The Typecast Artist
“You always paint such dark things!” a classmate exclaimed upon viewing one of my illustration assignments in art school. The exclamation took me aback, I hadn’t thought of myself as a “painter of dark things”. In fact, in all my years of art school, I painted maybe a dozen illustrations that might fall roughly within the dark fantasy/horror genre. With equal zeal, I would illustrate various genres: science fiction, action/adventure, mythology, literary or history scenes, children’s books, etc. How could my entire oeuvre be defined by a handful of illustrations in only one genre?
We can speculate as to why my fantasy/horror paintings made such an impression on my classmate while the rest of my artwork failed to register, but the problem of pigeonholing - being typecast, labeled or categorized as one thing or another based on one facet of my work - has always been a challenge for me. Early in my animation career, I was typecast as a cleanup artist. In A Longer Story, I recount being typecast as “a guy who only draws charcoal portraits”.
Fortunately, the internet provided an opportunity to break the typecast. In particular, social media sites during the mid-to-late 2000's were a great place to post artwork in various media, where followers could watch the artist’s progress over time. Hence, colleagues who had been familiar with only my animation cleanup work were now able to see my paintings, people who knew me from animation layout were seeing my illustrations, folks who had seen only my portraits were seeing my sketchbooks, and so on. The internet allowed my work to reach many more people, and opened up new opportunities for me.
More recently, I set out to build a website that would bring together various facets of my work: drawing, painting, writing, animation, illustration, sketchbooks, perspective studies, and miscellaneous artistic explorations. Looking back on it a year later, my website seems less of a portfolio site than it is an artist retrospective, or a form of autobiography. I had become less interested in “showing off” only my best work and more interested in documenting the creative process, while trying to make sense of whatever it is I have done with my life.
Artist Development: From Student to Journeyman to Seasoned Professional (or “Old Guy”)
In my previous post, we covered the progression of artist portfolios from student to professional. Where the student portfolio can be more general, showing the best work the student has done up to that point, the journeyman portfolio is a curated selection of work built around a specific theme or purpose. Beyond the journeyman portfolio is the artist retrospective, a collection of work that spans the artist’s career, and reveals the arc of development from student to journeyman to seasoned professional (or in my case, maybe just “old guy” because, as anyone working in animation or video games knows, of course… anyone over 35 is “old”).
The retrospective may include early experimental works alongside mature works, as well as explorations of varied media and subject matter. Note that we have come full circle: the movement from student to professional was from general to specific, but now we are moving back to the general - except now it’s a broad, decade’s long survey of an artist’s life’s work, in which perhaps we can see overarching themes, motivations, methods, values and artistic trajectory that collectively reveal artist identity.
The term “artist identity” is used a lot on the internet these days, and I would be in deep waters way over my head trying to make sense of it here, but at the risk of oversimplifying it, let’s just say artist identity is a constellation of choices, themes, values and motivations that distinguish one artist’s voice from another. It’s the creative engine that drives portfolio creation and unifies the artist’s work across multiple disciplines, techniques, media or subject matter. The artist’s portfolio becomes a self-portrait of the artist.
Artist Identity versus Typecast
Standing in opposition to artist identity is the typecast. Identity emerges from within the artist, while the typecast is imposed on the artist. The world is still trying to box us in to a neat little niche with a label, or as one of my painting instructors, Bill Perkins, said during a workshop:
They want to know if you are a loaf of bread or a box of cereal, can we set you on this shelf or on that shelf?
I understand why artists are typecast, especially in regards to art marketing or applying for industry work. Labels are useful in categorizing, recommending, selling, etc. I don’t think there is any way around this, but at least now artists have new tools to fight the typecast. The Internet has become the major engine of discovery, enabling artists to showcase their work to a worldwide audience, and even interact with followers and clients across the globe.
Portfolio Evolution: From Static Book to Multi-Platform Network
The art portfolio has gone from a static thing to a network. In recent years, the term “Multi-Platform Artist Identity” has come to the fore. It simply means that, as artists, we no longer express our identity through a single portfolio; rather our identity is distributed across multiple platforms. The artist might maintain a website, a blog, maybe an online store, an Instagram account, Facebook, YouTube channel, etc. The art portfolio is now a constellation where each platform offers a glimpse into a different facet of the artist’s life and work. Audiences can follow their favorite artists online, post comments or questions, and even watch them create live on YouTube, Reels, or TikTok.
Forgive my wordy meandering, but I’ve been trying to make sense of my life’s work through the portfolios I’ve created. I would like to think the lesson here is that no single label can contain a lifetime of creative exploration. At the very least, I set out to break the typecast. I hope I have done that.
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