Week 1: Introduction

First Draft: Week 1; Final Draft: Due Week 14

A good Creative Statement supplements the visual information in a portfolio so that the reader/viewer can better understand the work.

Compose your statement with a sympathetic friend in mind, one who is genuinely interested in the work and wants to know the answers to questions that may come up when viewing it.  To get started with the writing of a statement, begin by describing the type of creative work that you wish to do i.e. video - fictional narrative or social documentary, animation, video games, photography, interactive installation, illustration, data visualization…  What do you want the reader to know about your work?

Some Do’s and Don’ts

DO write a strong, compelling statement without art and media jargon.

DON’T imitate the writing often used in art or film magazines.  Avoid artspeak and overly flowery or pretentious language.  If your statement is difficult to read, it will not be read.

DO develop a strong first sentence.  Explain clearly and precisely why you wish to be a media maker, what it means to you and what materials you may use.  Or give us a story about something that moved you into making specific work.  Draw the reader into your world.

DON’T try to impress the reader with your extensive knowledge of art, film or media criticism or vocabulary.

DO keep it as short as possible – 250 words, approximately 2 paragraphs. It is an introduction and a supplement to the visual information, not your life story.

DO clearly express what you have or wish to accomplish.

DO focus on topics that may not be apparent from viewing documentation of your work, such as influences in your work: themes and issues.  The techniques, materials used, or scale of the work can also be important information to include.

Your statement should stand on its own: so that the reader can imagine what your work looks like even if they haven’t seen it.  Make the reader want to see your work.

Tips to help formulate a creative statement:

Invite a friend to discuss your work and record the conversation.  You can also take notes, but often the best phrases get lost in the heat of the moment.  Make a note of what kind of questions come up during these sessions.  Is there a pattern?  If there is, it is definitely information needed in your statement.

Have several friends who know your work, (especially those who are not artists or media makers) read your creative statement and respond.  They may have good points to add or can catch phrases that don’t seem to make sense.  Your non-artist friends will be best at finding the “art speak” which you may want to rewrite.

Ask a strong writer to proofread your written materials to check for grammatical errors and those of syntax.  They may also delete repetitive or extraneous phrases and may straightening out, twisted, run-on sentences.

Creative statements must be coherent and to the point to retain reader interest!

A creative statement is never finished for long.  Like your resume, it will undergo revision frequently, as your work changes and as you find new ways of expressing what you are doing.

Uses: 

No longer than half a page.

This statement contains the central idea of your work to catch the reader/listeners’ attention.

Addresses the most pertinent information about the work, a particular series or media.

Can be incorporated into the heading of a portfolio, grant application, etc.

Used as reference for: promoting, describing, selling writing about your work by festivals, gallerists, curators, publicists, critics, journalists, etc.

Can be the lead-in to a longer project description.

Examples Brief Creative Statement

Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung

I employ and remix images from popular culture, political figures and imagery found in cyberspace. Most of my social conscious artworks adopt the form of advertising in a reduction of contemporary events to a cartoon like mythology. Through various media I aim to explore the nature of digital communication while touching on issues such as identity, politics, sexuality and power. My media includes Hi-Definition video animation, video game, net.art, digital graphics and mixed-media installations.

http://www.tinkin.com/

Dina Kelberman

Early bio:

My work is about how everyone and everything is special, and so while specialness is not special, it is still pretty much the most exciting thing going. Much of my work comes out of my natural tendency to spend long hours collecting and organizing imagery from the internet, television, and other commonplace surroundings of my everyday life. I like to elevate the familiar and transform brief moments into infinite stretches of time.

I gravitate towards things that are simple, colorful, industrial, and mundane. I am interested in using materials that are easily accessible and familiar to the everyday person – anyone can and should make things that are perfectly natural to them and yet totally inexplicable to someone else. Humans are definitely a failure of an animal, but at least every single one of them is extremely weird. (Excerpt)

http://dinakelberman.com/ 

(click Who to read current bio)

Jean Michel Basquiat:

Bio

American artist who rose to success during the 1980s as part of the Neo-expressionism movement.

Basquiat first achieved notoriety in the late 1970s as part of the graffiti duo SAMO, alongside Al Diaz, writing enigmatic epigrams all over Manhattan, particularly in the cultural hotbed of the Lower East Side where rap, punk, and street art coalesced into early hip-hop music culture. By the early 1980s, his paintings were being exhibited in galleries and museums internationally. At 21, Basquiat became the youngest artist to ever take part in Documenta in Kassel, Germany. At 22, he was one of the youngest to exhibit at the Whitney Biennial in New York. The Whitney Museum of American Art held a retrospective of his artwork in 1992.

Basquiat's art focused on dichotomies such as wealth versus poverty, integration versus segregation, and inner versus outer experience. He appropriated poetry, drawing, and painting, and married text and image, abstraction, figuration, and historical information mixed with contemporary critique. He used social commentary in his paintings as a tool for introspection and for identifying with his experiences in the black community, as well as attacks on power structures and systems of racism. His visual poetics were acutely political and direct in their criticism of colonialism and support for class struggle.

Since his death at the age of 27 in 1988, Basquiat's work has steadily increased in value. In 2017, Untitled, a 1982 painting depicting a black skull with red and yellow rivulets, sold for a record-breaking $110.5 million, becoming one of the most expensive paintings ever purchased.

“I want to make paintings that look as if they were made by a child.”

Jean Michel Basquiat in his own words

Danielle Brathwaite Shirley

Artist living and working in London.  I create work that seeks to archive Black Trans Experience.  I use technology to imagine our lives in environments that centre our bodies…. Those living, those that have passed and those that have been forgotten.

https://www.daniellebrathwaiteshirley.com/  

Due 

9/12 for Tuesday Labs

Optional for anyone new to the Mac OS: https://youtu.be/67keaaWOKzE  (16min)

Required reading/viewing:

https://www.htmldog.com/guides/html/beginner/ - “Getting Started” through “Images” (8 sections, “Next Page” is linked near bottom of each page) & View tutorial video “Introduction to HTML” (approximately 9 minutes): https://youtu.be/KuLYc6aT9ZU  

Apply the concepts from the tutorials above to create an index page for your class site using Glitch.  

Create a Glitch account and use the “glitch-hello-website” to set up the course site; rename the provided index.html page as indexGlitch.html (never use spaces in naming web files) and then duplicate indexGlitch.html and give it the name index.html, this way you can start from scratch (Glitch’s index will remain available as a reference).  Use the index.html (home) page to write a personal creative statement and/or goals for the class.   To the index page write you name in <h1> tags and your creative statement in <p> tags.  Create a link to a second page with heading and paragraph text.  The second page may be lorem ipsum as temporary content, make sure second page links back to index.html (home page).  

In addition, make sure to get your free Linkedin Learning access through the public library this week. Your lab section next week will require you to sign into your account to complete one of the in-class exercises. This access will function as your book this semester with required chapter viewings for each homework. Your Lab Instructor will not help you with questions unless you have watched the assigned videos. If the url links are broken to the Linkedin Learning tutorials listed below, just search for the name of the tutorial on the Linkedin website to find it. 

Share your glitch.com live site link and code link with your Lab Instructor prior to the due date for your homework. If you’re having trouble doing this, check out Tara’s guide.