Aysha Al Bakry

I went live on IG with Mays to talk about how to find your style and creative voice. There was so much to talk, about we did it twice! You can watch our last live which we saved on IGTV at: .

We are in the age of too much information. I’ve found that often people resort to identifying with ideas, issues and art that they think others want rather then what breathes life into their own personal world and makes them come alive. 

What you use to influence your work effects what you end up making and what the world ends up consuming. 

I believe that what makes artists so integral to society is there ability to think and ponder things in ways that might not be easily achieved. We look at situations and come up with less then conventional solutions and ways of looking at things that are often more helpful then the black and white, straight to the point approach most people have. This ability to take the time to feel out the best possible ways of handling things is why I always encourage people to make art. Once you learn how to sit with ideas and play with them we become better at problem solving. The more knowledge and proficiency you have on a subject, the more chess pieces you have to move around. and ultimately the more creative you are.

As seen in real life and with the raise of social media, artists (especially beginners) tend to draw inspiration from the same creative well and saturate what we see and hear with more of the same. I’ve seen this happen with fine artists and even with dancing AND IT DRIVES ME CRAZY! it’s one of the reasons i refuse to download TICKTOCK! 

True artists must strive for more by applying a unique perspective and application to the art. Don’t share your practice with the world as a post unless it’s original. Stop selling things that could have been made by anyone else cause it lacks character. Use your platform and stories to show the experiments but stop landing there and getting stuck. Keep moving! If all your doing is mimicking or just flat out coping art that is meant to be practice you need to recognize that your stuck. This is a call to shake up your practice and reevaluate what your doing with your art.

Artists are collectors, they steal ideas they later mesh up and remix with others to create something totally fresh. They have a unique perspective or aesthetic that is the sum of all of the things they love. Unique to their style and interpretation. 

In this way you begin to have a totally revolutionary understanding of creativity. Nothing is original. but still it is unique blend of things that makes it new. You are a sum of all your influences and things you consume from the music you listen to, books and poems you read, movies you watch and paintings you gravitate to. We are shaped and fashioned by the things we love. So it’s up to us to curate our inspirations in the same way. Pick only that which sparks joy, interest and really makes you want to pay attention.

Your taste, your style and your voice is a remix. Collect these gems and put them together. Create a visual or literary playlist of all the treasures you have and save them in a sketchbook, notebook or store them digitally.

The main takeaways:

Improve your art skills through practice and creative play

Learn more about your ideas through research and combining them with other ideas

See connections between your work and others artwork

Learn how to critique art and examine works you love

Learn to organize and care for your art materials, tools and art making space

Questions to ask yourself (think bigger then just the art your creating, think about what your into on a day to day basis)

What are you drawn to? (pun intended) genre 

What do you care about? 

What excites and animates you?

What gets you asking questions?

What subjects or things do you wish you knew more about?

What materials do you enjoy working with?

Which artists do you love? why do you love them?

If you put all the artists and creatives you like in a room what would they have in common?

What Subject do you spend a lot of time thinking about?

What are the tools you can acquire and up your art game?

If you don’t have interests like that what can you do? Listen to lectures, debates, documentaries, read books, take courses.

Recommended Reading:

Steal Like An Artist By Austin Kleon

Big Magic By Elizabeth Gilbert

The Artist’s Way By Julia Cameron

Try these three curated activities while your at it!

Activity 1 - Create Your Own Creative Family Tree: Creative lineage 

As seen in the book Steal like an artist by Austin Kleon.

Your heroes  left a lesson plan in their work. Pick them and turn them into your teachers (artists) and use this to fuel your curiosity and interest. In the words of Jay Z “we got to pick and choose the ancestors who would inspire the world we were going to create for ourselves”. 

Pick one of each of the following: Thinker, writer, artist, activist then look for 2 people that influenced them and repeat till you have at least 3 generations on each person. This is your creative lineage.

You could also add a poet, philosopher, athlete or anyone you think is a role model.

Activity 2 - Art Criticism: Examine the works you love

Pick 3 works by one of the people on your creative family tree your most drawn to and ask yourself these questions:

What's going on with this work or idea?

What was your first reaction to this?

Does your opinion about it change the longer you look or think about it

Which area of the work is emphasized? How is that in line with what you think the work or idea is about?

While your here why not also

Learn the rules they broke

Examine their collections or their body of work.

Activity 3 - Creative Play 

Use and abuse all the tools and materials you enjoy using - Use the material you have and try every kind of techniques you can, look at your influences and how they used them

Try to mimic and copy the style of the artists on your creative family tree

 purposes. 

Develop forms for practice ( you can use this when your not motivated to get yourself in the zone)

The idea is to practice taking influence from different places till you come up with a mix of these inspirations and influences that cooks together in a perfect creative soup that only you could have come up with. 

Humor (“The main evolutionary significance of humor is that it gets us from the closed mode to the open mode quicker than anything else.”)

Specifically, Cleese outlines “the 5 factors that you can arrange to make your lives more creative”:

Space (“You can’t become playful, and therefore creative, if you’re under your usual pressures.”)

Time (“It’s not enough to create space; you have to create your space for a specific period of time.”)

Time (“Giving your mind as long as possible to come up with something original,” and learning to tolerate the discomfort of pondering time and indecision.)