Taste and Style
Discover more from Wysr by Cameron Armstrong
Taste is your Vision of how the World should be.
Style is your ability to execute on that Vision.
We (as Professionals) have to Practice if we’d like them to intersect.
There’s an incremental shift towards the convergence of two infinite arcs whenever you practice a skill.
The two arcs?
Taste and Style.
Taste
Taste is how you think the world should be. Or what you think is best. Or what you wish to represent to others with an expression of yourself or your activities.
It is the feeling in your heart and head about what you would oh so very much like everyone around you to experience that only you know with the intimate affection of Creation.
Indeed - Taste is forever locked behind the infinite expanse of the interpersonal gulf that exists between human consciousness.
Sometimes other people can catch a glimpse of it.
Rarely, an Other can see it even more clearly than you.
Often though, they see much less.
Mostly, others infer your Taste from repeated experiences with your Work and this inference of your Vision is unfortunately very different from the reality in your mind’s eye.
It’s in the nature of these things.
Style
They see your Taste differently because they can only experience your Style.
This is the tragedy of the human condition.
Your ability to express yourself is constrained by the mediums of your expression as well as your mastery of those mediums.
Interestingly, this entropic decay of informational conveyance was only mathemagicalized less than 100 years ago).
Expressed differently - your Style is how you’ve attempted to reconstruct your Taste in a space and time outside your brain.
It’s a measure of how well your meat puppet body follows your neurotransmitter commands.
With focused practice, your Style - in a particular medium - may come to better represent your Taste.
Take Picasso’s self portraits through time.
In a meaningful way, an uninformed viewer might reasonably assume that the portraits were listed out of order.
Of course they’d be wrong, but it speaks to the power of practice in conveying the image that Picasso perceived of himself to the world outside his consciousness.
Only through decades of exploration and repetition with his tools was he ultimately able to communicate his Vision through this deliberate expression of Style.
Now his shapes and lines and coloring are synonymous with his life and work.
His Style converged to his Taste.
And so might ours - if we deign to practice.
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