One way to write about art:

“After the Diagnosis” Digital Photo Enlargement, Fall 2008.

One great technique that I learned from Professor Steve Locke in a portfolio class at MassArt is an activity where the artist starts writing by listing ten adjectives, ten verbs, and ten nouns about one of his or her pieces. The resulting words can be used to formulate sentences about the artwork. In describing the work above, I used the following adjectives, verbs, and nouns:

ADJECTIVES
colorful
yellow
pink
green
white
close
sick
before
after
blurry

VERBS
zoom
live
die
experience
describe
see
reveal
look
begin
end

NOUNS
photo
rectangle
landscape
series
pixel
picture
death
after life
Heaven
skin

Now, I can put together sentences. Like maybe this piece is about “experiencing a colorful life”. Or maybe I could say it is about “seeing a pink rectangle”. I think the best sentence I can make is the work is about “looking closely at a picture of blurry skin in order to reveal something about sickness, life, and death”.

This particular sentence is a pretty literal interpretation of what is going on in this work of art, but I can use it as a starting point. Now I have a list of vocabulary to begin writing my artist statement. This technique works particularly well when you are trying to write about a certain work or a group or of works that are closely related.