Painting Styles

Interesting topic about painting styles in ST forum (in Spanish):

Link to discussion

Here are my thoughts:

I think that the best way to know if a painter has a certain style is if you are capable of identifying his figures without knowing they are painted by them. There are more original and less original styles, also learnt styles and developed styles.

One thing i've noticed is that people lately tend to say that in spanish contests all figures have more or less the same style, and that they don't like it. Is it that bad? Isn't it logical that spanish painters learn from one another and develop similar styles (but not identical)?

In my personal case, its obvious that my style is very close to those of Banshee or JMPN because they have been basicly my masters. It's not the same anyway, because I don't pretend it and I don't try to be. It's just that I learnt to paint that way and its the painting standard I use. When I go to France and I see what they do there, the first thing I do is get crazy because I can't think of how to do what they do and if I am able to learn anything, I try to do it. I also think that it isn't bad to have similar styles, they show our roots and also our personal tastes.

I think it's important to develop our own styles, the more original the better (there is nothing original in the end, but there's always something to add) and a good way of getting a name in this world is to have a recognisable style. This can only be achieved by using colours you like or you are used to, but without using always the same. Because one thing is having style and another is to paint everything the same way, with the same colours, the same ambience. I think that these are different things.

There's a threshold between style and repetition, I couldn't really measure it because I doubt if there is some way of measuring it, but its something subjective that anyone can perceive differently, one way or the other.