undertake new stylistic challenges — trying out new subjects, media, and perspectives — to keep their work fresh and original.
Art: Always in style
To develop a signature style, artists sift through hundreds, even thousands of years of art history, looking for approaches that correspond to their visual and personal sensibilities. Some artists are drawn to innate logic and order; these artists are likely to take a rational approach to art. Other artists find that an emotional impulse drives them to create, and seek to uncover that emotion in their art.
The rational approach: Resplendent reason
The work of many artists can be characterized by an interest in control, order, restraint, and ideal form. This approach to art is often called rational or classical, which technically refers to a specific period in Greek history. The Classical Period lasted about two hundred years (500-323 B.C.), during which Greeks artists cultivated a highly refined sense of balance and harmony, based on idealized forms and proportions, restrained emotions and behavior.
But the term classical has come to be used for any period of art or any artwork in which these principles of simplicity, restraint, and adherence to traditional rules of proportion and perspective are paramount. For example, we find strong classical tendencies in Italy in the late 15th and early 16th centuries (the Renaissance), as well as in France during the late 18th and early 19th centuries (Neoclassicism).
Finding order in chaos
Art with classical or rational tendencies continues to be very popular because it brings to our busy lives a sense of balance and harmony. Their images suggest that perhaps there is a mysterious, underlying order even in our chaotic world. Artists working with a rational approach show that if we look carefully enough, we can find a certain classical beauty and elegant form in the most mundane objects and materials.
The emotional approach: Bringing emotion to the surface
Even during periods in the history of Western art that emphasized reason and order, emotions simmered just beneath the surface. For almost every classical movement, there has been a counter-movement in which restraint is replaced by emotion and idealized forms are displaced by exaggerated ones. When Classical Greek art spread into Asia and Egypt, this Hellenic style cross-pollinated with local artistic styles, creating an exuberant new Hellenistic style. This style conveyed transcendent emotions, rather than strict Classical ideals of beauty.
Passion for painting — and painting for passion
Comparable changes in attitude can be seen in Italy in the early 1500s. A new generation of artists couldn't identify with the ideals of the High Renaissance, which produced Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, and became Mannerists instead. Mannerist art uses forms that are meant to be highly subjective and expressive — very different from the ideal or realistic depictions of nature favored in the Renaissance. In 19th century France, Romantic artists rebelled against the cool, reserved Neoclassical style that upheld ancient standards of morality. Romantic artists rejected the classical ideas of restraint, balance, and harmonious order in favor of expressing action, turbulent energy, and passion.
