Writing An Artist's Statement in Baby Steps

Graduate programs, internships, and galleries want you to have an artist's statement. I came out of college knowing I needed one, but dreading writing it. One or two paragraphs summing up my work, process, themes, and raison d'etre!? eeek! So rather than face this daunting task outright, I'm going to take baby steps.

A few simple questions:
How did you get into this work?
I've always wanted to be an artist. Well that's not true, first I wanted to be a doctor clown (what can I say, I was a creative kid), then there was a while in my early teens when I wanted to be a musician, but other than that, I've always wanted to be an artist. I'd be doing myself a great disservice if I didn't at least try. 

My current work, the landscapes, came about due to a series of college classes taken in a certain order. I took a landscape drawing class with Sarah Frankel followed the next year by a painting class with C of C's resident abstract expressionist Michael Phillips. So I started playing with abstraction in landscapes. John Hull, the Studio Art department chair, said once that abstraction itself can be the subject matter of a painting, or abstraction can be the mantle through which the subject matter is discussed. I loved this idea, to paint landscapes without out rightly painting a landscape, to let the landscape be the mantle through which I discuss my themes.


How do you feel when your work is going well?
 Exuberant, like walking out into the sun, like the world makes sense for a few hours.


What are some of your favorite things about your work?
The atmospheric quality. The tactility of the wood. The emotionally evocative quality.

Here are a few helpful resources I've gathered from the internet.

• Molly Gordon's How to Write and Use an Artist's Statement
• Art Business.com's Your Artist Statement: Explaining the Unexplainable