Theme and Variation 3/18/22
Most artists enjoy diving down rabbit holes to explore a particular theme. We mine a particular technique, pushing it into different directions. Plumbing the variations, we not only hone our skills, we also discover the ‘second order’ connections of one piece to another. Discovering the connections of one piece to another helps to guide our progress: each piece further binds the group together, and if we’re lucky, each additional piece gets slightly better. It’s a sort of self-discovery - an “oh, that’s where my brain was going with this!”-aha moment.
But how do we balance repetition with exploration, and how do we know when to shift to a new theme? We all know those artists who seem to do the same thing over and over, many of them fairly successful because, for the galleries and collectors, their work is always recognizable. I find that I often see these artists’ work with a mixture of eye-rolling but also self-doubt — a fear that I am missing some subtlety of their traverse that is actually a deep-dive I’m not detecting. But ultimately, my eye- rolling mostly wins out. I feel they are gaming the system without adding to the intellectual conversation (and yes, I am that kind of snob). On the flip side, I find that my snobbery can be helpful to my own progress — a sort of constant self-check mechanism to make sure I’m not doing that.
The flip side, though, can be a sort of art ADHD: changing my work too dramatically from piece to piece can deny the work the thematic connection the artworks deserve and causes me to miss important threads that should have received more attention.
This brings me back to the original issue. When can I say that a series is complete, that I have thoroughly plumbed the theme, and the work is ready to move on to a new theme? And how much change in the old work vs. the new work do I need to make in order to clearly mark that transition? In the past, I have radically changed techniques which serves as a very clear boundary. During my scientific career I also did this, completely changing course to explore a very different set of questions using a very different set of techniques. The frustrating part of that journey was having to essentially start over both to learn the new technical skills as well as the guidelines of what experiments will answer my new question(s). But with scientific maturity, I finally found a milieu that felt rich enough to hold my attention. And now, artistically, I think I am in a similar spot, whether it’s maturity of focus or just a truly rich constellation of techniques that let me connect the old to the new.
But continuing with a group of techniques once my mind starts to shift to a new topic makes it harder to see that previously sharp thematic boundary. So now I find that juncture to be noisy and blurred. Currently, I am just as likely to move “backwards” to add to a previous theme (of which there are now many) as I am to embark on the newer theme. And I can’t really predict what will finally push me completely into the newer theme and close the previous chapter. Mostly I see that transition in hindsight, with only a vague sense of when I stopped thinking about whatever was driving a particular series and started giving in to that tug towards something new. This makes me wonder how other artists know when they are facing a sharp shift vs. a more analog one. I would love to know...