Artist tips: The mirror exercise.
If you find yourself staring vacantly into the whiteness of your page, or if you’ve already written your statement and your bio but they leave you cold, as an artist tip, limber yourself up by borrowing – momentarily – someone else’s insight.
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A website that I have found very useful for artists is: ?http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists, which is the online portal for PBS’s Art:21 series, an outstanding arts program. On this site you can find any number of well-crafted statements and bios for innovative contemporary artists that run the gamut of media. While I don’t suggest borrowing language (that’s also called stealing), I do suggest borrowing their format, structure or approach. For example, let’s look at the bio for artist Laylah Al, which can be found readily on this site.
Laylah Ali was born in Buffalo, New York in 1968, and lives and works in Williamstown, Massachusetts. She received a BA from Williams College and an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. The precision with which Ali creates her small figurative gouache paintings on paper is such that it takes her many months to complete a single work. She meticulously plots out in advance every aspect of her work, from subject matter to choice of colour and the brushes that she will use.
In style, her paintings resemble comic-book serials, but they also contain stylistic references to hieroglyphics and American folk-art traditions.
Ali often achieves a high level of emotional tension in her work as a result of juxtaposing brightly coloured scenes with dark, often violent subject matter that speaks of political resistance, social relationships, and betrayal.Although Ali’s interest in representations of socio-political issues and current events drives her work, her finished paintings rarely reveal specific references. Her most famous and longest-running series of paintings depicts the brown-skinned and gender-neutral Greenheads, while her most recent works include portraits as well as more abstract biomorphic images. Ali endows the characters and scenes in her paintings with everyday attributes like dodge balls, sneakers and band-aids as well as historically and culturally-loaded signs such as nooses, hoods, robes, masks and military-style uniforms.
Her drawings, to which she refers as ‘automatic’, are looser and more playful than the paintings and are often the source of material that she explores more deeply in her paintings. Laylah Ali has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; ICA, Boston; MCA Chicago; Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis; and MASS MoCA, among others. Her work was exhibited at the Venice Biennale (2003) and the Whitney Biennial (2004).
This is about as long as I would suggest any bio should be. Anything longer won’t get read in full. As an exercise, grab two sentences from this bio that you think particularly work and try to emulate the type of content they contain and the style of the prose, replacing the words with your own and referring to your own work.
– Here is an example of one artist’s rather successful attempt with this exercise.
From Ali Bio:
Ali often achieves a high level of emotional tension in her work as a result of juxtaposing brightly coloured scenes with dark, often violent subject matter that speaks of political resistance, social relationships, and betrayal.
Mirror exercise:
Taylor achieves quizzical forms as a result of his playfulness with colour and perspective, creating what at first look like cubist shapes and later emerge as optical illusions.
From Ali Bio:
Although Ali’s interest in representations of socio-political issues and current events drives her work, her finished paintings rarely reveal specific references.
Mirror exercise:
Although Taylor’s fascination with man’s interconnectedness with nature drives the subject matter of his work, his finished paintings sometimes appear to remove man (or nature) from the picture altogether.
