Artist’s Statement Hell

I’ve got a big show that I will be applying for in the near future.
I’ve known about this show for over a month, but I still haven’t sent in my application.
Why haven’t I sent in my application?

Well, the last few years, they’ve wanted some jpegs, and a copy of my CV, a list of my show history.
This time around, they aren’t interested in my history.

Oh no.

This time around, they want an artist’s statement.

Oh, artist’s statements, how I wish you did not exist. I have yet to come across a single artists who is thrilled at the prospect of writing an artist’s statement. Some artists hire others to write their statements for them, some hack something together last minute, and some over-think and over-work their statements to the point where they have a tangled incoherent mess of invented undictionaried words.

In the last six months, I’ve written 50 entires for this blog. Averaging about 600 words per entry, that’s 30,000 words. Novels are typically around 100,000 words, so I’ve written about one third of an entire novel!

I’ve written the equivalent of one third of a novel, and the idea of putting together a one-paragraph artist’s statement scares the crap out of me?! How does that make sense? I’ve put it off for a month now, and I’m likely to put it off for another month. I simply do not want to do it.

Why is it so easy for me to type stuff in a blog, but so difficult to come up with a statement describing the work that comes out of my studio?