Finding a Medium That Lets You Express Yourself with Jordan Wolfson
As an artist, you want options. One thing Jordan Wolfson (Ep.95) suggests you think about is how multidirectional your medium is.
Here’s what that means.
In watercolor, because of the mediums' transparency, you have to work in a direction- light to dark.
But in Wolfson’s medium of choice, oil, you can work in any direction you want. You can work light to dark or dark to light or even start with midtones. You can scrape things off and build things up. You can work aggressively or you can work delicately.
(This is true for acrylics too.)
Wolfson loves oil because you can head in almost any direction and explore. He loves that he can handle the paint with whatever energy HE brings to it on a given day. It makes oil a medium where the artist can truly express himself.
Put it to Practice:
What you can do- and almost more importantly, how you can do it- changes based on the medium you’re using. If you don’t feel like you’re able to express yourself in your medium it could be one of three things:
First, you might not yet have the skills to express what you need.
It takes some time to get comfortable with the language of art before you can use it to express yourself fully. Have patience. Keep building. And don’t worry because the skills you build in one medium, while they won’t all transfer one to one to a second medium, they will still help a ton. This is not wasted time.
Second, you’re not using your materials in a way that helps you express yourself.
Any given medium can be used in many many different ways. If you can, find artists in your medium whose work resonates with you. Look at how they build their work. How do they USE the medium?
See if you are able to mimic that… not with goals to copy but to better understand how they use the medium in a way that is different from you.
Third, you might be in the wrong medium.
Sometimes you’ll realize another medium is a better fit.
However, try not to switch between media too quickly. After all, you need time to first learn the skills of that medium before you can fully understand what it can do.
But sometimes after getting familiar with a medium, you’ll find that it can’t work in the way you want to work. And then maybe it’s time to change.