Top 10 Artist Statement Examples 2021 Latest Updates
If you’re like most artists I know, the job of writing your Artist’s Statement feels like torture. This article will show you the top 10 artist statements you can use immediately for your resume. Just bookmark this page and stay updated.
You may ask, why doesn’t the work speak for itself? But, you’ve probably also learned that throughout your art career you will be repeatedly asked to provide one. Keep reading for the best artist statement examples.
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A well-written Artist’s Statement is essential and is one of the most influential art marketing tools you will have. Enjoy browsing the art and reading the below statements written by famous artists.
They have influenced a number of artists and art enthusiasts and perhaps their words might resonate with you. They may relieve you to know they also probably suffered from writer’s block when writing about their art.
List of Top 10 Artist Statement Examples
1. Henri Matisse
Henri Matisse, Harmony in Red, oil painting, 70″ x 86″.
“I don’t paint things; I only paint the differences between things… I do not literally paint that table, but the emotion it produces upon me.
What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity free from the troubling or depressing subject matter – a soothing, calming influence on the mind, rather like a good armchair which offers relaxation from physical fatigue.”
2. Mark Rothko
No. 14, 1960, oil on canvas, 114-1/2″ in. x 105-5/8″.
“I don’t express myself in my painting. I express my not-self. The dictum ‘Know Thyself’ is only valuable if the ego is removed from the process in search for truth…
The fact that people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures proves that I can communicate those basic human emotions… the people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious understanding I had when painting them.
And if you say you are motivated only by their color relationships then you miss the point.”
3. Claude Monet
Branch of the Seine near Giverny. Public domain.
“For me, a landscape does not occur in its own right, since its appearance changes at every moment; but the surrounding atmosphere brings it to life.. the air and the light which vary continually.
For me, it is only the surrounding atmosphere which offers subjects their true value.”
4. Berte Marisot
Painting by Berthe Morisot
“It is important to express oneself… provided the feelings are real and are taken from your own experience…
My ambition is narrowed to capturing something transient and yet, this ambition is excessive.”
5. Philip Guston
Philip Guston, Cherries III, oil on canvas, Honolulu Museum of Art, accession 7008.
“Painting appears like some kind of peculiar miracle that I need to have again and again… I am a night painter, so when I come into the studio the next morning the delirium is over…
Typically I am on a work for a long stretch, until a moment arrives when the air of the arbitrary vanishes, and the paint falls into positions that feel destined.”
He also advised all artists, “Let your 3rd hand do the painting.”
6. Louise Bourgeois
Louise Bourgeois, Spider. Executed in 1996 as an edition of six and cast in 1997; bronze with silver nitrate patina, with the first of the edition being steel.
“I’ve drawn my whole life. My parents were in the tapestry restoration business, and as a little girl, I would draw in the missing parts of the tapestry that needed to be re-woven. My ability to draw made me indispensable to my parents.
I came from a family of repairers. The spider is a repairer. If you bash into the web of a spider, she doesn’t get mad.
She weaves and repairs it. ‘The Spider’ is an ode to my mother. She was my best friend.
Like a spider, my mother was a weaver. . . Like spiders, my mother was very clever.
Spiders are friendly presences that eat mosquitoes. So, spiders are helpful and protective, just like my mother.”
7. Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Auguste Renoir, Diana, 1867, oil on canvas
“I have neither rules nor methods… I look at a nude and I see myriads of infinitely small tones.
I must find those that will make the flesh on my canvas alive and vibrate.”
8. Edward Hopper
Edward Hopper, Automat, oil on canvas, 28″ x 36″.
“It’s to paint directly on the canvas without any funny business, as it were, and I use almost pure turpentine to start with, adding oil as I go along until the medium becomes pure oil.
I use as little oil as I can possibly help, and that’s my method.”
9. Alice Aycock
Sculpture by Alice Aycock, “Cyclone Twist,” one of her public art installations on Park Avenue, in New York, NY, 2014, created with aluminum and fiberglass.
“I tried to visualize the movement of wind energy as it flowed up and down the Avenue creating random whirlpools, touching down here and there and sometimes forming dynamic three-dimensional massing of forms.
One of the works, in particular, references the expressive quality of wind through drapery and the chaotic beauty of fluid/flow dynamics.
As much as the sculptures are obviously placed on the mall, I wanted the work to have a random, haphazard quality – in some cases, piling up on it, in others spinning off into the air.”
10. Jim Dine
Jim Dine is seen here speaking with two patrons at the Galerie de Bellefeuille in Westmount, on the evening of a vernissage in 2009. Photo credit: Martin C. Barry.
“I’m not a Pop artist. I’m not part of the movement because I’m too subjective. Pop is concerned with exteriors.
I’m concerned with interiors. When I use objects, I see them as a vocabulary of feelings.
I can spend a lot of time with objects, and they leave me as satisfied as a good meal.
I don’t think Pop artists feel that way. Their work just isn’t autobiographical enough.
I think it’s important to be autobiographical. What I try to do in my work is explore myself in physical terms—to explain something in terms of my own sensibilities.”
If you are an artist and finds it difficult to create an artist’s statement, the above examples of artist’s statement can be a huge source of help to you. We cherish your comments, do well to drop one below.
CSN Team.
