In this special 1-year anniversary episode of Art Crush, Fi and Paula dive deep into a provocative question: Do you actually like the art you think you like?
From the omnipresence of Van Gogh’s Starry Night on aprons to the endless, echoing scroll of the Pinterest algorithm, it is incredibly easy to lose your unique creative voice to what is popular, comfortable, or trending.
Today, we are unpacking how marketing, societal comfort zones, and social media subconsciously shape our artistic tastes—and how those hidden influences might be holding you back from discovering what you are truly meant to create.
Whether you are fighting the pressure to paint hyper-realistically or just trying to figure out your distinct style, this episode is a call to embrace your creative wildness.
What we cover in this episode:
- How familiarity, marketing, and the public domain dictate what society considers “great” art.
- Why you need to step outside your digital bubble—and look beyond your immediate surroundings—to find genuine inspiration.
- How to release the pressure of conforming to popular styles and instead lean into the techniques and subjects that actually work for you.
- We reflect on how our childhood bedroom posters (from Star Trek to the Pre-Raphaelites) shaped our early identities as artists.
Thank you to all our listeners for an incredible first year of Art Crush! If you are a woman navigating the professional art world, this episode will challenge you to look beyond the trends, get wildly curious, and reclaim your authentic aesthetic.
We want to hear from you! Leave a comment and let us know: What kind of art did you hang on your walls growing up, and how has it influenced the artist you are today?
Listen to Art Crush every Saturday on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon, Google, and wherever you get your favorite podcasts.
art crush season 3 episode 30
00:00:00 Speaker 1: Welcome to Art Crush with artist Fi Marks and Paula Telizyn, where we talk about being an artist, being a woman who’s an artist and the art world and more.
00:00:23 Speaker 1: Hello.
00:00:25 Speaker 2: Hi, Paula.
00:00:27 Speaker 1: So today we’re going to talk about taste. And I’m not talking ice cream, but art styles, fashion, aesthetics more. Although I do want ice cream to Fi shared. An interesting article, with me and I think we’re going to jump off of that just to have this conversation because it was a very interesting article. So why don’t you catch our listeners up fee?
00:00:58 Speaker 2: the guy who wrote it was on LinkedIn. and he was talking very much about the influence of social media, on art, on your taste in art. I’ve sort of like gone a little bit, off piste by saying what I found really interesting was it was saying, how do you know what is really your taste, your taste in art or how you’ve been influenced, which is the same as people will say, my favourite chocolate is Cadbury’s. once you start unpicking, why is it you like uh, Cadbury’s before, you know, the person saying, oh, because it’s much creamier than the others. Then you remember their marketing campaign is, oh, there’s a glass and a half of milk. The creamier taste and all of those things have filtered in so much that you think you’re making that as a personal choice. And I think in the art world it is very similar. Unless you are in the privileged position that you have spent a lot of your time looking at art, not just in galleries, but in places where perhaps art isn’t normally thought of street art, whatever. And you’ve thought about it and you’ve talked it through. It’s hard to know. So Van Gogh would probably be one of the most popular artists that most people could name and also recognise his paintings. However, we all know when Van Gogh was alive, nobody knew his work. And thanks to our good friend Johanna, she was the one, his sister in law who promoted all his work and got his name and his pictures into the public domain. However, people will now say, oh, I love that. I love that work. But you think how often you see an image of Starry Night or the sunflowers. You will see it on products. You can buy it on aprons, you can buy it on anything and people immediately know it. How hard is it then to think, was Van Gogh a genius? Or is it just that we’ve been told it enough times that we now believe it ourselves?
00:03:24 Speaker 1: This is a really, really good question. in the vein of questioning everything we believe and what we think we know to be true, this is a valid question. I know that Van Gogh, when I was young, was not in the public zeitgeist the way his work is now. And a lot of that has to do with him suddenly being in the public domain. So you could reproduce the works without having to pay for the rights to reproduce. So when I went to look for a passport holder for my passport a few years back, what popped up under things I was looking for something pretty and nice and whatever, because I just thought, you know what? I should have something that makes me happy when I look at it. What showed up? Every other passport holder, Van Gough. Those are the kinds of things that show up now. I think if I was looking, it would be a lot of AI slop. But these are the artists that are freely available to reproduce. And familiarity breeds, uh, a fondness. It’s why we have not contempt. I know, I know, but familiarity breeds a fondness. That’s why we have seven thousand, Star Wars movies and Star Trek has been going on for, I don’t know, seventy years or something like it’s and Doctor Who and all that. Because you go in there, you know, the rules you’re familiar with, it reminds you of a point in your life that you felt good or safe or happy. And so you go back to it again and again. It’s the same thing with art. It’s the same thing with.
00:04:52 Speaker 2: Your comfort zone. It’s your comfort zone. in the art world, there’s a comfort zone, that people will recognize. I mean, I get a lot. I mean, we all sit around as artists and I’m sure if, you know, for all the artists who are listening, people will come and immediately want to compare your work with somebody else. the person that I often get is, oh, it reminds me of Klimt. It reminds me of Klimt. Oh, it’s just like Klimt. Do you like Klimt? And I find it really frustrating. And I have to keep my little, public face very straight and go, well, I guess I am quite fond I yes, it’s probably the glitter I put sparkle in his work has got gold leafing. They are figurative work of women, but I think that’s probably where it ends He was painting women from the male gaze. I paint women in a very different way. But yes, I have to be careful because I don’t want to destroy that person’s comfort zone, which is. Oh, look, it’s okay. I’m cultured. I know something about art. So they’re going to be, well, impressed when I say it reminds me of Klimt because they think that that’s the first time you’ve ever heard it. And you know, for you, it’s the millionth time you’ve heard it. And you find it frustrating because you think your art is unique. So we’ve talked in the past as well, not only of our personal taste, what people have in their home, but also of when we’re looking for our own style. Paula, do you think when you are trying to find your own style, you are also influenced by what you’ve been told and what has been, pushed out there in the media, in social media, in the shops. So you end up thinking, well, that must be popular. If I do something a bit like that, I’m going to be maybe not as successful as Van Gogh, but people like Van Gogh. Let’s go for that thick impasto oil look, because I already know that people like that. What do you think, Paula?
00:07:14 Speaker 4: I think it really depends.
00:07:15 Speaker 1: On the artist, because when I was in my, teenage years, so I’d gotten into painting in high school and really into portraits and painting and all that. In high school, the popular artists were people who were doing these. I wouldn’t call hyperrealism, but like very realistic paintings that were, showing beautiful scenes of nature. And, uh, I try to remember the guys name. I don’t remember his name right now. Very popular where I grew up. and there was another couple of painters that were doing similar things and I really wanted to create like them. I loved the realism. I loved the scenes they created. I loved the feeling of the spaces that they depicted. And I couldn’t do it. And I wasn’t doing it because I thought I would be popular. I was doing it because I thought I liked that kind of work. That was the art I was exposed to because it was very, very popular. So because it was popular, because anybody could understand what was going on. You look at that and you go, that’s a loon in the water, surrounded by some marsh. It’s beautiful, I get it, I understand it, I can actually relate to it kind of thing, right? That’s why it was popular. But wherever you turned, they oh, it was Robert Bateman was very popular. I don’t know if he’s even still alive at this point, but he was a very, very popular painter in, uh, Ontario, Canada in the nineteen eighties. And actually he lived near where I was living. So every school, every gallery had prints of his. Like, it was just ridiculous. Um, but not knocking him. But that was why I really, really wanted to paint realistically, because I felt like that was acceptable art and I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it. So I hated all my work. I tried and tried and tried. I could not do it. I couldn’t make smooth brushstrokes, couldn’t do the tight lines. I couldn’t do all of the stuff that they were all doing. And I know that these things take years of practice, but even today, if you said to me, Paula, go do something hyper realistic, I would basically, I don’t know, tell you to Take a long walk off a short bridge kind of thing, because I know even with my years and years of practice, I can’t do it. So picking a style for an artist, it might be a mix of what might sell. Because you see artists doing trends. It might be a mix of what they think they like because of their exposure to it, which is the theme of this podcast episode, right? But it also needs to be what can you actually do? What can you yourself do and create?
00:09:50 Speaker 2: I would be interested for the listeners, if you have got an opinion on this, please let share it in the comments beneath the podcast because I am always struck by things that are different. Now again, I that is a comment that I hear when I, when I did art shows and art fairs. Oh, that’s a bit different. And I would always hear a little bit of contempt in that conversation. You know, it was almost like, oh, I’ve never seen that before. But I wouldn’t have that because that’s not what my taste is, you know, and that, but for me, when I look at art, I look at things that are not the same. But I get drawn into. And if I see I’m thinking of an artist that I know, and she’s based in Derby and she has developed a technique that I’ve never seen anybody else do. she uses paper cutting and puts fabric behind it to create landscapes generally. she is immensely popular her whole technique that she has developed, the images are not challenging. You know, you’ve seen them painted. But what is so amazing is how she creates it and that she does it in this very unique way that she has researched and developed over the years. So I see people drawn to her work, and I think part of that is they are in awe because not only are they are beautiful images, beautiful landscapes, but it’s like she’s done something different. So it’s interesting that sometimes we’re drawn to things that we’ve been told and we go, this is what art is. And that’s, I suppose, another question. But when you’re looking at your own personal taste, how deep do you go? I think again, that will vary. Some people will just go, oh, I like that because I like the colors in it. I like that because I like flowers. Now before, as you know, Paula and I talk a lot about the big why And of course, my immediate thing is, well, why, why, why, you know, why do you why are you drawn to flowers? Or why are you drawn to landscapes? I’m interested to hear because I don’t think people question that enough. But there will be a deeper, profound reason why you like flowers, or why you like landscapes, or why you like portraits. Whatever there will be. If you dig deep enough, there will be, it will be, there might be hidden. You might have to go searching. So yes, have a think. What art are you drawn to? And do you know why?
00:12:46 Speaker 1: When I was, deciding to start making art again, and I was going to do it on my iPad with procreate and all that. And I have an Apple Pencil, and I bought this sheet of plastic to go on top of the iPad, so it felt like paper. Fi had me go on to Pinterest, turn off the AI search, and just go through the art and start saving and pinning things that I like the style of not questioning why, but just to see if there were patterns and everything, which I thought was really an interesting exercise to do. It was confounded by the Pinterest algorithm, however, because the minute I started pinning certain styles, they started giving me a lot more of those styles. And so it was really hard to go and find things that were unique. But it was an interesting exercise in general, because I could see trends of things that I liked. And some of those things were things I couldn’t do. I know at this point what I can and cannot do as an artist, it’s not that I can’t do it with practice or whatever. There’s some things I just can’t physically do. Hyper realism. One of those. Right? because I’m decades into my art career, I’m pretty confident what I can and cannot learn. But it was interesting to see what the trends were, but interesting also to see how the algorithm was that enthusiastic, that it was pushing more of the same things so that I couldn’t sort through. And then I was talking with another artist. She lives in Australia, originally from South Africa, and she always goes to galleries and sends me photos of her trips, the pieces that she saw that I would never normally see. So the Australian Aboriginal art pieces and pieces from artists I’ve never heard of or seen works like and all of that. And it gives me that exposure as well to different pieces. I think that deciding what you like and what interests you needs to require stepping outside of the bubbles we’re in and we need to understand how influential the algorithm is on what we get. The minute we show any interest in something, we need to talk to other people. If you’re lucky enough to have friends in other countries, talk to them, what are their influences? What’s going on? What do they like? That might be different from what you’ve seen before. So we can actually create a sense of what we enjoy.
00:15:10 Speaker 2: you can look at many, many different kinds of art, some of which you might in the past have gone, oh, it’s not my cup of tea and just walked on by. But every painting or artwork has its merits, and you can always find something that has you in awe of, be it again, the use of the brush strokes or be it the use of the clay, I was reminded of that very much this week. I went to see an exhibition of, Joseph Wright of Derby. If you don’t know him, have a little look up. because as many of you know, I live in Derby and that is where we’re doing our first ever exhibition in October. However, Joseph Wright of Derby has just had this big, exhibition up in the National Gallery in London. A lot of the work that was in Derby Museum and Art Gallery was up in the National Gallery, and now it’s come back and it’s also bought back some of the pieces that aren’t normally there. So I thought I must go and see it. went with a friend and to have a look. I would say my first response to Joseph Wright’s work is it’s not really my thing, but it’s very hyperrealistic. but his use of light, how he paints light is incredible. he does it with the backdrop of the industrial revolution and science. And so there are people watching science experiments and you see all their reactions. There’s one with two boys fighting over a pig’s bladder, which they were obviously using as a ball. And um, yeah, he’s captured something and I was like, what would make you want to do that? There was one of a man eating porridge. I mean, just very day to day things, as well as these huge canvases of science experiments. the thing that really blew my mind. Well, A, you can appreciate his use of light and how he captured those moments They are at night or they’re dark or in some way. And then there is light in them. But the fact that you think he was painting those in the seventeenth century and early eighteenth century blows your mind because of the hyper realism and his whole style. So although if I was going shopping for art and it was money, no object, I wouldn’t buy a Joseph Wright painting to hang in my house. So that would be a different category. But to see his work in the flesh, these huge canvases, what he was portraying, looking at every character I don’t know how long they took to paint, but they would have taken a really long time. It is mind blowing. If you are in Derby or near Derby, go and see it just for that reason, even though you might think, hmm, not really my sort of art, not really that interested, but it’s what people view us as humans and creatives can achieve is phenomenal.
00:18:32 Speaker 1: It is, it is. in a world that is speed, running us towards, conformity all over, I think it’s up to us as creative, wild, different human beings to grab on to our weirdness and our wildness and look at things that maybe don’t conform. I don’t know about in the UK in terms of trends, but over here for the last ten years, it’s been everybody’s house has been some shade of grey. Like I lived in a house, prior to this one where the floors were grey, the carpets were grey, the walls were light gray. That was the trend. If you had an up to date house, it was all gray. No. Make your spaces weird. Go find the stuff that makes you happy. Go find the stuff that’s different. It requires more effort to get to know it and decide if you like it. It’s very easy to decide you like something you’ve already seen before, or the chocolate that you know has, that much milk in it or cream in it to decide that that’s your favorite. But to actually go out and decide that you are not going to do what everybody else is doing, I think is really important. It’s critical. And whether it’s art or clothing or your house.
00:19:49 Speaker 2: It’s all part of getting to know yourself, which there’s not been enough of particularly in recent history and probably in ancient history. People were too busy just trying to survive. We, are privileged, in a way that we can actually look at ourselves. And until you know yourself, you won’t know what your taste is. and you should reflect that. the other day I saw a friend of mine and she was with some friends of hers and I pulled the car over and I was tooting my horn and I was like, waving at her. And the sun was in her eyes and she couldn’t see who was tooting and waving anyway. And she was going, me, me. I was going, yeah, hi, hi. And then I got out the car and she was like, oh, it’s V came over, had a chat, dogs had a chat, went back to her friends, and then she messaged me later and she said, my friend said that if there was a picture in a dictionary of what an artist is, it would have a picture of fee on it. it was really interesting because I actually quite liked that I took that as a compliment. Whereas I remember when I was a teacher and people would say, what do you do? And if I said, oh, I’m a teacher, I teach in a primary school, they would go, oh yeah, you look like a primary school teacher. I would be actually quite upset about it. As somebody said the other day, there’s far more worse things to say you look like in your job. However, it is interesting. And do we reflect what we do? For me, being an artist is such an intrinsic part of my life. I mean, I would say probably being a creative, everything that I do revolves around that. Whereas when I was a teacher, I would say it didn’t, but it is the essence of who I am as a creative. And so the fact that they could tell by the way I was the dogs I had, the way, the way I behaved, what I was wearing, you know, whatever. And I was not walking around in an artist’s smock with a paint palette in my hand in a beret. You know, it was it. Yeah. I just thought it was really interesting. it made me think, do people recognize you as a creative or do you want people to recognize you as a creative? I mean, that’s a whole nother podcast. But that was really interesting. it’s about that it reflects taste and who you are and how you decide what your taste is.
00:22:28 Speaker 1: So if you break conventional fashion expectations for your, relative age, then therefore you must be creative and artist and whatever. And then they’re able to understand and relate to you in some way. Oh, see, she wears cool things, but she’s not dressed the way a woman of her age should be dressed. Therefore she’s an artist or musician or whatever, right. these boxes that we put each other in and ourselves in do come back to what do we like and why and what do we know to be true and why and what has been fed to us all our lives through our media consumption, even before social media, through television commercials, through movies, through books? All of this stuff has influence on us. whether we’re aware of it or not. And it influences the people who would buy our art and influences the people who would want to see our art. All of this is really interesting.
00:23:28 Speaker 2: I was just thinking about art, how I got involved with the art world. not only going to galleries or whatever, but when I was probably even younger than a teenager, say like ten, eleven, twelve, and I was allowed to put posters in my room. it’s not a recent phenomenon, but That was a way you weren’t allowed to decorate. kids now, they decorate their own room and they’re allowed to do whatever they want. That was my first experience of making my space my own was what I pinned to the wall. it wasn’t the decoration because I wasn’t allowed to have any say in what my bedroom looked like. but I was able to stick posters up. That was my first way of showing my identity. Now, of course, we all at that time were sticking, pop stars on our walls and, footballers or whatever. I had Donny Osmond, David Cassidy, Bay City Rollers, now you all know what my age is. However, then in the UK had this thing called Athena posters, which were much bigger because obviously all the posters were out of magazines. You’d buy a magazine and it would be the middle page spread, wouldn’t it? The double page spread that you would very carefully get out so you didn’t rip and stick on your wall. But then when you could actually buy posters, I mean, there was classic ones of like the man with the baby, that was hugely popular, which is really interesting phenomena in a completely different way. But I remember starting to buy Pre-Raphaelite reproductions on posters and sticking those on my wall. that was different from putting boys that you fancied that you thought you were going to marry pop stars. It was. Putting artwork on my walls was like a big influence. And the fact that I was drawn to the Pre-Raphaelite. And I hadn’t seen any. From what I can remember, I hadn’t seen any in real life. I don’t know where it came from. It would have been through flicking, flicking, flicking and then coming across Hylas in the water nymphs and being drawn into the story or the beautifulness of or whatever, and then sticking that on my wall, age ten or eleven and going, I think this reflects me. And that was the start of the journey. Did you have anything similar to that? Paula?
00:26:11 Speaker 1: You’re going to laugh. My posters were Star Trek posters, of course. And yet still carefully taken out of the sci fi magazines that I used to pick up at the bookstore, the middle pages, and pull the staples out really carefully and whatever. And then I would buy the big original ones. When it came to my first art hanging on my wall. it was Inuit art. So the influence there. I think we’d gone to Ottawa and seen the National Gallery, and it was my first real exposure to seeing a new art in person. And so when I found it in calendars or magazines, I would cut it out and frame it and have that because it was wildly different to the art that I was exposed to through home, because my family is full of artists and through school with your colonialist type of art history. So I think I actually still have a couple of the pieces that I’ve had for the last thirty or forty years. but it was a huge influence on art can be different and it can be story focused and it can be, less representational in terms of being realistic, but still representational. It can allude to things. so that was a huge, huge influence on me. But, um, yeah, I started with Star Trek posters because I didn’t give a shit about music or pop stars or whatever.
00:27:38 Speaker 2: Of course not. Yeah. but it is interesting that that was our first foray into what is our taste, what is it that we like? my parents weren’t artists, but we did have art on the wall. And I think I’ve talked about having brass rubbings on the wall. That’s what the art that my dad created was, um, getting those framed. so we had brass rubbings. We had a couple of breugel reproductions on the wall, which again, my dad was a medievalist. It was his taste in art. And I remember my mom suddenly going, well, I, you know, I want to have my taste. And she put her a Renoir of the little girl in blue. And we had Le Parapluie as well. So I knew those paintings Breugel and Renoir growing up. we had one original on the wall, which I think my mom. No, my mom threw out eventually, but it was somebody who they’d known who was an art student who’d painted it in the sixties, didn’t really know much about it because now me and my sister was like, why do you keep it will We be fascinating now. But that was the only original piece. It was an oil painting and it was a painting of a woman, and it was all done in blues. It was quintessentially sixties, very fifties, sixties. Um, but yeah, so it’s interesting. It’s really interesting. So when you were growing up, have a think, what did you stick on your wall? Did you used to go and then did you start going to museums and art galleries and buying lots of postcards and sticking those up as well. I remember my parents bought me like a bulletin board that I was meant to be the only place where I was allowed to put things up. But of course, that soon went behind the bar and the blu-tack went on the wallpaper and ripped it off, whatever. But yeah, postcards. That’s when I started putting pictures of art, you know, original art that weren’t original art on my wall, and it was a. You’d go and you’d go, which ones should I get? So you’d find your favorite paintings that you’d seen and then buy the postcards.
00:30:00 Speaker 1: Mhm. It’s really interesting. I think we were very, very lucky to grow up in a time before algorithms, but we also lacked a lot of the access to information that people have nowadays. The trick is to understand that you have to get out of the algorithm bubble and go in search of things that are different and things you might like, or things that might be challenging, or things that might require effort to decide if you like them or not. But that efforting is well worth it because the exposure to new ideas and new perspectives outside of what we are constantly fed is a good thing. It’s a good thing to step back and go, I believe this to be true, but actually, is it? And who does it benefit if I think it’s true? So I think this is where we need to wrap up this episode, because we have a lot of questions about, what we like and where it comes from that we invite our listeners to ask themselves and maybe go find something that you don’t instantly like or feel good with to see if challenging yourself opens you up to new ideas or maybe a deeper sense of who you are as a person.
00:31:17 Speaker 2: Yeah. And it makes you narrow down what it is you like because you’re not just looking at the picture as a whole going, oh, that’s my taste. As I said earlier, you’re actually thinking, oh, I’m really interested in light, or I’m really interested in using paint in this way. it really makes you, refine your ideas about what your taste is.
00:31:43 Speaker 1: Yeah. All right. And that wraps up this episode of Art crush. We want to thank you all for listening. At this recording time, which you will get this a week or two later. It has been one year since we released our first batch of six episodes of Art crush. We want to thank our listeners for joining us throughout this past year. And for those of you who have been here since the very beginning, we really appreciate you and we are looking forward to creating a lot more episodes in the next twelve months, covering all sorts of topics. But we are delighted to be one year into this project, which has changed both face life and my own life for the better. And we hope that our influence, our discussions and our thoughts and challenges that we put out to you. The listeners also give you the opportunity to create some intentional change for the better in your own lives.
00:32:41 Speaker 2: And if there’s anything that you would like us to talk about, put that in the comments because we’re always looking for new ideas. So feel free to do that.
00:32:54 Speaker 1: You can catch episodes of Art crush every Saturday UK time on Spotify, Amazon, Apple Podcasts, Google, and also in your Alexa, Google Home and connected car devices, as well as wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. We will see you in the next episode. Thank you so much for listening.
