Artist Statement

It has been years since I wrote mine.

What Is an Artist’s Statement? A general introduction to your work, a body of work, or a specific project.

1. It should open with the work’s basic ideas in an overview of two or three sentences or a short paragraph.
2. The second paragraph should go into detail about how these issues or ideas are presented in the work.
3. If writing a full-page statement, you can include some of the following points:
   • Why you have created the work and its history.
   • Your overall vision.
   • What you expect from your audience and how they will react.
   • How your current work relates to your previous work.
   • Where your work fits in with current contemporary art.
   • How your work fits in with the history of art practice.
   • How your work fits into a group exhibition, or a series of projects you have done.
   • Sources and inspiration for your images.
   • Artists you have been influenced by or how your work relates to other artists’ work. Other influences.
   • How this work fits into a series or longer body of work.
   • How a certain technique is important to the work.
   • Your philosophy of art making or of the work’s origin.
4. The final paragraph should recapitulate the most important points in the statement.

What an Artist’s Statement is NOT:

1. Pomposity, writing a statement about your role in the world.
2. Grandiose and empty expressions and clichés about your work and views.
3. Technical and full of jargon.
4. Long dissertations or explanations.
5. Discourses on the materials and techniques you have employed.
6. Poems or prosy writing.
7. Folksy anecdotes about some important event in your life.
8. Nothing about your childhood or family unless it is very relevant to your work.
9. Not a brag fest or a press release.

Why Write an Artist’s Statement?

1. Writing an artist’s statement can be a good way to clarify your own ideas about your work.
2. A gallery dealer, curator, docent, or the public can have access to your description of your work, in your own words. This can be good for a reviewer as well.
3. Useful in writing a proposal for an exhibition or project.
4. It is often required when applying for funding.
5. It is often required when applying to graduate school.
6. It can be a good idea to include an artist’s statement when your slides are requested for review or your work is included in the slide library of a college or university.
7. Good to refer to when you are preparing a visiting artist lecture, or someone else is lecturing or writing about your work.
8. Useful when you are applying for a teaching position.
9. Good idea when a press release is being written.
10. Useful when someone is writing about your work in a catalog or magazine.
11. Useful when someone else is writing a bio for a program brochure.
12. It is a good way to introduce your work to a buying public. Often the more a buyer knows about your work the more they become interested in what you do, and in purchasing a work.

Types of Artist’s Statements You Might Need.

1. Full-Page Statement: This statement you will use most often; it speaks generally about your work, the methods you may have used, the history of your work, etc. It may also include specific examples of your current work or project.
2. Short Statement: A shorter statement that includes the above in an abbreviated way, or is specific to the project at hand.
3. Short Project Statement: A very short statement about the specific project you are presenting.
4. Bio: Often a short description of your career as an artist and your major accomplishments.

How Should I Write It?

1. This most often depends on the context where it will appear. Who is your reader? What assumptions can you make about their knowledge?
   • Emotional tone
   • Theoretical (but not over-the-top)
   • Academic (but not dry)
   • Analytic
   • Humorous
   • Antagonistic
   • Political
   • Professional
2. Ask yourself “What are you trying to say in the work?” “What influences my work?” “How do my methods of working (techniques, style, formal decisions) support the content of my work?” “What are specific examples of this in my work” “Does this statement conjure up any images?”
3. Use a word processor so that you can make changes and update it often. You should keep older copies so that you can refer to them if you should need to write or talk about your older work or if you have a retrospective.
4. Refer to yourself in the first person, not as “the artist”.  Make it come from you. Make it singular, not general, and reflective of yourself and your work.
5. Make it clear and direct, concise and to the point.
6. It should not be longer than one page.
7. Use no smaller than 10 – 12 point type. Some people have trouble reading very small type.
8. Artist’s statements are usually single-spaced.
9. Do not use fancy fonts or tricky formatting. The information should wow them, not the graphic design.

Considerations:

1. Who is your audience? What level are you writing for?
2. What will your statement be used for?
3. What does your statement say about you as an artist and a professional?

Style:

1. Be honest.
2. Try to capture your own speaking voice.
3. Avoid repetition of phrases and words. Look for sentences that say the same thing you said before, but in a different way. Choose the better of the two.
4. Vary sentence structure and length. The length of a sentence should relate to the complexity of the idea.
5. Organization of detail is important. Significant ideas should be at the end of each sentence for emphasis.

Where Should It Go?

1. In a binder at the front of the gallery with your résumé, list of artworks, and past reviews or articles about your work.
2. You may want to hang it on the wall, regular size, or enlarged as a didactic statement.
3. Include it in a program for performance, screening, or panel.
4. In the application package of the grant you are applying for.
5. Give to anyone who you feel would benefit from the information.

Art: Another Sylvan Setting

If you remember a landscape called Shirley's Woods, this is a view from the glade looking back the opposite way. Now the sun is behind us. The entrance to this fairy tale place is up the incline, where you have to duck beneath the trunk leaning to our left. Switching the direction of the sun produces an entirely different feel; the emphasis in now on the jumbled branches and their shadows. Rather than attempt so much detail, we let our brush do all the work. Load it with two or three colors for that specific region, and you'll get not only the suggestion of detail, but some nice dry blends for soft edges.

This one is also 8x10 acrylic. Working from my own photo, it took about an hour. You don't have to just copy your photo. In this case, contrast was magnified to increase the three-dimensional feel. I made about 15 shots that day, but so far have only painted three. It's probably time to revisit that album and take another look with the old magic eye.

Writing Essentials

Strong or Weak Words?

Words thought as weak in writing.  I don’t always think they’re weak, but used at the right time in some cases.  One person’s style or preference isn’t the same. 

Suddenly

Then

Very/ Really

Just

Slightly/Somewhat

Seem

Definitely

Overuse of adverbs







I have never used some of these words or came across them much in literature.   I think we are all used to the word suddenly.  That particular word alerts the reader something significant is going to happen in the story.  What are some words you use instead of these?   In stead of being redundant with the word suddenly, I like to use  “all at once” or use of a transition word that gives the reader the alert to the scene.  

Again it all depends on how well the writer expresses this in their storytelling.  

Anecdotes in Fiction

An anecdote is a short, amusing account that can be informative. These 'stories within a story' enrich a novel. The trick is working them into the narrative without interrupting the flow. A short anecdote can serve as a transition scene, one where the tension abates enough to digest what came before, and prepare for what comes next. It does double duty by developing character. This example has two men betting on a high stakes ball game.

Ed's team was leading at halftime, putting him in an expansive mood. Nor could he resist taunting the competitive Pete. He hoisted his beer. "Here's mud in your eye, bro."

Pete scowled. "Man, what does that even mean?"

"Let's find out that little thing." Ed magnanimously did the honors on his pad. "It's an English racing term. It seems my horse will kick mud in your Jockey's face all the way around the track!"

"Boogity." Pete turned up his soda, ignoring the toast.

This might reinforce Pete's sour mood, leading to consequences later on. But suppose it's Ed who's wigged out? In this example, the two are watching a police drama, where a cop has just used the term T.O.D.

"Unbelievable," Ed groused. "T.O.D. is the same three syllables as Time Of Death. It only saves time on the written page! Stoopid!" Pete didn't seem to care, even when the cops made fun of the "vic's" appearance. "Our vic? Wasn't the guy a human being? Real cops don't do that either!"

"Chill, homey."

The stage is set to propel Ed into the next scene, and we've learned something about both men. Anecdotes are readily found from personal experience or 'tall tales' you hear from friends. A few ideas:

Porch spiders: some actually make pets of them. And where do they go in winter?

Mole stakes: not the sonic kind, but sticks you plant along the property line to keep the critters from tunneling in.

Rodent traps: and the wide array of birds you get to see close up before you open the trap door.

Getting any ideas yet? Jot them in a handy notebook for inclusion wherever you want to lighten the mood.

Series In Art

Painters throughout history have made one or more alternate versions of certain works, notably the Impressionist Monet. Even musicians do so: the folksy take of Elvis' I Beg Of You is even better than the polished radio version. It isn't always a search for the best presentation; you also max out the mileage for a given inspiration. If it's good enough to paint, why not do it more than once?

This pair is based on the sixties Gothic soap Dark Shadows. The cliff only needed the addition of Collinwood, the haunted estate the show revolved around. Widow's Cliff got its name from a number of suicides we'd expect from such a place. The best known of these was Josette, when she learned her fiance Barnabas was a vampire. This of course created Josette's ghost, an obscure figure who influenced a number of future episodes. One of the best dramatic scenes was near the end of the series, where Josette appears to Barnabas and bids him farewell.

Dry blends are used throughout these pictures in keeping with the Impressionist feel. Sometimes it's hard to decide on a horizon color, such as on the right side. Orange or lavender? Well, orange would compete with the orange on the left side, but we still need some to extend across the sea. One solution is to paint in the orange, then overlay with a thin wash of lavender, letting some of the orange peek through (who says you can't have both).

These are 9x12 acrylics, titled Widow's Cliff Blue and Widow's Cliff Mauve. The latter has a more ominous, pre-storm feel. Check your inventory for works just begging for an evil twin or two.

Author Highlights

John Millington Synge

Ok I am going off Mick Williams post from jargon to an author I particularly liked and used an accent in his works.  Joh Millington Synge was an Irish playwright who also wrote poems and prose.  It has been awhile since I read his works, I am not sure where it started in my works to give a character an accentual tone to his dialect.  However, I wanted it to be distinct in a way that the reader would know it's him.  He's a villain by the way.  He's rather ruthless and does a lot of stuff in books one and two, still in working progress as I edit.

This one writer caught my attention because I think a playwright has lots to offer in variety of ways of dialogue as well. He was also an avid follower of the Irish Folklore which I adore today.   Wow he had a short life and not much in the way of medicine was available during the 19th century.


A little more on his life, as I enjoy reading about how an author or artist's life went.

Synge was born in Newtown Villas, Rathfarnham, County Dublin, on 16 April 1871.^[1] He was the youngest son in a family of eight children. His parents were members of the Protestant upper middle class.^[1] his father, John Hatch Synge, who was a barrister, came from a family of landed gentry in Glanmore Castle, County Wicklow. He was the uncle of brothers, mathematician John Lighton Synge and optical microscopy pioneer Edward Hutchinson Synge.^[2] Synge's paternal grandfather, also named John Synge, was an evangelical Christian involved in the movement that became the Plymouth Brethren and his maternal grandfather, Robert Traill, had been a Church of Ireland rector in Schull, County Cork, who died in 1847 during the Great Irish Famine.^[3]

Synge's father contracted smallpox and died in 1872 at the age of 49. He was buried on his son's first birthday. Synge's mother moved the family to the house next door to her mother's house in Rathgar, County Dublin. Synge, although often ill, had a happy childhood there. He developed an interest in bird-watching along the banks of the River Dodder^[4] and during family holidays at the seaside resort of Greystones, County Wicklow, and the family estate at Glanmore.^[5]

Synge was educated privately at schools in Dublin and Bray, and later studied piano, flute, violin, music theory and counterpoint at the Royal Irish Academy of Music. He travelled to the continent to study music, but changed his mind and decided to focus on literature.^[1] He was a talented student and won a scholarship in counterpoint in 1891. The family moved to the suburb of Kingstown (now Dún Laoghaire) in 1888, and Synge entered Trinity College, Dublin, the following year. He graduated with a BA in 1892, having studied Irish and Hebrew, as well as continuing his music studies and playing with the Academy Orchestra in the Antient Concert Rooms.^[6] Between November 1889 and 1894 he took private music lessons with Robert Prescott Stewart.^[7]

Synge joined the Dublin Naturalists' Field Club and read the works of Charles Darwin.^[1] He wrote: "When I was about fourteen I obtained a book of Darwin's .... My studies showed me the force of what I read, [and] the more I put it from me the more it rushed back with new instances and power ... Soon afterwards I turned my attention to works of Christian evidence, reading them at first with pleasure, soon with doubt, and at last in some cases with derision."^[8] He then continued, "Soon after I had relinquished the kingdom of God I began to take up a real interest in the kingdom of Ireland. My politics went round ... to a temperate Nationalism."^[9]

Synge later developed an interest in Irish antiquities and the Aran Islands, and became a member of the Irish League for a year.^[10] He left the League because, as he told Maud Gonne, "my theory of regeneration for Ireland differs from yours ... I wish to work on my own for the cause of Ireland, and I shall never be able to do so if I get mixed up with a revolutionary and semi-military movement."^[11] In 1893 he published his first known work, a poem influenced by Wordsworth, Kottabos: A College Miscellany.

Emerging writer[edit]

After graduating, Synge decided that he wanted to be a professional musician and went to Germany to study music. He stayed in Coblenz during 1893 and moved to Würzburg in January 1894.^[12] Partly because he was shy about performing in public, and partly because of doubt about his ability, he decided to abandon music and pursue his literary interests. He returned to Ireland in June 1894, and moved to Paris in January 1895 to study literature and languages at the Sorbonne.^[13]

During summer holidays with his family in Dublin he met and fell in love with Cherrie Matheson, a friend of one of his cousins and a member of the Plymouth Brethren. He proposed to her in 1895 and again the next year, but she turned him down on both occasions because of their differing views on religion. This rejection affected Synge greatly and reinforced his determination to spend as much time as possible outside Ireland.^[14]

In 1896 Synge visited Italy to study the language for a time before returning to Paris. Later that year he met W. B. Yeats, who encouraged him to live for a while in the Aran Islands, and then return to Dublin and devote himself to creative work. That year he joined with Yeats, Augusta, Lady Gregory, and George William Russell to form the Irish National Theatre Society, which later established the Abbey Theatre.^[10] He also wrote some pieces of literary criticism for Gonne's Irlande Libre and other journals, as well as unpublished poems and prose in a decadent fin de siècle style.^[15] (These writings were eventually gathered in the 1960s for his Collected Works.)^[16] He also attended lectures at the Sorbonne by the noted Celtic scholar Henri d'Arbois de Jubainville.^[17]

Aran Islands and first plays[edit]

The cottage where Synge lodged on Inis Meáin, now turned into the Teach Synge museum

John Millington Synge
A resident of the island of Inishmaan

In 1897 Synge had his first attack of Hodgkin's disease and also had an enlarged gland removed from his neck.^[18] The following year he spent the summer in the Aran Islands.^[19] He spent the next five summers in the Aran Islands, collecting stories and folklore, and perfecting his Irish, while continuing to live in Paris for most of the rest of each year.^[20] He also visited Brittany regularly.^[21] During this period he wrote his first play, When the Moon Has Set and sent it to Lady Gregory for the Irish Literary Theatre in 1900, but she rejected it. (The play was not published until it appeared in the Collected Works.)^[22]

Synge's first account of life in the Aran Islands was published in the New Ireland Review in 1898 and his book, The Aran Islands, based largely on journals, was completed in 1901 and published in 1907 with illustrations by Jack Butler Yeats.^[1] Synge considered the book "my first serious piece of work".^[1] When Lady Gregory read the manuscript she advised Synge to remove any direct naming of places and to add more folk stories, but he refused to do either because he wanted to create something more realistic.^[23] The book expresses Synge's belief that beneath the Catholicism of the islanders it was possible to detect a substratum of the pagan beliefs of their ancestors. His experiences in the Aran Islands were to form the basis for the plays about Irish rural life that Synge went on to write

Playboy riots and after[edit]

Main article: The Playboy of the Western World

John Millington Synge

The play widely regarded as Synge's masterpiece, The Playboy of the Western World, was first performed at the Abbey Theatre on 26 January 1907. A comedy about apparent patricide, it attracted a hostile reaction from sections of the Irish public. The Freeman's Journal described it as "an unmitigated, protracted libel upon Irish peasant men, and worse still upon Irish girlhood".^[33] Arthur Griffith, who believed that the Abbey Theatre was insufficiently politically committed, described the play as "a vile and inhuman story told in the foulest language we have ever listened to from a public platform", and perceived a slight on the virtue of Irish womanhood in the line "... a drift of chosen females, standing in their shifts ..."

At the time a shift was known as a symbol representing Kitty O'Shea and adultery.^[34] A significant portion of the audience at the first performance rioted, causing the third act of the play to be acted out in dumbshow.^[35] Riots continued at each of the scheduled performances that week. Yeats referred to this incident in a speech to the Abbey audience in 1926 on the fourth night of Seán O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars, when he declared: "You have disgraced yourselves again. Is this to be an ever-recurring celebration of the arrival of Irish genius? Synge first and then O'Casey?"^[36]

Although the writing of The Tinker's Wedding began at the same time as Riders to the Sea and In the Shadow of the Glen, it took Synge five years to complete, and was finished in 1907.^[29] Riders was performed in the Racquet Court theatre in Galway 4–8 January 1907 and not performed again until 1909, and only then in London. The first critic to respond to the play was Daniel Corkery, who said, "One is sorry Synge ever wrote so poor a thing, and one fails to understand why it ever should have been staged anywhere."^[37]

Personality[edit]

John Masefield, who knew Synge, wrote that he "gave one from the first the impression of a strange personality".^[38] Masefield said that Synge's view of life originated in his poor health. In particular, Masefield said, "His relish of the savagery made me feel that he was a dying man clutching at life, and clutching most wildly at violent life, as the sick man does".^[39]

Yeats summarised his view of Synge in one of the stanzas of his poem "In Memory of Major Robert Gregory":

And that enquiring man John Synge comes next,

That dying chose the living world for text

And never could have rested in the tomb

But that, long travelling, he had come

Towards nightfall upon certain set apart

In a most desolate stony place,

Towards nightfall upon a race

Passionate and simple like his heart.

Synge was a political radical, immersed in the socialist literature of William Morris, and in his own words "wanted to change things root and branch."^[40] Much to the consternation of his mother, he went to Paris in 1896 to become more involved in radical politics, and his interest in the topic lasted until his dying days when he sought to engage his nurses on the topic of feminism.^[40]

Legacy[edit]

Synge's plays helped to set the dominant style of plays at the Abbey Theatre until the 1940s. The stylised realism of his writing was reflected in the training given at the theatre's school of acting, and plays of peasant life were the main staple of the repertoire until the end of the 1950s. Sean O'Casey, the next major dramatist to write for the Abbey, knew Synge's work well and attempted to do for the Dublin working classes what Synge had done for the rural poor. Brendan Behan, Brinsley MacNamara, and Lennox Robinson were all indebted to Synge.^[41]

Critic Vivian Mercier was among the first to recognise Samuel Beckett's debt to Synge.^[42] Beckett was a regular member of the audience at the Abbey in his youth and particularly admired the plays of Yeats, Synge and O'Casey. Mercier points out parallels between Synge's casts of tramps, beggars and peasants and many of the figures in Beckett's novels and dramatic works.^[43]

In recent years Synge's cottage in the Aran Islands has been restored as a tourist attraction. An annual Synge Summer School has been held every summer since 1991 in the village of Rathdrum, County Wicklow.^[44] Synge is the subject of Mac Dara Ó Curraidhín's 1999 documentary film, Synge agus an Domhan Thiar (Synge and the Western World). Joseph O'Connor wrote a novel, Ghost Light (2010), loosely based on Synge's relationship with Molly Allgood.^[45][46]

Anyways, as a writer myself I prefer to read as much as possible to get a bit more rounded how to develop my characters.  Alas, he seems like favoring his array of women etc.  and his style and others helped in creating characters who are male, but as a female writer, I want to break that glass ceiling in the sensitivity of the literary field.  It is a must for a writer to stay out of the story.    So many authors influenced my works a bit but I still have my own style.  If you get a chance I would certainly look into his works.  It seemed he had a lymphoma type illness back then, if the death was related to Hodgkin's type.