Writing about art you love: how to describe a work without sounding pretentious

To describe a work of art without sounding pretentious, start with what you can actually see and how it honestly made you feel, then leave out any word you couldn’t explain to a friend. Pretension creeps in when we borrow language we don’t fully own. Plain, specific description almost always reads as more confident than the alternative.

Start with what is literally in front of you

The most reliable opening is the most concrete one: say what the work is, what it shows, and how big it is. Before you reach for meaning, describe the surface. Is it a small oil painting of a kitchen table, or a wall-sized photograph of an empty car park? Are the colours muted or loud, the brushwork smooth or scrubbed, the figures clear or barely there? This kind of observation costs you nothing and grounds everything that follows. A reader can picture a “loose grey seascape with one bright orange buoy” far more easily than a “haunting meditation on absence”. Detail is what makes writing feel earned rather than performed.

Name your reaction, then ask why

Once you have described the work, say how it actually made you feel, and be specific about it. “I liked it” tells nobody anything; “it made me want to stand closer, then step back again” tells them a great deal. The most useful sentence you can write about art is often the simplest: this drew me in, this left me cold, this made me uneasy and I’m not sure why. The “why” is where the real writing happens. If a portrait unsettled you, was it the eyes, the cropping, the colour of the skin against the background? Tracing your response back to a cause is more interesting, and more honest, than announcing a grand theme you don’t really believe.

The goal is not to sound clever. It is to make someone else see what you saw.

Cut the words that do no work

Pretentious writing is usually padded writing. Words like “iconic”, “powerful”, “evocative”, and “thought-provoking” feel like description but rarely carry any. Read your sentence back and ask what each adjective is actually telling the reader. If “powerful” could be swapped for “loud”, “large”, or “dark” with no loss, then say which one you mean. The same goes for jargon. Terms like “gestural”, “painterly”, or “the picture plane” are perfectly good when you understand them and they fit, but borrowed and dropped in for effect they read instantly as costume. A safe test: if you couldn’t explain the word to someone over coffee, don’t use it yet.

Let context support your response, not replace it

You do not need a degree to write well about a work, and you certainly don’t need to name-check a movement to sound credible. Context is helpful when it deepens what you already noticed, and hollow when it stands in for noticing anything at all. If you learn that a series of seascapes was painted from one window over a single winter, that fact might explain the repetition you already felt. Bring it in then. But if the only thing you can say is the period or the school, you are describing the label, not the art. Spend an hour somewhere like Bankside Gallery in London, where watercolour and printmaking are shown up close, and you’ll find that careful looking gives you far more to write about than any wall text.

Write the way you would talk to a friend

The plainest fix for pretension is to imagine you are telling a friend about something you saw and loved. You would not say a piece “interrogates notions of materiality”. You would say it looked like rusted metal but was somehow soft, and you couldn’t stop touching it with your eyes. That sentence is better writing, and it is honest. Contemporary work in particular benefits from this register, because so much of it resists tidy summary. Standing in front of a large abstract piece at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, you are allowed to write “I don’t fully understand this, but here is what it did to me” — that is genuine criticism, not a failure of it.

Practise on works that move you

The fastest way to improve is to write often and only about things you actually care about. Keep a small note after each visit: one work, three sentences, no audience to impress. Describe it, react to it, and find the cause of the reaction. Over time you’ll notice your own vocabulary forming, words that mean something because you arrived at them yourself. Plan a slow afternoon around two or three spaces near you — browse galleries in London or wherever you happen to be — and treat the writing as part of the looking. The point was never to sound like a critic. It was to hold on to what the work gave you, and to pass a little of it along.