Sunday, May 30, 2010

How to write an article in which you present yourself as an artist in less than 250 words?

No matter in which field of art you are working, sooner or later you will be asked to send in your biography. Whenever you write an application for a project, grant, exhibition, festival, etc., organizers want your biography. And preferably, your biography should not contain more than 250 words, because people usually don't have time to read other people's biographies.

When you are just starting as an artist, your biography might not yet be so long. You could of course include any job that you have done, including any babysitter or dishwasher job, but that might not look so good on an artistic biography. You could invent some projects, making the list of exhibitions look bigger than it really was, including even the art presentation you did in your parents' livingroom. But that might not look so convincing.

The trick behind writing a short biography is to understand that people are not really interested in knowing all the dates of every presentation or performance you have done. In general, it is a much better idea to write an artist's statement, rather than a biography. In an artist's statement you describe the artist who you are, you explain your backgrounds, your thoughts, your way of work, without a long list of data of all your projects.

In the following articles I will try to explain how to write an artist's statement with less than 250 words. To give you an idea how much that is: this article has exactly 250 words.

Friday, May 28, 2010

An introduction in 250 words

Two weeks ago I was invited to be one of the first regular bloggers on the new website of the Art Department of the University of Nova Gorica. I am not a typical blogger, but such an honour I couldn't refuse. The assignment is to write three articles a week. That doesn't sound like much, but I know that writing three articles a week on a regular basis is actually a lot of work. So here I am now, writing the first article of hopefully many to come.

Why did I say yes to the invitation? First of all because I like the school. Second, because I hope that writing a short article on a regular basis, will give me a beautiful collection of material after some years. And third, because writing for a blog that is not my own, makes it more official and therefore -hopefully- will give me a certain pressure to really keep up the rhythm to write something every few days.

There are so many blogs around these days, many of them just writing about anything that comes to mind, that I decided to structure my articles around certain themes. My main focus will be on themes that are interesting for art students. And since artists usually are most interested in themselves, my first topic will be 'how to write an article in which you present yourself as an artist in less than 250 words'.

To give you an idea: this article has exactly 250 words.

Monday, May 24, 2010

Welcome to this blog!

The articles posted on this blog are originally written for the website of the School of Arts 'Famul Stuart', University of Nova Gorica in Slovenia. You can read the original blog posts at http://vsu.ung.si/

Since the school website is mostly in Slovene, I decided to keep a separate blog simultaneously to the Famul Stuart website, in which I archive my blog entries in an english language area.

My blog entries for the Famul Stuart website do not have a certain theme. But I gave myself one restriction: each blog article has exactly 250 words. And restrictions are there to be broken, so some of the articles actually have a little more or less than 250 words.

This article for example, has exactly 125 words.