Taking the time to create a great artist statement will help you clarify your wording, so you can give a short and captivating presentation anytime you find yourself in front of an interested buyer, are giving an interview or just get asked by a random person at a party somewhere about what you do. 

The worst thing to do when casually asked what kind of art you make, is to go rambling on about your art for half an hour and spewing random artist’s names and isms with no head or tail. Again, the goal is to start with small bite-sized pieces of information that are easy to consume and intrigue the listener to want to know more, not your subconsciousness going full monty. 

A FEW THINGS TO KEEP IN MIND:

Be genuine and sincere. This is the most important one of all. Never feel like you need to defend your right to make art; regardless if you only paint pretty flowers because you like pretty flowers or if you are composing some conceptual piece that will explain the meaning of life itself, what you do is your choice, so tell it how it really is. There is absolutely no need for big words and fake concepts.

Short and sweet; 3 – 5 sentences is ideal. It can be longer if you really want to, though I couldn’t recommend it. The important thing to keep in mind is not to write half a page.

Clear and simple language. Regardless of who your target audience is and what you do, make your artist statement understandable to even the people that don’t know anything about art. Especially if your work focuses on being beautiful, rather than conceptual. Truth be told, nobody likes to feel dumber than the person they are speaking to and if your goal is to get them even close to as excited about what you do as you are yourself, it might be better to talk to them like you would to a curious friend rather than a judging professor.

Base your language on evoking emotions, not just intellectual concepts. Easy for anyone focusing on beauty or any other emotion-evoking art, but even conceptual artists can present their ideas by building on emotions. Think about it; your artist statement should intrigue the reader to become curious about your work and give them some sort of key to be able to understand it better. And curiosity is an emotion, not a mental state — nobody thinks they’re curious, they feel curious.

No comparisons to other artists, living or dead. The fact that you’re trying to make your work more understandable by comparing it to someone else — usually a more popular and successful artist — is a bad move. Not only are you passively implying unoriginality, but unless you’re comparing your work to Picasso (and you shouldn’t), there’s a big probability that people just won’t know the artists you’re mentioning.

Nobody cares about technicalities or tools. If you’re a landscape painter, talk about why you’re drawn to nature, not about the fact that you use oils instead of acrylics because they blend better. But you can always use materials to strengthen your narrative: oils are an old, slow drying medium and can allow for a much more mediative and relaxed workflow, thus complementing nature’s unhurried pace, compared to our fast-paced lives. But only if this is really why you chose to start painting landscapes in oil, don’t make things up because they sound nice.

Review your statement as you progress in your work. Be it quarterly or yearly or some other period of time, the point is not to write your artist statement once and then leave it be for 20 years. It’s also a nice reality check to sit down and think about what your work is about and if anything has changed since the last time you wrote it.