Reflections on Artist's Statements

Introduction

Most artists probably dislike writing an artist statement - it can often feel like forced extroversion for introversion-inclined individuals, and who doesn’t hate introducing themselves? 

Artists often view it as superfluous, superficial and pretentious - some sarcastically summing theirs up to “I hate artist statements” or state that “real artists don’t need a statement”. The old cliché that art speaks for itself is true, and I think something most artists believe, but it still is a cliché, and it is just as much of a thought-terminating one as a white page filled with pretentious prose next to an artwork. I was very much of this opinion, still am to some extent, that artists' statements are annoying, superfluous and difficult. 

However, I’m not one to back down from a challenge, and as tempting as it is to make a sardonic remark about how useless these statements are and how much of a unique non-conformist I am, truth is that a lot of applications require or desire an artist statement, and I had to ask myself what’s more important to me and I had to go back to why I create art in the first place. 

Ultimately, there are many reasons why I create art - condensed down into a single word, I would have to choose love or perhaps compulsion. Oblation, maybe even. But, above that, I love my wife, my family and the people around me, and as much as artistic and personal integrity is important, writing an artist statement doesn’t necessarily infringe on that. I asked myself - what’s more important to me: Not playing the game for my own selfish reasons and pride, or playing the game for the sake of both being able to do what I love while also being able to provide for myself and my family. I hate feeling like a burden to others, and while great creatives, thinkers and artists of all kinds throughout history have survived and created great things despite being parasitic leeches, it’s not something I want to do, and if writing an artist statement helps increase my odds of getting commissions, shows or getting into galleries it’s something I’m willing to do.

I set out, therefore, to write an artist statement which was genuine, true and uncompromising on my own integrity, and embraced the challenge. It’s been over a year now since I started thinking about this, and it’s been a year filled with self-reflection and difficult questions. In fact, I’ve painted the least last year out of any year, largely because of the difficult question an artist statement asks: “What do you do and why do you do it?” and how does one sum up such an extensive topic, which one could write a book about, into a couple of paragraphs? 

Before we get into that process, let’s back up a moment and reflect on how it all started. 

The Start and the Distance

I’ve always been a creative person, I just exist in such a state that most days I am engaging with reality through that lens of possibility, what ifs and creativity’s core. Daydreaming, talking to myself, and just wondering about things. In some ways, it’s a bit like being an empty vessel - when you open your heart and mind to life, then impossibilities are removed, and you go with the flow. That’s how I started; there wasn’t much intent or idea behind most of my work for the better part of 10 years. That’s what it’s like when you have a lot of things you want to do - painting was never some end goal or dream for me, but I found that it was a way for me to make a living doing what I love. 

I still don’t consider myself exclusively a painter, and supporting me doesn’t just entail I continue doing visual arts. It supports and finances all other projects. I wanted the statement to include that and not only be about the visual art, but about the Work I do. I often refer to it as “the Work”, and it includes the entire body of work in which I’m a part. Which led me to reflect on my own involvement in it.

It’s no secret that Zevul is not my real name, and it’s a pseudonym that my Organs Translate into. It’s a pseudonym I settled on many years ago, when I was transitioning full-time into the creative business. I chose to add another word; in hindsight, it was another way to further distance myself from what I do. That’s the purpose of a pseudonym in some ways, and when I made the Arcanum, I was taking another step away once more from my personal self as well as my pseudonym. I intend on changing to simply “Zevul” and to remove the Arcanum from both the website and my other handles, and believe it is a step in the right direction. 

When creating Zevul’s Arcanum, I wanted to avoid writing an artist’s statement and hoped to replace it with a simple phrase, like a slogan. That phrase ended up being

“The Mystery of the Soul’s Work” - a vague and forgettable sentence that reeks of self-importance and, more importantly, distance. Mysteries are unknowable, and in some ways it’s saying: You don’t know me, and you never will, because you can’t comprehend it. It’s a rather banal statement, while true, each person has an equally rich inner world, which can never truly be known to any outsider, but it’s not the world-changing stuff my younger self imagined when we started doing art. It’s a facetious attempt to once again distance myself from my own work, because that would mean the criticism it would face would not be directed at me. 

With this baggage of insecurities and doubt, the artist statement became a real challenge, because it presents a moment of vulnerability. It requires honesty and a genuine look at yourself, your ideas and what you stand for. It’s been a year of journaling and introspection, as well as avoidance and procrastination, and I want to walk you through some of those steps. The artist statement is a challenge because you need to condense down the very essence of your whats, whys and hows into a few sentences. The first step to that is figuring out and writing out the larger puzzle pieces, before you can assemble them into the smallest full picture. 

Outset and Outlines

Before puzzling the entire statement together, I pondered what I wanted my statement to be like - length, style and contents. As stated, my previous attempts are too abstract and too vague. Outlining the premise of the statement, I wrote down some keywords:

Direct - Avoiding abstractions, achieving accuracy and limiting pretentiousness. The statement should not only summarise a great deal of information, but it should also convey it with accuracy and honesty. While I appreciate and understand the necessity for a little bit of pretentiousness (after all, it is an artist’s statement), I wanted to limit the fanciful and colourful language to its absolute necessity. 

Genuine - Honest and open, in order for something to be direct and to avoid abstraction, it needs to be genuine. While artist statements are often intended for artistic people like gallery owners and art collectors, they shouldn’t be out of reach for ordinary people. When researching, I saw someone summarise an artist statement like “explaining to a family member what your art is and why you do it”. This often proves harder than one might think, and it’s certainly something I’ve struggled with. It took me many, many years before I would even refer to myself as an artist, and it’s something I still avoid today if I can. 

Short - Maximum 100 words. When researching, I often found people putting the limit at 200 words, but soon found that 200 words is way too many. I consider an artist statement to be more like an elevator pitch than anything else. It should be a statement which is concise and coherent, and can also be easily memorised. The final word count ended up being 57, and I think even trying to keep it to under 50 could’ve worked well. 

Encompassing - I don’t consider myself just a visual artist, and I work with a lot of different creative expressions, and that does entail painting, but isn’t limited to it. I don’t consider myself a painter in that sense, and prefer the term artist as it’s more encompassing. Thus, I didn’t want the artist statement to be a painter’s statement, and I want it to refer to my entire body of work. I personally and affectionately refer to it as “the Work”, and while that might seem a bit vague to someone outside of it, I still wanted to keep this term in the statement, for another reason as well.

A Little Mystery - While I wanted to focus on the directness and openness of this statement, it doesn’t mean I want to completely rid it of all mystery and intrigue. While it should be open and honest, it should still allure people to want to seek more information about the statement. It shouldn’t spoil the entire work, but it should accurately describe it, like the backside of a book or a description for a movie. 

Point of View - One thing, apparent to me, was that I wanted to avoid first person and words like “I” or “me”. The work is personal, and it is done by the individual, yet I often feel like I can’t take all the credit. Ideas are like raw ingredients, and a good chef knows his work is to highlight that produce, and that he can’t take credit for the potato. He decides what he does with the potato, but the produce itself is a gift from nature. We can create something new and unique to us, but we use building blocks gifted to us from others, whether it’s techniques or the physical tools required to actually perform it. Most of us as individuals are at the mercy of the work and ideas of others; we can contribute meaningfully to that, but we have to keep our own egos in check. It’s an important reminder that we walk a thin edge between being completely helpless and in control of everything. Anyone who has spent an excessive amount of time creating anything knows the feeling that creative flow can put one in, and that in that moment, the self sometimes dissipates, and it’s as if something else takes control and performs the Work. 

With these keywords and principles in mind, I set out answer the four questions that make up a good artist statement. 

The Puzzle Pieces

There are four cornerstones to a good artist’s statement, and before I could craft my own statement, I had to answer those 4 questions. I will write out my initial notes and then elaborate on them a little bit.

1. What is it you do?

“Art depicting the extraordinary by an ordinary person. No formal training, no fancy background, just a human being engaging with creativity in a human way.”

Explaining what art you do can either be reduced to a bunch of technical jargon; providing a long list of techniques, materials, and concepts. An alternative route is to fall into the old cliché and rather obvious explanation of expression. We all know art is expressive; it’s fundamentally true to the experience, and saying that doesn’t make it any less true, but it also doesn’t add much more than “water is wet”. 

I didn’t want to sound too self-righteous and proud, so I wanted to avoid words like “autodidactic” and “self-taught”, while they’re both true to some extent, a lot of my creative journey I’ve learned from others, not from formal teachers but from regular people who have sat down and painted or even just engaged in conversation with me. However, I do want to highlight that I am a regular person. 

Art is not something which only some people can do, and it’s an extraordinary experience, but it’s available and accessible to the, and through the, entirely ordinary. Creativity is part of being human, and expressing yourself, and creating things is so entirely human. What I do, I truly believe most people can do, but it’s not about possibilities; it’s about actually doing, and I do do it. 

2. Why do you do what you do? 

“Many answers: condensed into a single word somewhere between love and compulsion - inevitability.“

The why is perhaps the most difficult one to shorten, and is really at the crux of a good artist statement. We all understand that if you do something, you have a why, or perhaps a big net of different reasons, all coming together to form the things you do. I paint because I have access to brushes and paints, I write because I know a language, and I catch ideas because they seem to fly by constantly. 

To many artists, art is compulsive, I believe. I can’t fall asleep sometimes if I still have unfinished ideas, and when you’re in a state of ceaseless flow, it’s easy to lose hours just doing it. The neurochemistry at work may remain a mystery, but the trance-like state of being fully immersed in your work remains the same, I believe, for almost all people. It’s that journey which artists love more than the destination, because otherwise you wouldn’t seek it out again and again, and you would only seek to finish projects if that was the final reward. There’s a love there for that compulsion, and somewhere between that love and compulsion is just the fact that art is inevitable.

3. How do you do what you do?

“Living with an open heart day to day, where art becomes an inevitability.”

The question of how, is very similar to the first question of what and can be taken in a similar direction. It can be as direct and obvious as stating the immediacy of your creative process: I mix paints on a cotton canvas using a brush to form imagery. It can also be a long list of techniques, materials and concepts again. Both may suffice for some, but I find that it doesn’t exactly explain how I do what I do.

Understanding what you do is essential to understanding how you do it. As I wanted the statement to not only be limited to my process of painting, I instead opted to explain how I engage with all creativity and all the work I do, regardless of what genre of art it is. Engaging with creativity daily requires an open mind and open heart, and this allows for a bit of that childish naivety and play to come into the picture. I opted to just use the term “open heart” because I think that’s ultimately more important than an open mind, as an open mind means an openness to ideas, whereas an open heart means approaching something with love and without judgment. 

It doesn’t mean that you should just entertain every idea or be completely without discernment, but it means opening yourself to that creative state of engaging with things in a way that doesn’t have to make complete sense and without too much self-criticism. An open heart means allowing yourself to grow, and seeing imperfections and shortcomings not as permanent stains but as necessary stepping stones in the process of improvement. 

When you live daily with that open heart, and you create an environment that allows dreams to thrive and grow, then art doesn’t become a chore but rather an inevitability, and it becomes a meaningful joy to engage with, and that is important. 

4. Why is what you do important?

“It's important because it serves as a reminder. I hope it does good and brings joy to people and that it inspires them. The work doesn't serve the times nor does it serve the world, but it seeks to serve the soul.” 

The question of importance is a difficult one to answer, and it seems almost any way you cut it, it comes out as a little self-righteous. The two sides of the same coin seem to be either complete nihilism, where all your work is meaningless, and in the grand scheme of things, lacks anything close to resembling importance, or it’s a product of delusional megalomania, where your work is the most important thing that will change the world. I am an idealist, and I want to believe in the importance positive impact can have on the world, and I believe the changing of the world happens on a local, small-scale level. It’s not political policies but rather meetings face-to-face with another person that really changes the world. I can’t solve all the world’s problems even if I became a solitary and global ruler whose words would never be disobeyed or misunderstood, with a will entirely set on Good. In that way, I can’t change the world, but I can change the world around me, and having a positive impact is the way forward. 

In that sense, I do want my art to change the world, and I do want to change it for the better - I just believe the way for me personally to do that is to do something which brings positivity. Positivity takes many shapes and forms, and art doesn’t just have to be some kind of profound way to explore the self or answer tough existential questions; it absolutely can, but it can also just be enjoyed and bring a smile to someone. Art was always there in all its shapes and forms for me in my darkest moments, and in some ways, I want to pay that forward by creating something which can make someone say, “I like that, and it brings me joy”. 

Whether it’s beautiful, cool, deep, shallow, funny, cringe, lame or anything really, as long as it brings some kind of positivity to the world. I also want the Work to be a reminder, a reminder of good and that you can do things despite the odds being against you. A reminder that you can put your mind to something and do it, and that art is something worthwhile pursuing, it doesn’t have to be a career, just engaging with it as a hobby is valuable. I also want it to serve as a reminder that there’s a lot more to life than meets the eye, and while I impose my own beliefs and ideals into that, it’s also an open invitation into the strange and mystical.

Final Draft

Writing an artist’s statement is a difficult task, but with the proper outset and outlines, and with the time to reflect and polish, you can end up with something you’re hopefully happy with. It’s taken me a year, and in the end, I presented a sentence to my wife who simply responded, “I don’t like it”. I’d spent the past week actively working on this sentence, and she shut it down immediately - great, I thought that’s all my work in vain. However, she sat down with me and for the next four hours we worked on that statement, and it was the easiest thing ever. 

I had brought all the prep needed over the last year, and she brought the outsider perspective, because once you’re in it, it’s so easy to become blind to it. Always get help from those around you if you can. We made another draft, and I sent it out to some other friends for immediate feedback. After that, it was done, and that was a daunting task in itself. Alas, if there’s one thing I’ve learned from this art business is that you can’t wait around for the perfect thing or time; you just have to do things sometimes.

My initial approach to the art business might have been more distant than I would like, but at least I got started, and the only regret I have is that I didn’t start sooner. Whatever it is you want to do, get to it immediately and don’t let it sit and wait for too long. The sooner you start doing, the better it gets, and don’t fear failure; you can always improve and make changes along the way. This is the final comfort that enables me to approach this artist statement.

I might look back at it sometime and cringe, but then I can change it or rework it. For now, it’s right where it needs to be. Before sharing that final draft of the artist statement I ended up writing, I just wanted to share one other small detail on the journey towards drafting it. I had a dream not too long ago with a simple message urging me to remember it:
“Present: Now. 

Future: Why. 

Past: How.” 

Translated into waking life, it sums up my art in the following way:  “I do what I do because of the present. Why? Because of the future. How? Because of the past.”

This dreamy reminder may sum up what I do, but it doesn’t make a great artist statement. If there are any takeaways from this is that you should do it now, do it diligently and be honest with it and yourself. Don’t avoid it just because you don’t like it, and don’t back down from a challenge. Thanks again to all my wonderful friends and my lovely wife. Couldn’t have done it with you guys. Now with all of those reflections out of the way, the final statement ends up being: 

The Work doesn't serve the times nor does it serve the world, but it seeks to serve the soul. It's a depiction of the poetic at the hands of the mundane - created through an open heart, where art becomes an inevitability. Pursuing the forsaken dreams of generations past to bring a gentle reminder towards goodness and inspiration.