What Stands Between You and Writing an Artist Statement or Professional Statement?
Is it a dry creek bed, or the Grand Canyon? A closed door, or quasibusiness com the Chase Manhattan Bank vault? Or maybe, it’s the whisper of many doubts: Artist statements are so predictably icky. What can you are saying approximately your paintings that someone else can’t honestly see? What’s the factor of words for a visual enjoy? How am I going to be true, but now not boastful? Sincere, but now not sentimental?
And but, that professionals remember artist statements an vital part of an amazing portfolio (or About Me pages critical to an internet web page). Gallery proprietors are relieved with the aid of your professionalism. People who love your work will recognize extra approximately you. Offering your target market extra ways to connect to you increases their pleasure, as well as the perceived cost of your work. But, goodness, all the ones daunting phrases between here and there!
For artists, phrases are a very exclusive enjoy from the tactile world of artwork making. Paper and paint inhabit the sector of our senses, even as phrases remain the indifferent curios of our mind. If we’re an Independent Professional, we need to order middle level for our business. Once in a while, when the two worlds of work and phrases connect, language entices our senses and engages our imaginations, and we love it.
So what stops us from the usage of phrases to explain our art? Tell approximately ourselves? These are the equal words which have been with us seeing that we should stroll. What causes us to be deeply suspicious of language, one among our fundamental connections to being human?
The answer, in element, pertains to a fatal mixture of art critics and education. Art critics use language as scepters of judgment. If words are the messengers that determine our self-worth, then by using all way, kill the messenger. Formal training uses language as bastions of manage. If we are told when, wherein and the way we will, or cannot, use which words, we grow to mistrust our dating to language. The distrust smolders underground, on the whole neglected, until our words are thrust right into a field, just like the artist statement or About Me/Us internet page.
Suddenly, phrases make us visible goals for judgment and grievance, so we conceal our pain at this opportunity with what we remember rational responses. “My work speaks for itself.” “Statements are inconsequential to my work.” “I don’t have anything to say that my paintings does not already deliver.” And the list is going on.
An opportunity, like writing a personal or artist declaration, often causes us to 2nd guess each concept we ever had approximately our work. We persuade ourselves that we have not anything, really, to say, or for sure, nothing of fee. Our first instinct is to either flip off the mild and head out of the studio or workplace, or pump up our peacock feathers.
But walking away handiest confirms our unspoken fear: there have to be something to run faraway from. And pumping up encourages us to apply flimsy or pretentious phrases to smother over our distrust of language. This, in flip, fuels our belief that language related to our work is virtually ludicrous.
Luckily, there’s an alternative. Try pretending, that you have a lot to mention, which is neither self-essential nor trivial, but relevant and revealing. Imagine that each one of your objections have been met and you’re simply going to jot down anything you trust to be genuine, in the interim, approximately your relationship for your work. Because, the good news is: you may recover your personal words.
Why and how do you do what you do?
There is an unselfconscious language approximately your work, that you use all of the time. Every time you talk or consider your paintings, you create a courting among phrases and your selected ardour. The trick is to learn how to seize your self doing this, after which faithfully write it down. Yup, I said: write it down. How else will you engage that a part of your brain for endured guide and assist?
