Artistic roots

From one of my favorite "inspirational" blogs,The Beautiful Necessity, which is all about reactions and responses to Pre-Raphaelite art, this quote from A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book:

"Art Nouveau, the New Art, was paradoxically backward-looking, flirting with the Ancient of Days, the Sphinx, the Chimera, Venus under the Tannenberg, Persian peacocks, melusines, and Rhine maidens, along with hairy-legged Pan and draped and dangerous oriental priestesses.... But it was radically new also, in its use of spinning, coiling, insinuating lines derived from natural forms, its rendering in new metal of tree-shapes newly observed, its abandonment of the solid worth of gold and diamonds for the aesthetic delights of nonprecious metals and semi-precious stones, mother-of-pearl, grained wood, amethyst, coral, moonstone ...."


Huh. Am I Art Nouveau? I mean, the sort of abstract lines don't appeal to me because they paradoxically strike me as urban, I prefer a more representative naturalism ... but when I divorce myself from what comes to mind when I say "art nouveau" and look at its philosophy ... yeah, that sounds like me.

I've come to the conclusion that I'm just not totally comfortable blazing new trails. Yes, I want to be different and unpredictable in my work -- but I also need to feel like I'm reaching back to some sort of artistic heritage. Maybe this substitutes for the artistic community that, say, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (and its occasional Sisters) enjoyed. These either don't happen anymore or I'm just too congenitally reserved to gain entrance to them.

Of course, then I have to explain my weird steampunk. Mine is (oddly for me) less Victorian and more gritty, industrial. Middle-class steampunk? I guess my roots are more in assemblage, even though the steampunk philosophy appeals to me so much ...

And y'know, doing something different with an existing artistic philosophy? I'm really okay with that.