A Visit to the London Transport Museum

Posted on November 27, 2012 by Gail Brodholt

I had a nice day out earlier in the week, to one of my favorite places – the London Transport Museum in Covent Garden. I wanted to take a quick look at my linocuts, which are now stocked permanently in the Museum shop. They’re available to buy framed and unframed and ready to take away immediately (but only once you’ve paid….)

While I was there, I had another look at the Secret London exhibition. This is organised by the London Transport Museum in partnership with the Association of Illustrators and Serco and it has fifty works of art on display, each showing a hidden aspect of London. It’s on from 13th November until 10th December 2012. Well worth seeing…

This is my work, Up With the Larks, and the blurb reads “This is a linocut of a solitary figure ascending the subway at Piccadilly Circus very early one weekday morning when no one else is awake and the city is still.” Not bad, even if I wrote it myself….

And if you’d like to buy a version as a travel-card wallet for £4.95 or even a poster for £24.95, they’re both available in the Museum shop.
They’ve also produced a nice little book, illustrated with all the exhibits, for £7.99, also from the Museum shop.

And that’s it for the Gail Brodholt Bonanza at the London Transport Museum. Just one last thing, though – if I could choose one thing from the Museum shop, my heart would always belong to the Routemaster moquette cushion.
Well, a girl can dream….

Why Am I Blogging?

Posted on November 19, 2012 by Gail Brodholt

A very important anniversary came and went last month – four long years of blogging – and I didn’t even notice. But it did get me thinking – why am I doing it?

When I started blogging, I thought of it as a diary of my comings and goings, a way of tracking my progress – something to look back on when I’m locked up in the Retirement Home for Distressed Artists…
Then it dawned on me that it could be really quite useful as a marketing tool – after all collectors are supposed to be buying the artist these days, not just the art – and what better way of doing this than through an online diary?
So off I went, discussing/rambling on about my latest work and publicising exhibitions. You never know, I thought, it may even encourage people to come and see me and my work at an actual gallery (assuming I haven’t already bored them to death).
I also reasoned that people might like to hear about the ups and downs of an working artist’s life – sharing in your own hard won experience, and what you’ve learnt as a consequence, must be helpful. After all, what I don’t know about rejection by galleries, failure to sell and disasterous work can be written on the back of a postage stamp.

Inevitably, once I started to attract regular readers, I felt the need to write a bit more professionally – it’s not just my mum reading it now – and then I got to thinking ‘well, what is the point of putting in all this effort if hardly anyone’s reading it?’
So I started to look into how to attract more readers and what do I find? The number one rule is that you have to post on a regular basis as the search engines like sites that update regularly – having a blog and posting only every now and again is pointless as it won’t generate any traffic. Again, why bother if no-one is reading it?

And before you know it, writing a blog can become a bit of an obligation – and it’s hard work, especially for a control freak like me who needs every word to be perfectly placed and every idea perfectly expressed. I still enjoy it if I have the time but when it starts to become another chore, I do wonder if my time would be better spent doing other things. And I have many artist friends who are perfectly successful with no blog and no help at all from Twitter or Facebook.

So back to the beginning – why am I doing it? And the answer is, I have no idea…..