CREATIVE OUTLOOK: WRITING FOR ARTISTS

Who Needs It?

by Mary Wells, Oregon College of Arts & Crafts

You are planning to go to art school. You are going to be an artist, and you feel confident of your creative ability. In your mind you have a clear understanding of why you create art and what it means to you. It probably seems as though this is enough, but unfortunately for a self-supporting artist in the world today it is not. “What more,” you ask, “Do I need?” The answer is this: You need the ability to express yourself in words.

There was a time when the main support for artists came from the church or wealthy patrons. The artist’s job was to create works of art, and the church or patron’s job was to provide the artist a place to live, food to eat and payment as well. The Italian Renaissance artists Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo all worked under this system. Today only a few artists have this kind of support. Most of us will have to work at finding investors for our art. We accomplish this by working through galleries, receiving grants, being interviewed in the press and doing residencies at art institutions. All of these situations require us to express ourselves in words, and the more successful we are with words, the more successful we will be as artists.

As visual artists we are most comfortable “speaking” through our favorite media. While we are students working in an arts-oriented academic environment, surrounded by faculty and peers who share our interests and skills, we can focus all our energy on the visual aspects of our creative processes. However, once we leave this nurturing academic environment, we quickly realize that we need skills that go beyond our ability to express ourselves visually. As soon as we are out of school we are confronted with the need to interact with the world at large. We discover that we must be able to write a resume, produce an artist statement when submitting work for a juried exhibit and write grant proposals for projects and residencies. We may be visual artists, but we need writing skills in many different situations.

As college-level art students, we are given many opportunities to express ourselves verbally. In our studio classes we learn how to look at the work of our fellow students. We are taught how to participate in formal verbal critiques of each other’s work. We practice ways of expressing our views about our peers’ work–to talk about what we think is successful and what is not–in a positive, nonthreatening and helpful manner. We contribute our ideas for improving a piece, and we learn how to respond appropriately to our peers’ comments and suggestions about our own work.

While we learn how to talk about the work of others, often we do not learn how to talk about our own. Talking about the technical aspects of art, especially the art of others, soon becomes a comfortable experience, but talking about the meanings and intentions that lie behind our own work frequently feels uncomfortable. As artists we tend to believe we have done our job simply by creating; in our view, no further explanation should be necessary. Unfortunately, in order to be self-supporting in today’s world of commercialism and competitive marketing, this is not true.

My friend Anna is a good example of a young, educated, working artist. Anna earned her BFA a few years ago and is an emerging artist with a gallery contract. She has already had two solo shows as well as exposure in several regional juried art exhibits. Even though Anna is achieving success as an artist, she is still “getting by” marginally. Anna has decided to seek out a residency program that will support her and, at the same time, give her the time and a space to focus on her art without outside distractions. Competition for the program is stiff and grant proposals are required. For Anna, receiving the residency depends–at least partially–on her ability to communicate her needs in words.

Anna graduated from a respected BFA program where she took a class in writing for artists. While aimed at the needs and interests of developing artists, Anna found her writing class did not really prepare her for life as a self-supporting, working artist. “Our classes focused more on reading than on writing,” Anna says. “We learned a lot about art criticism and the writing of Clement Greenberg, but we didn’t spent too much time writing ourselves.” After graduating Anna had to start marketing her own work. To supplement the writing course she took in college she took a course called “How to Promote Yourself in Art” at PICA (Portland Institute for Contemporary Art) where she learned the writing skills she needs as a professional artist.

My experience as a student in the BFA program at the Oregon College of Art & Craft has been quite different from Anna’s. All BFA students at the College are required to complete and pass a writing class as part of their junior year. “Writing for Artists,” taught by Steve Taylor, a professional writer, focuses on the kind of writing we need as visual artists in our workday lives.

Taylor’s class begins with exercises that focus on descriptions of our surroundings, a skill already familiar through our critique process, but written this time instead of spoken. Next we interview someone we know, and write a profile – good practice for the day when we ourselves will be interviewed. We learn how to write about events and experiences by telling a story that puts the reader “right there.” We write a piece about our personal philosophy and values and how they in? uence our lives and artwork. We write about artsrelated issues, and we practice writing art reviews. Learning how to write an artist statement and practice in stating our goals and abilities in a confident but not arrogant manner is one of the skills we acquire in Taylor’s writing class. We read former students’ thesis statements and do some preliminary writing for our own upcoming thesis proposals. Finally we write and submit a proposal for an imaginary arts grant. In class we review each grant, discuss its pros and cons andtake a vote to choose the award winner.

As with our visual critiques, we read our pieces aloud to the class and practice critiquing each other’s writing. We critique how something is said–the structure, style, grammar – not what the writer is saying. Over time we develop the ability to respond verbally to questions about our art as the subject of interviews, articles in art journals and broader publications. Writing about our own art takes this process one step further, allowing us to create our own statements, articles and proposals without the filter of someone else’s interpretation. Writing helps us clarify our thoughts and feelings about our own art, thereby making our message in its visual form clearer to both ourselves and to our audience.

By the end of our junior year even those who at first felt uncomfortable with writing and doubted its usefulness for themselves as visual artists have been won over. Through repeated practice in a non-threatening environment we have learned how to clarify thoughts and feelings and to express them through words as well as in preferred visual media. Being able to clearly communicate in writing has brought us closer to our goal of being successful and self-supporting artists in today’s competitive world.