Artplots is a communication tool. So, it is aimed towards communication and answering simple questions like "who are you and what do you do." While adding your texts to your profile you significantly expand the answers to these questions, offering the audience to go deeper — the goal is just the same: you are telling your story.

Maybe it is also worth saying that your art practice is a sort of storytelling, communicating something genuine and intimate using various methods and media. But here we try to be practical and direct.

Two major parts of your profile are texts and work examples. Let's start with the former.

This part is pretty straightforward. First, you put your name, then your handle, then a couple of fields.

Who are you? How do you describe yourself professionally? Exactly how it reads. You can be an artist, a performance artist, a curator, an author, a sailor, or a flying dragon. Just put it within the character limit.

What exactly do you do? In a couple of words. Simple — drawings and illustrations, acrylic painting and murals, novels and sound installations. Here you can specify your field, as general profession descriptions can be too general.

Where are you based? Useful to have your current location so people know where you are networking offline.

Writing an artist statement can feel hard, and probably it is to some extent — especially when you're approached with a request for it unexpectedly. There are a couple of tricks that help significantly.

What is an artist statement? It is a short text written by an artist to describe their practice or body of work. There are variations depending on purpose: it can be written for a show, linked to a particular work, or attached to an application. The tailoring skill comes with iterations, and here, you need a general default version that describes your work best.

Let's start with the formal part. Give it 200 words tops, less is better. The field has a character limit, so you can keep track.

Write it in first person, tell a short story. Don't write a manifesto, a research paper, or a commercial ad. It isn't a bio either. No need to describe what a nice person you are or how exclusive and valuable your art is. Leave the reader to decide. They actually just saw your pictures, probably.

While writing, just answer three questions:

If you're not sure where to start, find and read the statements of artists whose work you can relate to. But don't copy or try to imitate. It is you who should speak. This is your unique experience.

Bio tells how you got to where you are now. It is a straightforward biographical piece that has various applications, from the handout flier at the exhibition to informational material for someone who writes about your work. It tells shortly, in several sentences, who you are, what you were doing in your career so far. It is a quick info piece.

Formally, no more than 150 words, less is better, but shouldn't feel shallow. You write it in third person, so it sounds more indirect and dry by comparison with the artist's statement.

Bio can also be broken into three parts, even if one part can be just one sentence in the whole paragraph.

The whole logical journey is: a person who is doing something → was going through these events → and finally arrived at this point.

There are several ways to write a bio, and sometimes different lengths are required for different purposes. This short one is the most common. At this point, you have already accomplished two main things that these artists' texts do: you communicated your practice and told about your professional journey.

There is a certain distinction between an artistic CV and one that is usually sent along with a job application for a company. An artist's CV is mostly a straightforward list of events with sections and no room for sweetening it. Which makes it easy to write. Different sources will give you different takes on the order of sections. Do as you see fit. Here is common guidance that many art professionals build their CVs upon.

A CV is a list of events in your career broken into sections. Each section starts with a subheader and is followed by the rows of events related to it. The structure of the rows is:

[year (optionally with month)] [name of the event], [optional important detail], [venue or like], [city, country]

The structure of this row can vary from case to case. One can have an exhibition, a position at the university, a publication, or an award in a CV, so this is more the common way to put your information into a form that is somewhat tabular. You don't write full sentences usually; it is intended to be brief. If you have the name of an exhibition, some work, or a text, it is usually written in italic.

The order of events is always reverse chronological, from most recent to least recent. There is also no page limit; as you progress, it just keeps growing, as artists often have more frequent entries than a job-based career path.

Let's go through the sections.

Those are the major sections found in a standard artistic CV. As you develop your practice, the list changes not only with the addition of new rows — in time it can be restructured as the nature of what you do changes. It is normal to start as a painter, then begin working with video, and at some point find yourself to be a film director. Your CV will start to look different, and you pivot at some point and present yourself differently. Or take the case where artistic practice brings you to teaching, and at some point you hold a professorship somewhere — that probably tells much more about your expertise than exhibitions, so it can go up the list.

What is important is that your CV should be clear about who you are and follow your story. A common issue is when a practitioner pursuing an artistic career, while not having many exhibitions yet, mentions design projects that come from freelancing. Two different professions shouldn't be mixed unless it can be justified as part of an art project with explicit artistic value. This is an issue of professional identity, which should be defined clearly. If it is an artist's CV, your MS in Computer Science would probably fit a different CV better — but not if your main medium is code itself.

The other side of professional identity is a problem of growth. If at some point the activities and sections in your CV span a wide range of professional areas — combining significant artistic practice, writing, and curating — you can have several CVs tailored to specific areas, each highlighting a different part of your work. All these texts serve the purpose of communication, so the goal is not to confuse the reader and leave them guessing who you actually are. Some people also keep a master CV as a single source of truth, where everything is mentioned and sorted according to its importance.

The best call for your CV on Artplots is to keep it short and tailored. Imagine who will read it and how much time they would be ready to spend on it. Why does this matter? One thing to have a CV on your personal website where you have the whole body of your practice, the other is to utilize it for communication, which gets read differently. So, when it comes to a CV, it is worth being tactical.

As with your artist's statement and bio, before writing your CV, have a look at examples from other artists. See what is helpful and what doesn't fit your practice. When your piece is ready, put it into the form, and your texts are done.

The artworks section lets you show examples of your practice. You can add single artworks — each as one image with title and details — or organise it into folders that can include slides of different media. Folders are available for Pro users.

Singles represent the flow of a classic portfolio: one image changes with another, each has a title, and formal details like year, media, technique, and size. Good for practices where individual works stand on their own or when you want to set it as an overview.

Folders work better for series, a body of work, or something that requires a deeper dive. Each folder has a cover image, a title, a description, up to five images each with its own title and details, an option to add up to three text slides, one links slide, and one video up to 2 minutes in duration.

When adding a folder, set the title, then add a description if you want. You don't need to explain the artwork or provide judgment about its value; try to set the context and frame it instead. Then add media: the first item goes for the cover, and all the next ones are following it as a gallery. Add several projects so they could spin.

How to choose between Singles and Folders mode? It is about what suits you better. Singles are faster to swipe or click through, they are direct, and probably more visually focused. If your goal is to show what you have as a spectrum, they will work well. Maybe they are closer to the initial idea of Artplots, which is built for the purpose of showing what you do right away.

Folders are in the format of multi-media sequences, and are for those who would prefer to show less but with more detail. This is the way to tell separate stories and change angles, add quotes, and a video, and then lead your viewer somewhere else with links. You invite the audience to stay with your piece for a while and explore it. They are more tailored and rich with options.

It is worth keeping in mind that, as Artplots is not a personal website of an artist, the whole function of this section is not to contain the whole archive of your works, but to make an impression, and let people understand what you do.

Your email and links appear on your profile. Email is optional, but keep in mind it will be publicly visible to anyone who visits your page. Use a professional email rather than a personal one if you have both.

Links give visitors quick access to your online presence. Add your website if you have one, your socials, a blog. You can also include articles you've published, reviews of your work, or interviews — anything solid or recent enough to tell people more about you and your practice.