The Fine Art of Art Fairs

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An art fair is a peculiar place to spend a week, especially when you’re only used to working in a cold, uninviting studio for months on end. The inhabitants of Half Moon Studio tend to emerge slowly into the bright lights and bustle of art fairs, with their unsettling mixture of nail-biting tension and ennui.

On the one hand, there’s nothing like the buzz you get from completing a sale (especially when it’s your work) but on the other hand, there are long stretches, especially during the week days, when nothing much happens.

I find it hard to keep looking alert and interested for hours at a time but then again I don’t want to look too desperate. In my experience, visitors really don’t want to feel that they have to buy something before they can get out alive/leave the stand.

Also, forget trying to second-guess who is a serious buyer and who is ‘just looking’. You can spend what seems like hours with someone who looks ready to whip out their wallet at any moment, only to have them utter the dread words “I do a bit of painting myself, actually…” Meanwhile someone else has quietly come up behind you, with an armful of prints ready to buy.

Oh yes, it’s that time of year again – preparing for next months Glasgow Art Fair…..

Crowded studio

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Here is a view of Half Moon studio with me on the left rolling up the ink with my Albion press to the side and Louise Davies on the far right, printing on her Rochat etching press.

The photo’s been taken from the mezzanine area where we are supposed to do our paperwork, etc. (not much goes on there, then). Sadly, it’s also the only warm bit in the studio at this time of year, as all the heat rises and wafts about near the ceiling.
We’re in an old Victorian warehouse in Brixton and it gets bitterly cold in the winter – we all spend months on end, wrapped up like over-stuffed teletubbies…

Co-operative Galleries

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After six busy years, I have left the artist run co-operative gallery, Greenwich Printmakers. I made a lot of great friends and had a really good time there.

However, being a member of a co-operative gallery entails a fair bit of work. Every artist has to staff the gallery for a minimum of one day a month, take on a role within the organisation (i.e. marketing, outside exhibitions, chairperson, gallery manager), pay a subscription, and attend planning meetings. On top of these commitments, you still have to pay the usual gallery commission (40 -50%).

In return, you get a gallery that keeps a reasonable stock of your work on display (you are allowed a certain number of acetated prints out in the browsers at all times) and there is a regular display of work on the walls (each exhibition generally lasts for a couple of months). In addition to this, each artist gets the chance to have an area of the gallery devoted to a small show of their framed work (on a rotating basis – how often it is depends on how many members there are).

All this is is fine if you’re just starting out, or have other commitments. Once you start to build up a good network of commercial galleries, it becomes difficult to justify devoting so much time to that one co-operative gallery – and of course that co-operative gallery in turn has to rely on every member pulling their weight and being equally committed.

But in the end, co-operative galleries don’t have any more to offer than commercial ones (after all, with commercial galleries, all you have to do is deliver new work periodically and they do the rest). Sadly, it became increasingly difficult to find the time needed to play an active and useful role within the Greenwich Printmakers organisation – and that was the problem in the end….

The Little World of Printmaking

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The printmaking world is a small one, especially in London, and an artist’s working life is rather solitary, so generally it’s great to feel part of a community.
Of course, as in any group of people, everybody knows everything about everyone – a bit like living in a village, I’d imagine. So while it’s great when you have some success – word gets around without you having to stoop so low as to mention it yourself – there’s always a downside.
Cringingly, everyone gets to know about the other stuff as well – the things you’d rather keep quiet about – all those rejections and setbacks that come from working in such a competitive field. (Suffice it to say, I won’t dwell on the less than spectacular parts of my working life right now.)
What’s brought this on? Submission for the UK’s national open print exhibition, Originals, is here again and I’ve just spent this freezing cold, snow-bound day at home, framing, packing and form filling, that’s what…

Mini-Picture Show

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This is a really lively show – great for Christmas presents as you can take what you buy away with you there and then.
It’s on from 10 December 2009 until 22 January 2010
Work on a small scale by Members of the Royal Watercolour Society and the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers.
Open daily fron 11-6. Admission is free.
Bankside Gallery
48 Hopton Street,
London, SE1 9JH
020 7928 7521
You can see this print there, called May, one of my series of Diary of a Londoner. Framed, it will cost £120.