writing the artist statement

"Pay attention everyone, including you at the back, I have a statement I wish to make."

It's all very portentous. The artist speaks. He has something important to share.

Submitting my work to an online gallery recently, I was asked to provide them a statement. It had been a while since I'd done one and the most recent version had become a little dogeared. It was obvious a copy and paste job wouldn't suffice.

Slow Splash, drawing in acrylics, 2024

I can't be the only artist who dreads this chore. The difficulty lies in translating something intuitive, visual, and nonverbal into language without killing it. I'm an habitual ruminator but my thoughts are fragmentary and kaleidoscopic, tending not to lend themselves to the linear, dualistic conventions of written language. My thoughts don't conveniently arrive in fully formed sentences, moving left to right, top to bottom.

But, whilst it is one of the trickier aspects of being an artist, it remains an essential task, if one wants to go public with one's art.

I'm not a writer and entertain no aspirations to become one. The saw I'm sharpening is my art. This piece, and my blog generally, are to bring the woollier edges of my thinking into sharper focus and achieve greater clarity on my creative practice. If they find a reader somewhere, who becomes a follower or even a collector, that is a bonus.

I'd rather call it something else too, something less formal than 'statement'. But I have to conform to the standard industry term for such things, just as I am obliged to use the term 'abstract' to pigeonhole my work.

When I could delay the task no longer, I got quite into it, enjoying the craft aspect of the exercise, marshalling the visual ideas into sentences and paragraphs and produced something fit-for-purpose. I could have said much more but with a (busy / distracted) general reader in mind, decided to keep it to the essence of what my practice is about.

It's a pretty good snapshot of where the work is currently, until I have something new - and important, of course - to share and it's time to write the next statement. They don't have a long shelf life so the dreaded chore cannot be postponed indefinitely.

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