Process:
Your artist statement should summarize the work, ideas, and interests you have discovered so far in your art making process. Usually an artist’s most recent work is most important to the artist, but your statement should reflect upon the many experiences you’ve had in general, so you may refer to your strongest works from previous semesters as well. Your artist statement is a working document because it will not have one final form. Instead, the artist statement will take many forms as you update and adapt it for various purposes over the coming year(s): college applications, scholarships, future exhibitions, and employment.

There are some basic requirements for an artist statement:
1. Brevity: Your artist statement is limited to 500 words or one page.
2. Legibility: Your statement must be printed (typed) from a word processing program using a familiar font (Arial, Times, or Helvetica…no Wingdings)
3. Clarity: Your spelling and grammar must be accurate. Choose words for their meaning and clarity not because you think you will sound more intellectual.
4. Honesty: Write from your heart. We are much more interested in your genuine thoughts than your ability to make yourself sound smart.

Always use the active voice. Compare the following two statements:
I admire Lucian Freud bold planar brushwork. Therefore, in my own painting, I have tried to use similar bold brushstrokes that emphasize color planes. Active voice)

My paintings have bold, planar brushwork like Lucian Freud’s. (Passive voice)

For best results, take some time to look at your recent portfolio works.

Consider how to use the following somehow in your statement. You do not have to address the following questions in the order they are listed! Make your statement cohesive, with a natural flow, not choppy and forced.
1. What characteristics/qualities should a person have to be considered an artist?
2. What are your artistic strengths/qualities?
3. What criteria/strengths should something have in order to be considered a work of art?
4. How are your artistic strengths/qualities evident in your work?
5. Identify a professional artist(s) that you feel has influenced your work at some point this year and explain how that influence is evident in your own work. Be sure to identify the artists’ name(s) and what you specifically like about his/her work.
6. Think of a hobby, activity, or everyday interest you have and love to do that is completely unrelated to making art, yet is still unique or important to you. Then, find a connection between that interest and your own process/perspective of making art and explain how they relate to one another.
7. Identify two or three works by title and explain their thematic connection.
8. Explain how you plan to continue to develop as an artist in the future.

Sample Artist Statements/Bios

FULL PAGE ARTIST STATEMENT: KAREN ATKINSON

My work for the past 20 years has used revealing aspects of history, which have a profound impact on our contemporary culture today.  In the current climate where many believe history has no relevance, I find myself continually returning to those aspects that are often hidden or misrepresented in the “official” recordings for posterity.  In my varied and diverse approaches to making art; installations; public, curatorial and web projects, the context of the work has an impact on the work’s relationship to the viewer.

My work ranges from the context of the street to museums, movie theaters, to presentations of sound through parking meters.  Often focusing on the trappings of power and the rituals needed for it’s effect, or evoking the traditional distancing of the supplicant by those in power, giving voice to those who are often unheard, or revealing the power of language through history.  The work takes on various forms intended to draw in the viewer as co-author and witness, create new and unpredictable cycles of thoughts and associations, providing an experimental chance to challenge one’s perceptions, perspectives and assumptions.

My current project, “Prisoner of Love” is a multi media installation with a projection of a 41 minute Director movie on a glow in the dark screen made by the artist.  There are bus benches for comfortable seating, and a sound track with multiple interviews, music and sound.  When the images are projected on a glow in the dark screen, it charges the screen so that when the image changes, it leaves a trace of the image before it, often affecting the image which comes next – in a way that history does the same.

“Prisoner of Love” is a multi layered story about the my great aunt and uncle, who were married illegally in 1934, in Tijuana, Mexico.  She was Caucasian (Danish American), he Japanese American.  They were included in the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.  Although my grandfather grew up with a Japanese American as his best friend, when his sister married, she was shunned by her brothers and sisters.  When the local newspaper found out about their marriage a few years later, it hit the front pages of the local newspaper.  This project is a complex layering of stories, revealing the contradictions inherent in the lives of this once close knit family, and their subsequent “recovery” from extreme bouts of racism.  

Art remains as a strong contender of how we share our thoughts and ideas. Throughout history, art has survived the tidal wave of information, and remains an unpredictable source of imagination.  It has the possibilities of changing one’s thoughts, opening new ideas, and borrowing through received ideas so common to our educational system.  I have no grand illusions that art will create a revolution in the traditional sense, but have witnessed the powerful changes it can make in an individual.  Just one new idea can change a persons’ perception.  The world may not change in an instant by art, but it’s slow and insipid spread into the active part of our brains lives to tell the tale.  It may leave the studio and make it’s way around the world, and yet come back to the studio where anything can happen.

The use of materials in my work is calculated.  I am often looking for avenues of the unexpected.  An ironic twist to images or things you might expect.  Or their combinations.  Provoking a participant to new and perhaps unexplored territories.

SHORT ARTIST STATEMENT: SAM DURANT

My artwork takes a critical view of social, political and cultural issues.  Often referencing American history, my work explores the varying relationships between popular culture and fine art. Having engaged subjects as diverse as the civil rights movement, southern rock music and modernist architecture, my work reproduces familiar visual and aural signs, arranging them into new conceptually layered installations. While I use a variety of materials and processes in each project my methodology is consistent. Although there may not always be material similarities between the different projects they are linked by recurring formal concerns and through the subject matter.   The subject matter of each body of work determines the materials and the forms of the work.  Each project often consists of multiple works, often in a range of different media, grouped around specific themes and meanings.  During research and production new areas of interest arise and lead to the next body of work.

SHORT ARTIST STATEMENT: MILLIE WILSON

I think of my installations as unfinished inventories of fragments: objects, drawings, paintings, photographs, and other inventions.  They are improvisational sites in which the constructed and the readymade are used to question our making of the world through language and knowledge.  My arrangements are schematic, inviting the viewer to move into a space of speculation.  I rely on our desires for beauty, poetics and seduction.

The work thus far has used the frame of the museum to propose a secret history of modernity, and in the process, point to stereotypes of difference, which are hidden in plain sight.  I have found the histories of surrealism and minimalism to be useful in the rearranging of received ideas. The objects I make are placed in the canon of modernist art, in hopes of making visible what is overlooked in the historicizing of the artist.  This project has always been grounded in pleasure and aesthetics.

BIO: MARTIN KERSELS

Mr. Kersels was born in Los Angeles and attended UCLA, receiving a B.A. in art in 1984 and an M.F.A. in 1995. His body of work ranges from collaborative performances with the group SHRIMPS (1984–93) to large-scale sculptures such as Tumble Room (2001). Since 1994, Mr. Kersels’s objects and projects have been exhibited at museums both nationally and internationally, including the 1997 Whitney Biennial, the Centre Pompidou, MOCA Los Angeles, the Museum Tinguely, Kunsthalle Bern, and the J. Paul Getty Museum. A survey of his work, Heavyweight Champion, was organized and exhibited by the Tang Museum in 2007 and the Santa Monica Museum of Art in 2008. His room-sized sculpture 5 Songs, and an accompanying performance series, Live on 5 Songs, was on view in the 2010 Whitney Biennial. Before joining the faculty at Yale he was a faculty member and co-director of the art program at the California Institute of the Arts. Mr. Kersels was appointed associate professor and director of graduate studies in sculpture in 2012.

BIO: KAREN ATKINSON

Karen Atkinson is a media, installation, public artist, independent curator, and collaborator. Atkinson has published and guest edited a number of publications. Exhibiting and curating internationally, Atkinson’s work has been shown in South Africa, Australia, Europe, Mexico, Canada, throughout the USA, and in the Fifth Havana Biennial in Cuba and the 2011 Biennale de Paris. She has a Ted Talk on hybrid careers for artists at http://www.gyst-ink.com/our-team/. In 1991, she was a co-founding director of Side Street Projects, a non-profit artist-run organization in Los Angeles, which continues to thrive now in Pasadena. Atkinson has held a faculty position at CalArts since 1988. She has taught workshops for over 20 years, both regionally and nationally, for organizations like the California and Boston Lawyers for the Arts, College Art Association, NCECA, The National Association of Arts Organizations, and dozens of additional artist-run spaces and non-profits as well as universities. Karen created the GYST software for artists from scratch and in 2000 she founded GYST as an artist-run professional practices service company. Currently, Atkinson chooses to focus on making life better for artists and less on exhibiting her own work. In her spare time she serves on Boards and Advisory Boards of local and national arts organizations, advises artists on their careers, and tries to get into as much art trouble as possible. To view some of Karen’s projects visit http://www.karenatkinsonstudio.org

I personally use Google Docs for my resume because it has easy to use built in resume templates that can be updated from anywhere. Once you have your resume completed you can just link to it from your own portfolio site. This will mean that you only have to update it in one place.

Writing an artist’s resume when you have little experience.

Resume Now

Documenting your work

Documenting your artwork with a digital camera allows you to keep a record of your completed and sold artwork. Whether you gift the artwork to someone or you sell it, you want to make sure that it’s a part of your legacy as an artist.

You can also use the digital image for marketing purposes on your website, blog, online portfolio and print portfolio. Having a digital copy of the artwork is also important because you can utilize the digital file as a tool to produce additional income in the form of digital prints.

Join photographer Andrea Walker Collins in our latest video Documenting your Artwork with a Digital Camera Part 1 & 2 for an inside look into this process.

Are you new to using a digital camera? Then read our full article below for an in depth look into the tools and skills needed for digital reproduction. With some practice you will be documenting like a pro in no time!

CAPTURING AN IMAGE OF THE ARTWORK

There is a standard model for setting up a space for art documentation. All you need is:

• Tripod
• DSLR (digital single-lens reflex) camera
• Beginners Lighting Kit

If you don’t own these you can rent the equipment needed from most camera stores. To help save on cost you can rent the equipment before a gallery show, when you have lots of artwork on hand, and do a full day of reproductions. This will help ensure that you are covered when the artwork sells.

Looking for a camera to rent? Simply google camera rentals + the city where you are located to bring up a list of rental houses near you. To help get you started, here are a few local businesses in Vancouver:

• Leo’s Camera
• Kerrisdale Cameras
• Vancouver Camera Rentals

Lighting

If you know where you’ll be mounting the artwork for the photo the first thing you can do is set-up the lights. The way you light the image will depend on the medium used in the artwork. For example, oil and acrylic paint will reflect light more than watercolours. You will need to evaluate how the light is affecting the piece during this stage in the process. Regardless of the medium used the most important thing when lighting is to get an even distribution of light.

In this video demonstration, Andrea uses Strobe Lights to document the artwork. Strobe lights are timed to flash when the picture is taken and are usually used by professionals because it gives them the ability to adjust how bright the light is when the flash goes off.

An entry level alternative would be to use a Daylight Lamp or any lighting gear that can use a daylight bulb. Instead of a flash of light, daylight lamps provide constant light on your subject and are easier to find and purchase. Daylight bulbs produce a true white light and ensures that your colours are recorded as true to their original tone as possible. You don’t want to use incandescent or fluorescent light because the light they produce will have a yellow or green cast.

Once you have established your set-up, it is always going to be the same in the space where you’re photographing, regardless of whether you decide to use a strobe lighting kit or daylight lamps.

It is also important to make sure that you reduce as much non-white light from the space where you are photographing to eliminate a mixed lighting scenario. You don’t want half of the artwork to look white and the other half to look orange because two different types of bulbs were used. A general rule is to make sure that the room is as dark as possible when you are working to help limit the amount of outside light sources that may seep into the room.

For smaller artworks you can create a small white photo booth or even take the artwork outside on an overcast day. Some artists place the artwork on the floor by a window and take the photo that way. As long as you have an even distribution of light and the picture is properly exposed, DIY set-ups will work as long as you use a DSLR camera.

CAMERA

Now you can set up your camera onto the tripod. If you are not familiar with DSLR Cameras, read the manual that comes with your rentals or ask a sales staff at the camera store for help. These manuals are actually very straight forward and a great resource when you’re first learning how to use a camera. When it comes down to it, a good quality camera and lens are the key to achieving the best results.

If you don’t have access to the manual, all major brands offer online versions of them:

• Canon
• Nikon
• Sony
• FujiFilm
• Sigma
• Olympus

Can I use a point-and-shoot camera instead?

While point-and-shoot cameras are a great and cheap alternative for everyday photography, their camera sensors are simply not big enough to support professional art reproductions. You can still print the photos taken with them at a smaller size (like a 4″ × 6″ photo of your family in Hawaii), but for professional Art Documentation and Reproduction you must use a DSLR camera.

ARTWORK

In the standard set-up for art documentation, the artwork is always mounted upright. Andrea uses an easel and a piece of white foam core to mount the artwork because it allows it to be upright and completely parallel with the camera lens.

Andrea uses push pins to mount the artwork onto the foam core instead of tape to help limit potential damage to the work. Andrea doesn’t puncture the picture with the push pins, she uses them as a guide to rest and secure the artwork.

If you are doing this from home an alternative method is to mount the artwork directly onto a white wall. However, this requires tape if you are documenting artworks on paper and don’t have a piece of foam core rested against the wall. If the artwork is on canvas it can be placed on the floor and rested against the wall. As long as the artwork is completely upright and flat, the image will reproduce accurately.

CAPTURE

Now that you’ve set up the lights, camera and artwork, you can take a few test photos and adjust the position of the camera so the lens is parallel to the image. You want the edges of the artwork to appear as right angles in the viewfinder, but when taking a photo for art documentation, you don’t want to zoom all the way into the borders of the artwork. Leave yourself a buffer on all sides of the piece just in case you need to make changes during editing that may cut segments of the artwork out.

There are 4 key things you need to remember when taking photos with a DSLR camera; these all relate to achieving proper exposure in your photographs. If the image is underexposed (too dark) or overexposed (too bright), your digital print will not match the same brilliance as the original.

Is your image quality set to RAW? Camera RAW image files are the largest photos that your camera can produce. Therefore it is the ideal format for taking photos of fine art because it gives you the highest quality image to work with when editing and printing.

RAW image files are sometimes referred to as digital negatives because they are not yet processed and need to be converted to a file format such as .TIF or .JPG before storage and printing.

Visit digital-photography-school.com to learn more about the basics of RAW image files.

What is your Aperture, Shutter Speed and ISO? The camera’s aperture, shutter speed and ISO are directly linked to taking a properly exposed photograph.

Aperture relates to how big or small the opening of your lens will be when the picture is taken. These are called f-stops and can range anywhere from f/1.2 to f/22 on most cameras, but are largely impacted by the quality of lens used. The lower the f-stop (f/1.8, f/2.0), the wider the lens can open and the more light that can be let in to reach the camera’s sensor. A higher f-stop (f/11, f/22) means the lens opening is smaller and less light will reach your camera’s sensor.

Shutter Speed relates to how fast your camera can take a picture. This is measured in seconds and ranges anywhere from 1s to 1/500 of a second. A slow shutter speed is useful for still life subject matter, like artwork! It requires less light to take the image because the lens stays open for a longer period of time. A fast shutter speed is ideal for moving subject matter and requires more light to expose the photo correctly.

In traditional film photography the ISO referred to how sensitive the film was to light. In digital photography it measures the camera sensors’ sensitivity to light. In most cases you want as low an ISO as possible, but not too low as to underexpose the image. The higher the ISO, the more digital grain is apparent in the image, which is not ideal for making reproductions of artwork.

For more information how Aperture, Shutter Speed and ISO relate to the image visit photographylife.com

Is your image White Balanced correctly? White Balance refers to the process of removing unrealistic colour, rendering objects that are white in person to a true white in the photo. This is often referred to as Colour Temperature because it will change depending on the light source that is lighting the subject.

When using a DSLR camera, you will have a few options for colour temperature such as Daylight, Cloudy, Tungsten – all of which will change the overall colour temperature of the photo.

For those new to digital cameras, Auto White Balance is a safe setting to take your photos in. When you are taking RAW photographs, the colour balance can be corrected in the photo editing stage of this process. However, do not leave everything up to the edit. Try to achieve an accurate and high quality photo in camera.

ADJUST LIGHTING

Because the flash can be so strong when the light is directly facing the artwork, depending on the room you are in, you may need to adjust the direction of the lights so they point away from the image. This is called Bouncing the Light and can be done by turning the light towards a different surface, such as a white wall or a piece of white foam core that you’ve mounted.

Bouncing the light essentially disperses the light and enables it to travel much further. When the light reaches the artwork it is now more ambient than it would have been if the light was directly facing the artwork. This process helps to eliminate glare and overexposure.

6. REVIEW

Once you believe you have a good photo you need to review it. DSLR cameras have a Zoomfunction that allows you to view all the small details to make sure that they are in focus. Camera’s also come with Histograms, which are visible when you review each photo you’ve taken. Histograms are graphs that tell you how much colour and luminosity are in the photo, making them a great tool for reviewing.

Visit cambridgeincolour.com for an easy tutorial on how to read Histograms.

If everything looks good in your photo, the next step is to take the image into photo editing software to prepare it for storage and printing.

EDITING THE PHOTO

Now that you have digitally documented your artwork, you can transfer the image files onto your computer and open them with your photo editing software.

Before you begin editing the photos, it is ideal to ensure that your computer’s monitor is Colour Calibrated. A properly colour calibrated monitor renders colours accurately so the image will look the same when it’s printed or shown on other digital screens. There are a few quick ways to calibrate your monitor using built-in and free computer software:

• Windows Calibration
• Mac Calibration
• Free software from calibrize.com

Makeuseof.com has a great article that details the importance of a properly calibrated monitor.

PHOTO EDITING SOFTWARE

There are various Photo Editing Softwares available online, however, the key is to have software that can work with the RAW images you have taken. Below are a few options for programs that can work with RAW image files.

SOFTWARE FOR PURCHASE:

• Adobe Photoshop
• Adobe Lightroom

FREE SOFTWARE:

• Picasa
• Windows Photo Gallery
• Darktable

WORKING WITH CAMERA RAW IMAGES

Working in RAW will produce the best results and offers most of the tools that standard photo editing software provides. The main difference is that once you convert the RAW image into a .JPG or .TIF, the degree to which you can make further changes are limited. RAW is the unconverted negative (.CR2 for Canon, .NEF for Nikon) for a digital photo, so editing in RAW gives you the most flexibility before conversion to .JPG or .Tif.

The following video tutorial from video2brain.com introduces the basic adjustments that can be done when a RAW photo is opened with Adobe Photoshop

Once the adjustments have been made to the RAW image, there are a few basic things that you need to do in the photo editing software.

Cropping your photograph is essential because you want to be able to remove any excess elements in the photo. You want to have a nice clean image that doesn’t have any negative space, so you want to remove things like the foam core or the wall you may have used to mount your image.

Color Balance
You want to make sure that the whites are balanced properly, or changed if you want to achieve a specific look. Even though you white balance in your camera’s settings, and can adjust it again in RAW, using the Color Balance tool in the editing software is still suggested.

You can also use your own eyes to judge the white balance. If there is something in the photo that you know is pure white, use the colour balance tool to adjust it if it looks too red, or blue, or green, etc.

Levels
Another option is to work with a tool call Levels. This is a tool that will help to balance the contrast of your image, making sure that there is an even distribution of highlights, shadows and midtones.

It features a simple slider tool: shadows on the left, midtones in the middle, and highlights on the right.

Saving for Print and Web

Once you’re done editing the photo you’re ready to save. We recommend saving in 2 different formats.

FOR PRINT: Using the SAVE AS tool, select the option to save the image as a .TIF file. This is a high resolution file that you will be using when you are ready to make prints of your photo.

FOR WEB: Use the SAVE AS or SAVE FOR WEB & DEVICES option to create your Web Ready .JPG. A Web Ready .JPG needs to be sized smaller so that it is ideal to be placed on a website or to be emailed to someone.

Naming conventions change depending on how you store your digital photos and what works best for your workflow. Generally you will want to include the name of the artist, the date, and whether it is for PRINT or WEB.