She had been working on this picture for so long that she had felt her style shifting as different areas of the painting neared completion, and now that it was almost finished, the sections began to merge ungraciously, with rattling edges.

Bailey White, in her novel Quite a Year for Plums, describes an artist (a bird artist, no less) whose work evolves, or possibly devolves, right before her very brush. It’s an apt description of the natural and sometimes unwanted growth that occurs over the course of an artist’s career. But when an artist takes a workshop, growth accelerates. Shift happens.

You go to a workshop to improve your technique, grow creatively and feed your art a big bowl of Great Artist. But then you have this new thing called style shift. You may love it even more than your (boring) old way of painting, but what do you do with it once the workshop’s over? Can you merge the new way with the old?

Only time will tell.

Happy Friday.