Below is a personal/artists statement I wrote for this weeks task.
I’m Carla.
I find it hard to define myself as an artist, even after years of clawing away at my own art trying to find a meaning buried under too neat lines and blinding bright colours.
In a way, I think the insecurity in my own art adds something to it, lets me improve, lets me pick up the pieces of a ripped-up sketch and keep on trying.
I can’t define what I make into a simple paragraph, because I don’t want to place myself in a box that won’t permit growth or make it seem like I know what I’m doing, because I don’t. But, to try to define the undefined, the definitionless, I try to make art that I know I enjoy, or more specifically that I think Little Carla, a younger, brighter-eyed me, would be proud of. I have never believed that art needs to be meaningful or complex or even profound, I have always thought that pretty art can be made simply for the sake of making pretty art- and yet I hunt, and I dig, and I claw for that meaning.
Little Carla drew squiggly trees and messy stickmen to catch up with an imagination too big, too fast for small hands and empty sparkly gel pens, and I think today she would just be proud that I kept on drawing, and never caught up with that too big, too fast imagination.
I’m proud of the way I depicted myself and wrote about my art and touched on some of the struggles I have when being creative, especially because I find it so hard to talk about myself. I decided that my personal statement would be a little more abstract and read a bit more like a story than something very matter-of-fact or like a list of facts about me as an artist, because I enjoy to write and it is it’s own form of artwork to me. It also feels a bit impersonal and misleading to write a ‘proper’ artists statement when I am still exploring what it means to me to be an artist or identify as one, and exploring my own styles and the mediums I like etc.