At a panel discussion several years ago when I was in art school, one of the gallery reps said that on a slow day the assistants pull artists' statements from the files and read them aloud for laughs.

Someone (Elvis Costello, Miles Davis, or ?) said that writing about music is like dancing about architecture.

A former teacher of mine, Anne Johnson, did a project several years ago using scraps of artists' statements that had been cut up and used for note-taking. She edited them into a melange of the impossible - intentions, justifications, and deadlines - and made us all laugh.

As a former gallery co-op member, I've heard some amazing artists' statements from applicants - belligerent, arrogant sad, intentionally and unintentionally funny, poetic, awkward, pathetic.

So where am I?

My BFA thesis is probably still my clearest artist's statement, but at 12 pages long with appendices and a bibliography doesn't condense well to a single page (generally the limit for galleries and calls for artists). I have about a 25-word statement that I rattle off when someone asks me face-to-face about the work (it changes all the time), but it sounds airy-fairy when written as a formal artist's statement. Somewhere in between the two there has to be the perfect solution.

The dilemma is that I've probably written 300 to 400 artist's statements - sometimes there is a new one every day, complete or incomplete - papers scattered around the studio floor, 3 by 5 cards strewn thoughout the house, a jungle of Word documents, random thoughts while I walk the dogs. It's what I do when I quit painting for the day.

The pattern that seems to have evolved over the years is that whatever I say in words about my art is untrue the next day. Verbalizing about whatever it is that I think I've discovered seems to kill it. Clarity lives only in the painting, and in the process of painting, itself. It's frustrating for someone who has always thought that her logical and verbal abilities are up to the task. But painting is livelier than that and eludes the net. It is deeper than the ability of words to mean. It is the quarry, in both senses.