No matter how creative artists, craftspeople and writers are, somehow it all goes out the window when they are asked to write about themselves. We all fall victim to it. We are asked to provide a blurb or bio or statement for an exhibit or book, and we draw a complete blank.
We come up with a variety of (mostly unsuccessful) ways to proceed. There's the "Just the facts, ma'am..." approach, with a tedious list of college degrees, job descriptions, shows, exhibits, etc. It looks very distinquished to present a list of credentials, but unfortunately, after you read a few, they all sound distressingly alike.
Then there are the gushy ones that also sound so run-of-the-mill. "I just love color!" is my personal pet peeve among visual artists. I challenge you to name a quilter, painter or watercolorist who doesn't love color.
I struggle with the artist bio/statement, too, but I've had a chance to read and edit what other people have written. It's easy to see what not to do when someone else does it! Not only am I learning some of the more common mistakes artists make, I'm firing up to rewrite mine.
By the way, I'm lumping artist bio and statement together because for most purposes, you'll be lumping them together anyway. You can formally separate them out, if you need to. They are different. Bio says where you came from and how you got here. Statement is why you do what you do. But I'm finding more and more that the info in a bio and a statement are increasingly needed in one mushed-up document. And usually, it's a matter of length rather than function that's at issue. I'm often asked to provide an informal paragraph or two to accompany my project being published in a book, or for a work in an exhibition. They really don't care what I say, as long as it's brief.
Plus, if I'm being asked for a bio, I still try to slip in something about the work itself and why I feel compelled to make it. It's all self-promotion, after all.
So, a few observations to give your artist bio/statement more punch.
1. Avoid cliches. "I love color" is an obvious one. So is the desire to be an artist from a very young age. Someone in one of my forums exclaimed, "Everyone wants to be an artist when they're young!" Too true.
2. On the other hand, it's okay to talk about color and youthful ambitions in your bio. It's how you talk about it that makes it either a cliche, or a punchy, memorable statement about your work. By definition, a cliche is a trite phrase (or idea behind it), or a hackneyed theme. But if you can express the idea in a fresh, creative way, you can get your point across without boring your reader. Here's one from an interview with Boston ceramist Jill Rosenwald in the May 03 issue of Victoria magazine: "With me, color comes first and pattern comes second. Devising palettes has always given me more pleasure than anything else in the creative process. Color is so alive." She's still saying she just loves color, but now we have a little peek into her creative process. It says so much more about her artistic nature.
If you really did know you wanted to be an artist when you were little, put it in a zippier context. Did you cover your freshly-painted room with hundreds of original drawings (held up with scotch tape) when you were three, much to the chagrin of your mother? Did you paint a beautiful portrait of the family dog with catsup and mustard on the family car? Did you decide you would look lovelier in purple hair, and used a can of paint for the transformation? These examples still show you had creative urges at a young age, but now there's a story, a nugget of interest working in your favor.
3. Think "by-line." If we were reading an article about you, what would be an attention-grabbing by-line? In the same article ("Primarily Colors"), the by-line reads, "Though her patterns are jazzy and geometric, Boston ceramist Jill Rosenwald thinks of herself as a colorist most of all." What a great sentence! We now know who this person is, where she lives, what she does, and we know three things about her work: It's jazzy, it's geometric, and it's colorful. It makes me want to see her work. So think about your bio/statement as a mini-article about you. What will your title be? And what's your by-line?
4. One trap I see new artists falling into is being tentative about what they do. I see it often in self-taught artists. I used to do it, too. We know we've broken out from the typical 9-5 jobs but don't feel quite confident that other artists have accepted us into their ranks.
My view: If you're doing it, you are one. If you paint, you're a painter. If you write poetry, you are a poet. You may not be a financially successful painter--yet! You may not be a published poet--yet. But there is no need to qualify what you do. Nor does your audience need (or want) to see you qualifying yourself. My favorite example was a talented artist who said his spouse supported his "struggle to be an artist". He meant, of course, that she supports his desire to create and sell his art. But it sounds like she supports his struggle. Ouch. And....we would never know he was struggling if he hadn't come out and told us so. I thought his work was pretty cool!
5. Go through your bio/statement and eliminate tentative-type words. Take out words like "try", "attempt", "began to try", "started to make", etc.When I read, "I am trying to attempt to capture the quality of light in my work", I wince. It sounds like the artist doesn't have a clue what to do. And it doesn't say why the quality of light is so important to them, or how it's different than what other artists do with light. Say something more direct, more concrete: "I use light to highlight small, intimate details that might otherwise go unnoticed by a casual observer." Or "I use complementary colors to represent light in unexpected and exuberant ways--purple horses bathed in the golden orange glow of early morning light."
6. Always, always, ALWAYS go for active voice over passive. It is soooo easy to slip into passive. We must think it sounds more academic or something. I recently, as a favor, edited someone's bio and noted that they'd selected passive voice almost all the way through. "And I was an English major!" she exclaimed.
Passive voice weakens your writing. Active voice is more dynamic, more powerful. And as an artist, you want to sound dynamic and powerful, even if your style and work is reflective and quiet. Even if you are by nature quiet and thoughtful, you still make stuff, whether it's a delicate watercolor or subtle words of prose. Making and creating is an active process. A dynamic process. As a maker, you need an active voice when you talk about what you make.
7. Don't be afraid to be present in your bio/statement. Sounds obvious. But again, it's another literary device we can fall prey to. We start talking about our materials and techniques as if they are independent of what we do with them or how we put them together. We talk about our work as if it simply appeared in front of us one day. As if it has a life of its own, separate from us. Well....it does eventually. But the reason it appeared in this world is because of you, the artist. Don't be afraid of that.
I know a woman, a talented potter, who talked about her work this way. She would get quite ethereal about it, how the pot existed somewhere else in space and time, and she would align herself with the universe and let her hands go and the pot would appear. I was astonished. I said, "So we could get someone else to access this universal force and eliminate you, and we could get the same pot??" Well, no....she didn't like the idea that someone else could do exactly what she did. In fact, she was extremely proud of the fact that, due to a thousand minute variations in water quality, clay content, firing times, glaze components, no one could ever exactly duplicate another potter's work. It took awhile for her to admit she still felt a little unsure about whether she was really an "artist". She felt more confident talking about the work instead. She knew the work was good, but she wasn't sure she was good. So she deflected her writing to talk about her work instead of herself. Very ethereal and high-falutin', but not very powerful.
I started a long philosophical thing here, about why we are here and what we're supposed to do about it, but you don't need to hear that. What you do need to hear is, if your work comes from an authentic part of yourself, if it is the result of your individual story, quirks, techniques, way of seeing things, then it's here because of you. Don't leave "you" out of your story.
8. To quote Bruce Baker, craftsperson, writer and public speaker on many crafts issues: "Tell your audience what they want to hear, not what you want to tell them." His example is a potter who says his work uses titanium glazes and fires at cone 10. He says the customer hears "titanium" and thinks "space shuttle??" and hears "cone 10" and thinks "ice cream cone??" What a customer wants to know about pottery is, is it functional, can it go in the microwave, and does it have lead in the glazes. Don't write a bio/statement for other artists, write it for your audience.
9. In closing, try not to use templates or statements by other artists as anything more than a starting point. Rewriting what someone else has written, and substituting your worn words, will not have the power of what you write from your heart. My good friend, Nicci Glick, artist and business consultant, puts it succinctly: "You cannot fill in the blanks with passion. If you copy a template, it doesn't go far, it doesn't have energy. And you're audience doesn't want to read a template--they want to know something unique about you."
Writing about yourself is hard (until you get used to it--then it's fun!) Just don't sell yourself short on the process. If you care about your art, your work, your craft at all, then it deserves enough time, honesty and passion on your part to get it out into the world. It deserves your very best effort.
