EVERY SCHOOL CHILD draws in the classroom and at home. So why do so many modern-day “artist statements” begin, “When I was a child, I loved to draw?” All children love to draw, at least until they go on to other things.
Today, the artist statement has become a mainstay for practicing painters. At art colleges, writing an artist statement is almost like a senior thesis. Nearly every art contest now requires an artist statement. And quite a few begin with, “When I was a child.”
Our modern notion, in the wake of Sigmund Freud, is that the child makes the adult. There is something crucial to childhood, obviously. Putting too much stock in childhood, however, may fuel an overly romantic notion—that artists are endowed with a divine spark, born, not made.
In a former time, before “childhood” and the “age of consent” were invented, parents chose their child’s vocation. They placed them in commercial workshops as pre-teens. Many of the great artists of the past began this way: apprentice, journeyman and, if lucky, master of the trade.
Very few childhoods today are like that of Michelangelo, apprenticed to a stone carver as a small lad. Or that of Picasso; his artist father imposed his will on the boy while his mother, two sisters, and aunt doted on him daily for his infant drawings. Today, childhood is not destiny. Many youth stay in childhood through college. Vocation, if any, comes late.
Whatever the case, artist statements are now a mainstay. In the past, art critics and art dealers typically wrote glowing accounts of a painter’s artistic psyche and journey. Today, we all have to lay that bare in our own written testimony. There’s some logical history behind this, perhaps. One great debate of the past was whether artists were also poets, that is, intellectuals. In that vein, artist statements allow painters to show they are deeply thoughtful and lyrical.
The French art critic, Charles Baudelaire, forced painters to claim their cerebral powers after commenting on how you can be “dumb as a painter.” What we forget, meanwhile, is that during the Renaissance, the disciplined, long-suffering workshops of Florence took lads “who were probably quite ordinary in every respect to be turned into men possessing a high degree of artistic skill,” as one historian recounts.
In other words, training, not childhood, made the painter. Still, in the commercial market of today, a painter may have a leg up by making an early bird claim (“as a child”), a priority not given to latecomers.
The intellectual elevation of the artist continued into our age. This was seen in the early twentieth century in the rise of “idea” art, which came to maturity in the 1960s as Conceptual Art. The artist with a conceptual mind was seen as more elevated than an artist with mere imitative skill.
Artist statements today, while variously evoking childhood and earned degrees, often take one extreme or another. The first kind, typical of recent graduates of art colleges, is to quote heavily from postmodern art criticism. You might hear, “My painting interrogates the dominant narrative of bourgeois society, refusing to objectify notions of beauty, and instead probing the simulacra of existing aesthetics.”
The other extreme is about as predictable. Such as, “I have been influenced by Rembrandt, Monet, Velasquez, Sorolla, Sargent, Henri, Hopper, and Hensche—and I studied at the Art Students League in New York City.” Have we left anything out?
Okay, I, too, have a childhood trace. My grade school report card said that I contributed “many artistic ideas that we have enjoyed using” (supplemented with, “[his] self-control has improved lately.”)
I suspect that a lot of report cards say the same. For my money, the story of nearly all serious artists begins at a time of mature awakening and commitment. It’s not very poetic, but that turning point often is about deciding whether you can compete, have an audience, and make a living in art. Many young artists answer, “Not really.” So, they may come back to their first love—being an artist—after family and career.
Childhood experience is important. Yet one is right to highly suspect a hypothetical second grader’s declaration that, “My work is influenced by Rubens.” For our next artist statements, we might think like criminal investigators: When in life did I have “motive and opportunity?” It’s usually at a later age.