Finding Your Voice

Posted on Thursday, Oct 24, 2024 | Mental Health, Art, Creativity, Mental Illness, Voice
Alex explains the concept of voice in creativity, how to find your artistic voice and why it’s so important

Show Notes

Summary

Alex explains the concept of voice in creativity, how to find your artistic voice and why it’s so important.

Show Notes

Transcript

In 1985 Stephen Hawking finally lost his ability to speak. From then on he communicated verbally via a text-to-speech device called the Equalizer that was attached to his wheelchair and controlled, initially with his hand, and later by his cheek muscle when he lost the use of this hand. The device spoke in that now iconic robotic American accent, despite the fact that Hawking was English. At various points later in his life, he was given the opportunity to change the voice, but refused stating that he “preferred it and identified with it”. It’s also fair to say that he was instantly recognisable because that voice. Voices are important in terms of our identity, and how we are perceived, just go ask Morgan Freeman. But voices comes in many forms, not just the noises that come out of our mouth hole.

Hawking was intensely creative, and was responsible for some of the most important discoveries in science, yet he was profoundly disabled. However, he stated “My disabilities have not been a hindrance; they have shaped my life and made me who I am.” In every possible sense, his disabilities were part of his voice, and everything he became. He was a one off, but then, we all are.

Humans have very different personalities, different lives, different lifestyles, physiologies, world views, upbringings, cultures, prejudices, beliefs and therefore they tend to have different tastes. Even people from roughly the same background and world view may have some overlapping tastes, but still be quite divergent, often radically so. And therefore the idea that you can make a piece of art that is universally liked is ludicrous, it’s just not possible.

This is all awesome and as it should be, because if everyone likes anything that anyone makes, the world would be a boring place, and no progress would ever happen, there would be no or little novelty, and beauty couldn’t exist. Culture emerges through variety. But variety isn’t distributed uniformly through culture.

In statistics, you have the concept of the normal distribution. Often referred to as the bell curve. This is what you get when you take measurements across a population and create a chart that shows how many people have each measurement, the measurement being along the x-axis. Google it, you’ll recognise the distinctive bell shape. The obvious example is adult heights. You have a small number of very short people and the same for very tall people, in between all the heights of the everyday folk around you. This makes a bell shape with the average height bang in the middle. What this tells us that the majority of people cluster around a relatively small number of heights. The same goes shoes size, IQ and any number of other measures. This is a basic statistical reality. A fact of the universe. There’s all sorts out there, but mostly, if you zoom out, and look at them en masse, people are pretty similar.

This goes for culture too. There’s a huge diversity of creative outputs out there. Go poke around on Spotify and you’ll find an insane number of artists across a mind boggling array of styles genres and styles. However, despite the quality of their music, cosmic progressive death metal band Blood Incantation are not selling out 10 shows at Wembley Stadium, whereas Taylor Swift is. Go figure.

I can recommend the new Blood Incantation, it’s really rather good. I’ve not heard the new Swift album though. I’m sure she’ll get over it.

Like human heights, there is a middle ground of stuff that’s more common and ubiquitous. Stuff that’s considered to be more socially and culturally desirable sees more exposure and therefore more engagement than more esoteric stuff. This is just simple statistics, where there is variance, there is both uniformity and extremes.

These days there are 8 billion people on the surface of this little wet rock we call Earth, most of which are perpetually wired into this thing called the internet where they spend their time swapping cultures and really mixing things up. So now we have legions of English speaking teenage girls worshipping Korean boy bands that who sing in a language that they themselves don’t speak. This is all marvellous.

Along with the prevalent or popular culture wherever you find yourself, there are a million micro-cultures that are like a gumbo with ingredients from across the cultural spectrum. These are cooked up as all the different flavours of weirdo seek each other out and celebrate their shared oddity. And these little, or sometimes huge, cliques sprout new sub-cliques, which them sprout their own tendrils and so on. As I say marvellous.

And as we discover more things, more technology, more about the human mind, more about the universe and the world around us, new inputs come in, new people have new ability to create even more strange new things and form cultures around them.

So for anyone looking to scratch a cultural itch, there’s a hell of a lot of it out there to choose from now. The flip side of this from the point of view of a creator, is that one one hand, there’s 8 billion potential eyeballs, on the other hand, those eyeballs are is bombarded with diverse and manifold choices for things that they can consume. And therefore it’s quite hard to reach your potential audience, especially since the arrival of things like the social networks, Instagram particularly, but also now TikTok, YouTube, Netflix and so on. Increasingly these businesses are mediating what people see. This has a countering effect on the diversification of culture since these networks have algorithms that are optimised make money for their owners, and therefore will favour one creator over another in the competition for eyeballs and attention in such a way to maximise revenues. This tends to favour creators and influencers that are already very popular, and squeeze out niche players. So the majority of people are exposed to only a small sliver of the global melange.

Unless your lucky enough to be able and inclined to make stuff that pleases the algorithms and therefore this middle ground, you need to seek out your audience, your clique. So not only do you not have to please everyone, you just need to find your tribe, and please them. It’s not exactly easy to do this, but it is, thanks to the interwebs, possible. And when you find them, they will support you.

How do you please them, perhaps even before you find them? Easy, you please yourself, since, by definition, you are one of them! Actually, it’s kinda hard to make stuff that doesn’t please you. Since how do you know if you have produced something good? You like it! This is not a facetious point. And perhaps not as obvious as it seems. From an observers perspective, ideas and creations are magic unicorn poo that flows from some mystical, esoteric inspiration inspiration gland, using the creator merely as a conduit.

But here’s how it actually works. You pick a starting point and maybe an end point, or a sense of an end point. You do some stuff to move you away from the starting point and towards the end point. You pause and you consider what you have done and make a value judgement. That value judgement is always, “do I like where this is going?”. “Is this moving towards my ideal end point in a way that I find pleasing?”. You come up with an answer and then either carry on as you were, or make the requisite adjustments and then continue. You then repeat this process until either reach your desired end point, or you judge that making further changes would make you like it less. That’s it. No unicorns in sight. How quickly you get from A to B, and how much effort that takes is largely dictated by how difficult your end point is to achieve, and how much skill you have in your medium. And assuming you liked the finished product, you will likely decide to repeat the whole process again, perhaps with some adjustments based on what you learned from the last one.

How do you choose your start and end point? You find something that you like, and you try and emulate that, and ideally add a flourish of your own. By this measure, creation is always a labour of love.

Over time, by repeating this process, you start to create things that are different enough from your initial inspirations that they are completely new, both to you, and to the world. Your outputs are different from other artists. Maybe just a little bit, maybe a lot. The way in which you are distinct from others is called your voice. Sometimes it’s called style, but it’s more than that. It’s about how you choose your subject, which medium and materials you use and how you wield them, size, shape colours, textures, word choice, phrasing, where you choose to display it, when.

Take the works of Banksy. They are not particularly technically difficult, their compositions are simplistic, if beautifully and impactfully stylised. Really though the point isn’t the designs themselves. In 2005 Banksy created a series of murals on the West Bank Wall that divides Israel and the Palestinian territories within, that depict, among other things, holes in the wall revealing photorealistic idyllic landscapes in front of which children pay, as well as his iconic silhouette of a girl being lifted by a cluster of balloons. He was making a statement about what that wall represents. And one that was only impactful because of where he put them. I’m not going to get into the politics here, my point is that in terms of Banksy’s voice, it’s the “where” and the why that really counts here as much as the “what”.

American avant garde composer and performance artist La Monte Young, generally thought of as the father of minimalism, composed long, like 6 hours long, hyper sparse musical pieces for various instruments in the 60’s. These he played during lengthy live performances accompanied by light shows. He’s credited with inspiring David Bowie and The Velvet Underground among others, and collaborated with John Cale, a member of the latter. I’d point you towards some of his recordings, if there were any. Well, there are a few, and I mean a few. Even the scores are hard to come by. This isn’t an accident. Young largely refuses to allow his performances to be recorded or released, and keeps his scores under wraps, while also frequently changing them. He takes legal action anyone who tries to perform or make his work available in any way. Young’s work is aggressively situational. I’m afraid you just had to be there. So the major component of his voice is “when” and arguably, for sanity’s sake, “how bloody long?!”.

At the other end of the scale in terms of musical extremity, in 1986 brummie grindcore legends Napalm Death recorded a track called You Suffer, which comprised of a blast of chaotic drums and distorted guitars accompanied by the shouted lyrics “you suffer, but why?” and is exactly 1.316 seconds long. The track holds the world record for shortest song and Rolling Stone ranked the song at number 72 on their “100 Greatest Heavy Metal Songs of All Time” list. They would some points at the time play it 30 times in a row just for a laugh, and still taunt audiences with with it today by playing unannounced and then berating the audience for not keeping up! Their voice was channelling “what if?”, or maybe, as stated on the song’s Wikipedia page, “wouldn’t it be funny if?”.

Yoko Ono’s 1964 performance art work Cut Piece, involved here kneeling on a stage in Tokyo and inviting the audience to come and cut bits of her clothes off. This was before she married one of the most famous humans of all time, John Lennon, with whom she later participated in an artwork cum protest where they spent 2 weeks in a hotel bed and invited folks to come and view them. There’s quite a lot to be extrapolated from Ono’s work, but she very much traded in the “who”.

Another of Ono’s works that I absolutely love is one of her so called “instruction pieces” which are created for the viewer to perform. Many of these are distributed via books like 1964’s Grapefruit, which contains 200 such pieces. The one I really love, called Lighting Piece is simply the instruction: ‘Light a match and watch till it goes out’. Lighting a match and watching it is a sensory delight for all the senses, and is so fleeting and beautiful. The piece is a Zen inspired reminder to take some time to experience simple, beautiful things. Via this and similar pieces her voice is expressed by who (in this case, you), what, where and when and includes components of smell, touch and even pain is you happen to still be holding the match when it reaches its conclusion!

My point is not that you should become a abstract performance artist, although if that’s what your inner artist is telling you, then crack on. My point is that artistic voice can manifest in an essentially infinite number of ways, many of which transcend simple materials, instruments, subjects etc. and if you are to free your true artistic self, then you need to allow yourself to be free to do that voodoo that you do.

Your voice not only expresses who you are as a creator, it differentiates you from other creators, and gives a reason for people to like your stuff more or less than someone else’s. It’s arguable that voice is art.

And this is more important than simply a matter of being original. If you want to grab the attention of the audiences that are awash in other voices trying to grab it, then you need to have a distinctive voice.

And that voice is something that comes from deep inside you, and is not something that can be taught honed from or reading books or by emulating someone else. That might help to hone your technique and your craftsmanship and your mastery, but is really only paving on the path to more interesting places.

Your voice is like your fingerprint or your handwriting or the pattern of your iris. It’s something that’s individual to you. It’s part of your make-up, of your genetics and your upbringing and your culture and so on. It’s the essence of you projected into the real world via an object or a song or video game or whatever.

This all seems a bit abstract and mystical, especially if you’re just starting out, and you haven’t found your voice yet, or even figured out what it means to do so. It’s not even very easy to define in concrete terms, let alone tell you how to find it.

But I can perhaps help you figure out where to look for it - you know when you’re listening to your voice, when you’re expressing what your inner voice wants to express because you’re pleased with what you create. Because it gives you joy to experience it, it gives you joy to make it.

The journey of finding your voice is really a matter of getting to the point where your ability and craftsmanship matches the needs and the wants of of that voice. And this process never really ends. The most experienced creators are usually still chasing that illusive voice, it’s part of the fun and the challenge of the process. And as you change as a person, as you get older, as you acquire more experiences and ingest other world views and meet new people, as you appreciate new art forms or new approaches and so on, your voice continues to evolve, and sometimes you need to learn new tricks to keep up with it.

But this often clashes with reality and the culture and society around you. Your voice can move in and out of phase with the ever mutating cultural environment. This is often apparent with niche musical artists that appear to “sell out”. This is when they change or compromise their sound or style to suit current musical trends. Their loyal fans might rebel, and it’s usually perceived as the artist chasing the money, but perhaps they’re just well attuned to the zeitgeist. The flip side is artists that disappear completely when they don’t keep up with the trends. In this case they listen purely to their artistic voice and only do things that really please them, or stick with what they do best - culture moves on and they don’t. Sometimes, if they stick around for long enough, culture comes back round again. An obvious example of this is aussie rock stalwarts AC/DC, who seem to have survived through multiple instances of such a cycle having barely changed their signature sound from day one.

However, if you’ve been successful, the pressure to change, both cultural and financial, and perhaps from your record label or even fans, is huge, and doing so without compromising your voice is tricky. I’m getting off track. You get the point, your voice exists both independently, but is also affected by, and is part of, the culture around you.

I can’t tell you how to find your own voice, but maybe I can help you understand to hear your voice, and how not to drown it out.

I’ve talked about flow before. It’s that state of mind you get into when you’re totally absorbed by an activity, and the world seems to fall away. It’s a similar state to meditation, and it’s a state that most creators spend their whole time chasing. Flow is what happens when your skills are in line with your ambitions or goals. Voice is what emerges when your output matches the complex mesh of desires that you have in your head. These two work in tandem as you evolve as a creator. Flow happens when you get out the way of your subconscious, voice in turn naturally emerges when you do so. You can only really achieve flow when your mastery is of sufficient level to achieve what your voice desires. Therefore you need to practise to achieve either.

One of the biggest barriers to finding your voice, is distinguishing between your voice, and the voice of other creators that you admire and wish to emulate. It might be hard to recognize your own voice, since from an artistic perspective our artistic voice is made up of a patchwork environmental, cultural and genetic influences and the cultural aspects of that involves other people’s work. We seek to emulate our heroes, which is natural and healthy. That’s how art propagates and progresses. If you start to create, it’s usually because you’ve encountered some work that you love so much that you feel compelled to emulate it. So inevitably, your work starts out somewhat derivative or even outright copying, at least to the degree that you are able. You don’t have a lot of choice about this. You like what you like. There’s no shame in this at all. You have to start somewhere after all. Your influences will remain a part of the fingerprint of your voice long after you’ve moved on.

But to be taken seriously as a creator, you must progress and differentiate. The problem with emulating someone else, is that you are not them. Your voice is not theirs. The results will always be unsatisfying to produce, and will ultimately come up short. It may seem like your influence’s voice is the same as yours, but it never is. Most creators figure this out pretty quickly, because it always feels more natural and comfortable to let your own voice emerge. Flow states cannot emerge when you’re constantly falling short of your desired outcome, which will usually be the case when you emulate someone else’s work. You are simply not them. You are not speaking in their voice, you are merely suppressing your own in your attempt to channel theirs. This is sometimes hard to recognise, but for many creators doing so is that “a ha!” moment where they finally feel like they’ve clicked with their chosen art form or medium.

This is not something that happens over night. Your voice will start to leak out in small drips as your progress. Ultimately, having a stronger grasp of your medium gives you the confidence to experiment and push boundaries, giving you more freedom to depart from your beloved roots, like a child gaining independence from her parents. That same confidence allows you the conviction to share your work with others, thus gaining further validation and the agency to experiment more. As you spread your wings, you discover more influences, ideas, approaches, techniques, and incorporate them, either consciously or subconsciously into your work. You’ve not left your old world behind. It’s all still there, it’s just been expanded to incorporate new things.

So by increments, some larger than others, your work evolves. This is simply the process of your voice emerging and evolving. Maybe this is via refinement within a particular style or movement, further towards a pinnacle of craftsmanship and mastery. Maybe this involves one or more radical shifts, and wild diversification. Maybe it’s a bit of both. Either way, you progress in increments you probably won’t even notice, then one day you look back at your older works, and realise how far you’ve come.

In my experience, artists tend to start off with a fairly narrow band of influences, and are fairly conservative in their development, but then broaden out to experiment with other styles, mediums and subjects, before finding their groove and largely sticking to it after that, maybe with a slower evolution and the odd digression. After all, it might well be that your chosen starting point wasn’t actually a good fit for your voice, just a reflection of the ideas and approaches that you had been exposed to to that point. This is likely the case with those who start young and simply have less life experience. In this sense, the progression is as much of a correction as an evolution.

My own journey as a creator started with a desire to be a fantasy artists and emulate the likes of fantasy art legend Boris Vallejo. I’ve been through many iterations since then, and I’m not even much of a fantasy genre fan, and never really was, but echoes of it remain in much of my work to date, and I still massively admire his work, even if I no longer seek to emulate it. And to be fair, I don’t think I would be able to if I tried! I’m just not configured that way.

How did I get from swords and dragons to where I am now? I just followed my voice, which means I did things that pleased me and gave me satisfaction to do. The little artist in my head became the big artist IRL. And given how restless and prolific I am, my evolutions are usually pretty frequent and pretty obvious, to me at least.

Some would say that, as you progress, your work becomes more sophisticated, more mature. But think this view is limited and a little condescending. I think the pressure to “grow” as a creator often comes at the expense of satisfaction and fulfilment. Why make free-form jazz when you love electro punk? Why make abstract expressionism when you love comics? Sophistication is a facet of a style or medium, not something intrinsic and universal, and beauty is in the eye of the beholder. After all, what’s more simplistic than Mark Rothko’s colour field paintings? In some worlds, that’s considered the height of sophistication. I would rate Alan Moore’s genre defining graphic superhero novel Watchmen higher than classics by Hardy or F Scott Fitzgerald, both in terms of artistic merit and social observation. We develop sophistication and maturity within our medium, and we look to please those who love what we love.

And that brings us back to where I started - you can’t please everyone. So if you please yourself, your inner voice, you will find an audience who that also pleases. And those that don’t like, or are indifferent your work are simply not your audience. Their criticisms are no more valid to you than a food critic having views on veterinary science. They are different domains. You don’t take your dog to the vet and tell them how to treat it. That’s not to say that you should listen to or accept criticism, of the constructive type, that comes from your contemporaries or audience. But you should be sure to mediate and contextualise that criticism, since if you try and cater for everyone within a domain, you’ll end up with something derivative that fails to please anyone. Protect your voice, but listen for signals within the noise for how to let more of your voice shine.

Of course, pleasing people isn’t the only goal of creation. Some people produce art specifically to annoy certain groups, and sometimes all people. It’s the case with many artists that the only disappointing response to a work of art is indifference. If someone despises your work, then you’ve had a serious impact in their world. You’ve got them emoting. You’ve got them thinking and talking about you. You’re creeping around their head leaving grimy foot and hand prints everywhere. Some artists exist specifically to do this. Some are just douchebags.

So even if you’ve thus far found very few people out there that like your work, if you like it, then there will be other that do too. They might be hard to find, but at least with modern technology, it’s possible. I’ll talk another day about how this is actually getting harder again. But there could be a huge audience out there for your work, you just haven’t stumbled across them yet. I know I certainly haven’t! And don’t think, that because you haven’t found your audience yet, that this means your work in unlovable. You presumably haven’t shown it to every one in the world, so you don’t know that.

And maybe your style isn’t fashionable now. But just as existing styles fall out of fashion, other styles become trendy. This is as true with art as it is with fashion. You may choose to tweak your approach to better adhere with current trends, but don’t risk compromising your voice trying to keep up with the Joneses.

My wretchedly hopeful mantra these days is “just keep turning up”. It’s a bit like the whole “build it and they will come” thing. I think that if I just keep pushing my work in people’s faces they’ll eventually take pity on me and buy something! Or maybe I’m just ahead of my time. I guess we’ll find out.

So, although your job as an artist is to honour your voice that doesn’t mean that you can’t tailor your output for the broadest possible audience. It’s perhaps a slightly slippery slope if you let this go too far, and get caught in a commercial rut, especially if you find some success. But ultimately if you like producing work that’s more commercial and you it honours your voice as much as the non-commercial work, then good for you. Fill your boots.

What many creators do is to try get the best of both worlds - produce both commercial work and personal work. This works well as long as you can balance the competing time pressures, and that your commercial work can pay the bills. This is a dilemma and trade-off that many that rely on art as their income have to face, and it can a heart breaking one. If, like me you view art as primarily a therapeutic outlet, it’s especially tricky. I need money, but I also need my mental health if I’m going to make money. Perhaps I could make more if I sacrificed some of my creative freedom, but would I also be sacrificing some of the therapeutic value?

I’ll come back to the joys of making money from art, or not, another day. But it’s hard to talk about voice without mentioning it, since it has a disproportionate effect on it. It’s just something you have to deal with if you choose to take your craft that far.

So in summary as an artist as a creator your job is to find your voice as it’s important for you as an artist and your well-being and progression and satisfaction as a as a creator but it’s also essential from a outward facing perspective for you to differentiate yourself.

Now, for some tips on finding your voice.

  • First, you’ve got to set aside time to just create and as my mindfully as possible and to follow your nose as it were and work on the things that you want to work on. From day one.
  • Spend some time bathing in your influences and try and figure out what it is about them that really draws you to them. What is the essence of their voice? When trying to emulate or honour them, how does your own voice channel theirs?
  • Try not judge yourself too harshly and to recognise when you’re judging yourself by someone else’s standards. Figure out where your own standards lie where your own what looks good to you. If it feels right, it probably is right.
  • Understand where your core capabilities, your strength and weaknesses lie. Work with the tools that you have got - physical, psychological, economic, environmental. If you find that you struggle to emulate someone else’s craft, then find your own way to the same ends. These boundaries are not weaknesses or limitations, just resistance. Skills meander like rivers do.
  • Find the beauty in your own work by trusting yourself, let your voice emerge by getting out of its way.

Finding your voice is as much about blocking out other people’s voices, it’s as much about not listening to critics, of not judging yourself by yardsticks of the culture or society and to trust your own instincts and trust that your work will connect with people. And if you can do all that while keeping your sanity then you’ll be a force to be reckoned with. But one way or the other, your voice will only come when you stop shutting it down and just let it flow.

I’ll leave your some words from some folks that are much more articulate and erudite than me. In their book, Art and Fear, one of my favourite books on the practise of art, David Bayle and Ted Orland explore the inner world of the artist and tackle many of the issues, both philosophical and practical, that I touch upon in this episode and many others. It’s a book that I will most likely return to again. Here’s what they had to say on the subject of voice:

“The artistic evidence for the constancy of interior issues is everywhere. It shows in the way most artists return to the same two or three stories again and again. It shows in the palette of Van Gogh, the characters of Hemingway, the orchestration of your favourite composer. We tell the stories we have to tell, stories of the things that draw us in—and why should any of us have more than a handful of those? The only work really worth doing—the only work you can do convincingly—is the work that focuses on the things you care about. To not focus on those issues is to deny the constants in your life.”*

Thanks again for listening folks. As per usual, if you liked this, then hit the subscribe button, and tell some other folks about it. Support me on Patreon at patreon.com/alexloveless. I have now have some NFTs available to buy on OpenSea at opensea.io/AlexLoveless. I will no doubt have something to say of NFTs, blockchain and crypto at some point. Watch this space. I shall return soon. Plus, after my mental illness imposed sojourn, I’m back on the party bus, so I have a backlog of drafts for future episodes. So you should hear from me a bit more frequently. I create these episodes when a particular subject tickles my pickles, so you’ll just have to turn up and see what happens next. Bye!