An Artist Statement Formula, Just for You

Dear Studio for Tomorrow subscribers:

Last week, you might have noticed that I didn’t send out the weekly newsletter. With apologies, I needed the time away from my desk to tend to a beloved creature. I’ll make it up to you in the next week or two, I promise. As always, I am filled with gratitude that you are here, reading me. I hope you are taking good care, always.

—LA

Image Description: A bouquet of flowers sits in the sunlight, near a window that is not visible in the photograph. The flowers are hot pink and red, bright yellow and purple, marked with sprigs of green. Underneath the flowers is a bright ceramic plate, blurred in the photograph. This photograph has no conceptual link to this week’s writing, I just needed flowers.

I’m thinking this week about artist statements. Part of every application, website, and exhibition, statements are the ubiquitous texts we use for the artist’s voice, the place where we are asked to make visible the conceptual armature that supports the work. Of course, there are other places where you will be asked to write about your work, about your practice more broadly, and about who you are as a human, in your particular contexts, but the statement is the one place where those things are most commonly asked to cohere, with extraordinary concision.

Many of the artists I talk to have a kind of reluctance around writing, even though many of them are also excellent writers. Maybe this reluctance is connected to the ways we culturally separate brain and body, presuming that visual art is from the body, more intuitive, or less language-driven (again, these are broad cultural presumptions, not defensible truths), and that language comes from the logic-center of the brain, so it must be at odds with our feeling capacity, or in conflict with the part of the artistic process that is closest to an athletic flow, a meditative state, or a physically-driven object construction. This binary is to our detriment (as most binaries are), and is replicated in the division between artist/curator or artist/arts writer and the resulting power dynamics between them. If the curator or arts writer has the power of language and the artist doesn’t, then the power of meaning-making is also taken away from the artist (to take that binary to its extreme).

I wonder what it would look like if artist-writers (my clunky term for all of us here), allowed our writing to take on the physicality of object making? Or to flow unencumbered by the grouchy grammar rules we learned in seventh grade, to move loosely and wildly into unpredictable rhythms? What if we thought about writing sentences like we do building objects, allowing our structural logic to reflect the building decisions we make in the studio? Or what if we allowed our writing to enter a kind of dream-state or fictional mode?

As they are used in most contexts, artist statements become formulaic, even jargony, descriptions that lose most of their meaning in their efforts to fit a particular pattern presumed to offer more opportunities. But, by now you already know about the scarcity of official opportunities in the arts, so maybe it’s productive to get playful with your statement, if only to break from the writing reluctance that I hear so many artists describe.

To that end, I’m going to offer you an exercise for practicing getting juicy and loose with your statements.

Or, rather, I’m going to offer you two, intertwined exercises: this week, an exercise for writing a traditional statement (in case you’re feeling stymied), and—next week—I’ll send you one for playing with the form. As always, take what is useful to you at this moment, and leave the rest.

There is only one rule to this exercise and it is this: Do not use previous statements as a starting point. Resist the impulse to re-write, and allow yourself the wide-open road of a fresh start. I mean, it is January, after all.

An Artist Statement Formula Just For You:

1. Write 1-2 sentences that say what exactly you make (I make luscious, drippy, trippy, exuberant oil-on-canvas compositions, for example, or I make meticulously rendered geometric drawings with colored pencils) and which idea you’re most interested in, right now (that are explorations of lunar landscapes and space wildlife, or, that are reflections of architectural dystopias)…

2. Write 2-3 sentences related to your larger origin story, as an artist…. i.e. how did you first know that you would make those trippy, luscious concoctions? You might say, for example: I first started painting the moon after being jettisoned into space in the 47th year of the Covid-19 pandemic, as part of a billionaire’s birthday party entertainment. (Sorry, sometimes I go dark).

3. Write 1-2 sentences about an important influence on your work. This could be a writer, another artist, an experience from your past, a garden you once visited, a beloved pet, your experience as a yoga instructor… You might say something like: My paintings are in the tradition of cosmonaut painter Alexey Leonov, a little-known space painter in exile since 1950, then perhaps mention what you do that is different than the other space painter: but in contrast to Leonov, I use big, gestural strokes and a blue that, following the writing of Rebecca Solnit, I describe as “the blue of distance.”

4. Then tell us, in 1-2 sentences, what is especially interesting or unusual about your work, either the recent work, or your entire body of work? To take this space example way too far, you might write: Unlike any previous space exploration painters, I include snippets of conversations I’ve had with Venutians, which I paste onto the canvases from the pages of my space journal. This makes the paintings not only materially complex, but they also become documents of Venutian history and storytelling.

5. Then, in a sentence, imagine who your audience might be, and what might they understand about your work… (I’m a big believer that calling out to your imagined community helps to bring them into your world). This sentence can be about the future, about specific communities or audiences, or about what the works offer to you, as your own perfect audience. So, you might write, In looking closely at the rich blueness of space exile, I am making mixed-media compositions for viewers of the future, so they might understand the depth of space abstraction and consider the aesthetic potential of contact with other life forms.

6. Read back through what you’ve written, and add in any other explanatory or descriptive sentences that expand upon these prompts, or that feel important to you. You might add in a description of a specific series of work to support one of these sections, or you might describe a single object as emblematic of your larger concerns. You might include a quotation from a writer you admire, or you might include your current studio questions. Don’t worry too much about where to place these additions: trust your intuition and drop them in wherever they feel necessary. You can always move them later.

That’s it… that’s the homework! Feel free to send me what you come up with… and next week I’ll send you a prompt for getting messy with this formula and moving into some guided experimentation with the language around your work. I want to encourage you that you are, I promise, a beautiful writer. Trust your voice.

Warmly & with gratitude that you’re here,

Laura