Painting personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

I want to study Painting because it is the only way of thinking I have found that rewards slowness. Over the past eighteen months I have painted the same set of allotments at the end of my street more than forty times, and I still do not feel finished with them. What began as convenience, a subject two minutes from my front door, has become the thing I care about most: the way a polythene cloche goes silver in flat light, how a row of bean canes turns into a drawing problem rather than an object, how the same patch of ground refuses to look the same twice. Painting lets me stay with a question instead of answering it. I am drawn to a degree because I want my work pushed beyond the habits I have built alone at a kitchen table. Working without a studio has taught me resourcefulness, but it has also taught me the limits of my own judgement. I read what I can find and look hard at paintings in free public collections, and I have noticed that the works that hold me are rarely the most dramatic ones. Gwen John's small interiors, seen on a day trip, showed me how much restraint can carry. I want to test my instincts against tutors and other students, to hear my paintings described by someone who does not already know what I intended, and to learn the histories and arguments that sit behind the surfaces I admire. I also want scale and materials I cannot currently reach. Most of all I want the sustained time that a degree gives: three years of being allowed to treat looking as serious work.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

My A-levels are Fine Art, English Literature and History, and the combination has shaped how I paint. In Fine Art my coursework project is titled Ground, and traces a single allotment plot through autumn and winter; my tutor pushed me to stop replacing weak paintings and instead keep them in sequence, which changed how I see failure in my own work. I now keep everything, pinned in rows, because the gaps between paintings are where I learn. English Literature has trained the part of me that writes about pictures. Studying Larkin's Whitsun Weddings made me think about how ordinary, unglamorous places can be looked at without sentimentality, and I have tried to carry that into my subject matter rather than prettifying the sheds and water butts. Close reading has also made me more careful with the words I use in my sketchbook annotations; I try to describe what is actually on the board rather than what I hoped would be. History has given me the habit of asking where an image comes from and who it was made for. A unit on nineteenth-century industry and labour led me to look at paintings of working landscapes, and to notice how often such places are either romanticised or turned into evidence. I have used contextual study time in the college library to read on colour and materials, including parts of Kelly Grovier's writing on how paintings hold attention, and to work through the technical notes in a secondhand copy of Hilaire Hiler's Notes on the Technique of Painting. Alongside lessons I take life drawing at a monthly community session in the town hall, which costs three pounds and has taught me more about measurement than any tutorial.

What else have you done to prepare outside of education, and why are these experiences useful?

Because timetabled studio access at college is limited, most of my painting happens between shifts. I work Saturdays and Sunday mornings in a bakery, on the counter and the ovens, and the discipline of a six o'clock start has made me realistic about how long things take. I save a set amount each month for materials, and I have learned to make cheap surfaces work: cardboard sized with dilute glue, offcuts of plywood that the timber yard on the ring road lets me take from their bin, and hardboard from a house clearance. Priming forty boards in a back yard in November is not romantic, but it taught me about absorbency, warping and patience in a way no worksheet could. Twice a week I collect my younger cousins from school and look after them until my aunt finishes work. They paint at the same table as me, and watching a six-year-old commit entirely to a green sky has usefully undermined my tendency to overthink. I also volunteer once a month at a community centre coffee morning, where I help set up and clear away, and last spring I hung twelve of the allotment paintings there for a fortnight. Talking about them with people who actually dig those plots was the most direct criticism I have had; one man told me I had made his shed look taller than it is, and he was right. I travel to free public galleries when the fares allow, usually alone, with a small notebook, and I try to look properly at three or four works rather than everything. I have kept the notebooks for two years. They record the same lesson repeatedly: the paintings I return to are the ones that were made by someone willing to look again.

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