Defining your personal style is a fun and exciting way to stand out from the crowd. Whether it’s your fashion sense or the way you express yourself in writing, identifying and developing your style can make you look and feel great! Developing your personal style can also help you get that dream job, win the attention of the guy of your dreams or even make a big impression at a business meeting.
Style is that which distinguishes a work of art from another, allowing one to identify the artist responsible. Obviously, there is a degree of subjectivity in determining what constitutes “style,” but some of the most important aspects of style are what allow works of literature and art to differ from each other. It would be impossible for works of fiction to have the same impact on readers if they all had the same style; it is the author’s unique style that makes a story truly memorable and enticing.
It has been suggested that the distinctive character of styles is due to conventions which are learned and absorbed by those who carry them on, as with the movements which a craftsman learns to carve a ritual mask, the ways in which painters prime their canvasses and arrange their palettes or the rules of harmony which musicians must follow. This is an interesting suggestion, and the study of musical styles has in fact yielded some promising results for statistical analysis of probabilities (Cohen 1962). But it is a subject which must be treated with care, because the observation that certain features are characteristic of a particular style can easily become an assumption and a bias in the investigator’s approach.
There are certainly societies or groups which will tend to resist change in all fields, while others may attach prestige to experimentation in whatever field is being investigated. This could perhaps explain the existence of contrasting characteristics in the arts, with static cultures preferring solid craftsmanship and the refinements of skill, while dynamic ones will be inclined to give the advantage to new ideas and innovations, even where the result is unremarkable or worse.
The question of the origin and development of style is difficult to answer because of the inseparable interrelationship between an art form and the society which develops it. This is illustrated in the example of a nineteenth-century notion that the style of an art must reflect the social conditions of its period, in which case the naturalism of Jan van Eyck can be seen as the climax of the Gothic tendency toward detailed accumulation and the primitive start of a new era or the realism of Rembrandt as a transition from the Renaissance to the Baroque.
There are many different theories of style, some rooted in psychology, some based on the art history of various periods, and some based on the philosophies of music and language. Whatever the basis, a thorough understanding of style is essential for all students of the arts.