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Question:

Has anyone written an Artist Statement?

What exactly do you write? What points should be focused on?
I am so lost.

Does anyone have any advice or an example?


Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: Don't freak out! It's just a description of your artwork.

If you paint wildflowers, what medium do you use, why are you interested in that subject, etc.

It doesn't have to be long. It should focus on your current body of work. Like a resume, what you write may depend on who you're writing it for. For an exhibition I tend to write about two paragraphs worth (personally I'm not fond of long explanations). In that case, I focus only on the work in the show.

However, for my graduate application the statement was several paragraphs long. It covered my ideas as they evolved over the period of time that all of my submitted images documented.

By the same token, if you are writing it for a juried show it needs to be very explanitory.

Either way, it is a descriptive statement about who or what you are as an artist, what you stand for, find interesting, or what you think ought to be known about your work.

You'll want to describe the unifying aspects of your work, give details about your thinking or physical process, describe influences or connections to ideas within the art world, highlight any issues raised by your work. It's personal to your particular artwork.

For instance, I might say of my own work that it "deals with the continual process of re-defining history, applying the cultural and technological norms of present reality to the past. I use a repetetive layered process of filtering, digital editing, and traditional painting to traslate the conventions of documentation into records of themselves."

In another case I might say that my process is the "visual equivalant of running James Joyce's novels through fifty iterations on a cheap web translator".

For another purpose I might say :

"I take images from historical landsape painting and manipulate them digitally. I use these digital "maps" as guides to create paintigs in a layered process. I use high gloss enamels to create a surface texture that reflects the highly polished style of commodities"

It depends on the audience. I might use aspects of any of those in one statment.

(Well, not actually, since I don't make that work anymore)


Here is an example of some one I know who as a statement that can be found on his website:

http://www.maxkazemzadeh.com/

You can see that his statement is tailored to a web audience and includes biographical information. Personally, I don't like to include biographical information in my statement, and prefer it to be completely descriptive or explanitory of my work. However, you may need to include biographical and exhibition information if you're not going to have the chance to submit an exhibition record, biography, or resume.