I do step 1 and 2 you should complete step 3. I also give an example for the statement. try to make it very simple.

1. Decide on your medium, topic, and issue.
2. Create the product
3. Write a 500-700 word artist statement for your project. Give some background of the issue. Explain the artistic elements and principles in your piece (This should include the elements of whichever media you worked with that are important for conveying meaning in your piece). Write about yourself in the 3rd person as the “artist” “film maker” “poet” etc…

Here is an example of the artist statement:

Artist: Colton Flynn

Title: Discourse into Nature

Medium: Mixed-Media, Acrylic Paint, Ink, Watercolor, and Newsprint

Topic: Science

Issue: Climate Change

The Earth’s climate has changed throughout history. Just in the last 650,000 years there have been seven cycles of glacial advance and retreat, with the abrupt end of the last ice age about 7,000 years ago marking the beginning of the modern climate era — and of human civilization. Earth’s climate is now changing faster than at any point in the history of modern civilization, primarily as a result of human activities. Global climate change has already resulted in a wide range of impacts across every region of the country and many sectors of the economy that are expected to grow in the coming decades. Ninety-seven percent of climate scientists agree that climate-warming trends over the past century are extremely likely due to human activities, and most of the leading scientific organizations worldwide have issued public statements endorsing this position.

This artwork depicts a lone, tall pine tree in front of a purple and blue night sky. The newsprint in the sky represents how politics and negative media can loom over nature and threaten it, given our government’s negligence to assess the issue of climate change.

The ground in this artwork is white to represent the purity and vulnerability of our earth. The gray on the ground represents how global warming has already affected the earth. The sky/newsprint is purple, which evokes a feeling of royalty and bureaucracy to represent how inaccessible our government is to the public. The sky is made of collaged newsprint torn into organic shapes. These shapes are chaotic and disorganized, much like our government.

The artist has utilized asymmetrical balance in this work to create uneasiness in the viewer. The empty space to the right of the pine the pine tree represents the space left after the disappearance of other forms of nature. The fact that there is only one tree left gives a call to action to the viewer, by showing there isn’t much time left until we cannot return to a normal earth.

To create this work, the artist first painted large sheets of newspaper with black, purple, and blue watercolor paints. He then tore them into small pieces and randomly glued them onto the backing paper. Then, he used acrylic paint to create a middle ground, which consisted of the ground and the moon. Finally, the artist freehanded the tree with a black marker to create the foreground.

To create value on the tree, the artist used hatching. This both created lights and darks, while also adding implied texture to the surface, which simulates the rough texture of a tree. This method leaves the tree with a transparent quality, which emphasizes the fast-approaching disappearance of nature. The color choice of black for the tree further drives home this point by promoting a sense of uncertainty.

The artist has also used scale in an interesting way here. The tree is very large and takes up most of the space on the paper, while also having minimal weight, due to the effect of it dissolving into the background. Scale was also used in the ground. The artist used a larger texture for the closer part of the ground, and a smaller part for the land that is receding into the distance. This makes it look more like land than just a large block of gray at the bottom of the work.

The artist did not want to use warm colors in the sky, which normally represent heat, which would have been more fitting with the subject of global warming because that would have also given the work a more positive tone and would have taken away the darker overall feeling of the work.