OK, let me restart this post.
If you didn't go to art school, or didn't follow a straight-forward art path, and just picked up weaving and ran with it, how on earth do you create a CV?
Previously I had a "weaver history" heading listing some of the workshops I attended, plus any work, volunteer work, and conferences relating to textiles I've been to, but now that section is starting to look too long, and most of it is pretty trivial. So I've separated them into "weaver history" (I know it sounds dumb but what else can I say? Biography? "This Life") and "Selected Workshops" and it looks a tad better.
I had headings for "Exhibitions and Award(s)", and "Commission Works" and these are starting to get a bit long, which isn't a bad things but make for a clumsy looking CV. I separate the affiliations, which I sometimes include, but it almost looks like I have to start cross referencing lines in different sections. Just ridiculous.
Then, of course I have the "Employment" and "Education" sections, which have nothing to do with weaving so they are stuck at the end with bare minimum info. But, for e.g., where do I stick this new job at the Red Gallery? Is this weaving or just a job? Do you have another heading for "Outlets"???
You think you're confused... You should see the look on my face all afternoon!
The base of my "art" CV (as opposed to office work CV) was a composite of what several practicing artists and Martin Rodgers suggested few years ago, and it was great back then because I had practically nothing to write about, but now I have so many headings and little things I've been involved in and I can't remember them now, and all the bits are fragmented and trivial and even I wouldn't want to read it, much less write it. Ugh...
Google and you shall find? Yes and no. A good starting point was Edward Hussein Winkleman, the blogging gallery owner, so his focus is a CV intended for a contemporary and prestigious gallery, and his post I found via Deanna.
But this is a high-end art practitioner CV. For example, I had to laugh at "Bibliography". As in, things people write about your work, as in reviews. We are supposed to keep tabs on what's written about our work. Gee, I don't remember them all - I must have clippings of some of them. Besides, our little local newspaper's items keep disappearing from their website, and just between you and me, I don't read the paper version of our local paper. I recently found my name in a short review written about a year ago. Anyway, I don't think this is would be appropriate in my particular case.
After going through about a dozen resume samples for artists, I'm totally bored. I think it's vital an artist's CV is elegant and stylish, and more than half of these samples fail in that regard. Most importantly, "Selected" seems to be the key according to Edward; edit to suit the reader; well, that's the same with any old CV, isn't it.
Because I'm 50 and I can't remember things even though I've been weaving for such a short time, I just started to collect and enter everything I've done relating to weaving in the last couple of years and hope to edit to create, hopefully, a 2-pager in a couple of days.
Anyway, it's been an unproductive day, I tell you... There's 1/2 of a painfully fragile-looking scarf waiting to be woven downstairs, but I thought I had to do this at some point. Ugh...
And then after that, I have to write up details of what I hope to achieve with this scholarship, how I hope to achieve it, how I plan to "measure" my achievements, schedule, budget, and why my selected tutors/coaches are appropriate people. Ugh...
Then I have to make up a portfolio with photos of past work and samples. Ugh...
See why I wanted at least a month for it? Why didn't I ask about it before September 23? Well, I didn't see the scholarship mentioned in the guild publications, so I wasn't sure if this was going ahead this year, seeing as the Festival format has been in turmoil and subject of some passionate discussions. I only found out in the last printed newsletter that it's still on, and I wrote to the person named there almost immediately. Ugh, ugh...
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