About "Style" - and a few vids featuring Kent Williams

Paraphrased from Kent Williams:

He says he dislikes the word style and the very idea of it because it sounds like something from the fashion industry - something you can put on and take off. He prefers to think in terms of growing as an artist, becoming ever more honest in your work, and expressing yourself through your own language.

My own thoughts -

Too many times I've seen young art students use style as a crutch - their instructor shows them something they're doing wrong and they say "Dude - that's my style!". Then they refuse to listen or to try changing. It blocks growth and progress until they outgrow it. And what they're calling style is actually just an affectation - probably adapted so they can pretend like they're better artists than they actually are.

Here's the video where he talks about it, along with a lot of other things - its an hour and a half long ( ! ) and shot in the Philippines, where Kent hails from:



Here are 3 more (much shorter) ones:





And a correction on something I wrote earlier - Williams didn't meet Jeff Jones until he moved to New York for art school. That was when they would talk in Jones' studio, not when Williams was a kid. Weird factoid that makes me kind of sad - Williams is the same age as me, and was already having amazing short graphic novel work published in Epic Illustrated in the early 80's, while he was still in art school - when I was just about to experience my first artistic growth spurt.