Similar to a CV, the portfolio of works is an important document to have as a creative; not only does it make your life easier when applying to open calls, but allows for an incredible amount of introspection and reflection on your personal brand, your preferences and just what you and your art are all about!
Though not as rigid of a document as the CV, the portfolio of works should still follow a certain flow and provide the reader (or spectator if you’re a video artist) with all the necessary information:
Unlike a CV, your portfolio will almost surely have a front page or cover (or a landing page, if it’s a website) and this important bit will pretty much define the experience of anyone going through it.
A good cover is important, because it is the first contact with your reader and provides them with more or less all the details about how you feel about your art and yourself; are you a minimalist, do you love kitsch, are you flamboyant or introverted?
Deciding on what to put on your cover does allow those that know what they are doing and have experience with looking through thousands of other portfolios, to know who they are dealing with, but it also gives you a medium to express exactly how you’d wish your art could be exhibited — if you had unlimited choices available.
What I mean by this is that where we decide to show our work and how we present it, impacts our art’s narrative immensely — a white cube will not compliment a classical landscape the way it will any abstract expressionist work. If our portfolio is clean, with hard edges, strong contrast and minimalist in design, but you’re actually a classic portrait painter, it’ll just look out of place.
But if you use a nice serif typeset, colour the pages in earthy tones and provide good quality photos of your works (framed in appropriate frames) you will give anyone reading it the strong impression that you do know exactly what you’re doing.
Have some information about you in the portfolio, but don’t use it as a CV.
Think of it as a catalogue, but dial down the biographical info and other non essential parts. It’s a good idea to have contact info on all of your presentational documents (you want them to contact you, right), but starting a portfolio with 4 pages of your academic history or a full exhibition list might not be the best idea.
I don’t use any info except my website (here’s a link to my portfolio of work from around 2016), because I want the reader to just get to the art and focus on the product — if they then wish to look at my background, I always send my CV along with this pdf.
And the only thing apart form my art and the descriptions and various info that I have in there is a quote from Austin Dobson — just can’t help it, the man wrote one of my favourite bits of English poetry!
Lastly, the meat (or soy, if you’re a hippy like me and don’t partake in the carnivore diet):
High quality, spotless images of your work are imperative. Fixing the colour and white balance so that they look exactly like they do in real life is the most important thing — they are the product that we are advertising!
You can frame them or leave them raw, depending on how you tend to present them — mine are usually unframed, so that’s how I show them in my portfolio, too. And here, you could experiment with having several images (of the back of the work, side shots …), but I tend to just use one giant image on white, because this is also the way any gallery visitor would interact with my work, if it were exhibited.
Have coherent and precise descriptions throughout your portfolio.
I use Title, Year, Technique and Medium, Dimensions, Description, in that order. Under Technique and Medium I tend to precisely describe what the work is made out of and this is a decision that should be made individually — some just say painting or acrylic painting, others count the screws that were used. For me, somewhere in the middle of vague and overly precise is my sweet-spot — it all depends on what kind of work you do and if either more or less information would bring any added value to the understanding of your work.
And a nice description in a few words, I believe, will do wonders for anyone — especially if you use symbolism or any other motifs that demand prior knowledge to be understood. If you’re an abstract expressionist, the world is your oyster, but if you paint oranges to depict the divine trinity or use flower symbolism, it’s best to write a short description that explains this. You just can’t count on people to know the meaning of symbols.
A good portfolio can bring a lot of clarity and a deep understanding of your work and personal brand if given the proper amount of thought, and making one is a wonderful exercise to really learn about what your art is about and how you want it to be presented. Not only will anyone that’s looking at it have a much easier time understanding your message, you will too!
Posted from my blog with SteemPress : https://survivingart.com/2019/03/31/creating-a-great-artist-portfolio/
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