I’ve had an idea (yes, I know, make the most of it). I thought I might post a photo on my blog every day this month – of the studio, work in progress, the odd private view, etc. And as February is the shortest month, that would mean I’d only need to do 28 posts.
Actually, that’s quite a lot, put like that. Perhaps it should be more a case of posting every day until I get bored. So just the six posts then….
Yes, it’s that time of year again when I bang on about applying for membership of the RE, a.k.a the Royal Society of Painter Printmakers .
If you’re interested, you will need to fill out an application form and return it (with a cheque for £30) to Bankside Gallery, by Monday 4th February. Hand-in date for delivery of portfolios is Friday 15th February. (The porfolio should consist of eight prints, together with some supporting material, either a sketchbook or six drawings.) More details can be found here
And below is what I wrote last year about the best approach to putting a portfolio together, in case you missed it or, most likely, would really enjoy reading it all again:
1: Keep things simple. You only have one chance to impress and now is not the time to show how versatile you are. I know it’s tempting to put in examples of all the different aspects of your work but you only have one chance to impress. Random pieces that do not relate to the main body of work are pointless – try to keep the look fairly uniform.
2: Presentation. All applicants are expected to be professional and it’s very important that the work is presented to the highest standards. It goes without saying that all the work should be clean – no crooked mounts, no dirty or creased margins. If you don’t think your work is worth presenting properly, then there’s no reason to think anyone else will.
3: Supporting work. Make sure it is relevant – don’t put in life drawings to support urban scenes, as I once did. You want to reinforce the thinking behind the work and hopefully increase the appreciation of it. If you don’t use sketchbooks, then try to show examples of the process you’ve used to get from the initial idea to the finished piece.
4: CV. Make sure it’s up to date, relevant and preferably on one page – a good exhibiting history obviously helps but so does an interesting project, residency or commission.
5: Don’t get discouraged if you’re not successful – people sometimes get in on the first try but it’s much more usual to have several attempts. The panels who review the portfolios change all the time and what gets turned down one year may well be accepted the next.
And good luck to all those willing to give it a go – fingers crossed….
This past week or so I have been a prisoner in my own home (although to be fair, my long neglected painting is progressing)…
With only one operational arm, I am unable to drive to the studio, let alone use this…
Or even these…
Because this 70lb monster barrelled into me and knocked me flying off my feet on to some handy concrete…
Resulting in a bruise stretching from my elbow to my shoulder (and let’s not forget the cracked rib).
Sigh…
Following on from my blog post, Getting Your Work Out There, I’ve had a couple of questions regarding open submission exhibitions.
So why should you enter this type of show in the first place? A few reasons:
1. If you’re successful, it will expand your exhibiting history and may even prove to be a step towards an invitation to exhibit elsewhere.
2. It provides an opportunity for lesser known artists to hang alongside international names – always a bit of a thrill, unless you happen to be squashed between a couple of other nobodies….
3. There are often awards and prizes on offer so if you’re lucky enough to win one of those, that too looks good on your CV.
4. And if one of the selectors is the owner/director of a gallery you’d love to show at…. well, it’s a longshot but you never know.
And some reasons why you shouldn’t?
1. The cost of entering can be high – the RA fees at £50 for two pictures is not cheap. Also if you don’t live within easy reach of London, where the majority of these shows are held, then the cost of transport can be prohibitive. And once you get in, if you don’t sell your work, you’ll still be out of pocket as you won’t recoup your costs.
2. A CV with nothing on it but open submission shows is not too impressive – you need to get some variety – and there may come a point in your career where you should stop entering any but the most prestigious ones…
3. It certainly gets your work in front of some important people but obviously if they don’t select it (i.e. they don’t like it) then they aren’t likely to remember it (unless it’s so bad it’s been burned into their retinas).
4. And be aware that almost none of these exhibitions is entirely open submission – the percentage of invited artists varies but can considerably reduce the number of non-invited works hung. You have to research the numbers (not always easy to find but they’re out there) and decide for yourself whether it’s worth it or not.
Here are a few open submission shows that I’ve always liked (obviously the first on the list is the most well-known and in my opinion, the best):
RA Summer Exhibition.
This is the UK’s largest open exhibition and it attracts huge numbers of visitors. Over 1000 works are exhibited from an entry of over 10,000 (although when you consider that there are 80 Royal Academicians and 41 Seniors, all of whom are entitled to exhibit 6 works each, well, you do the maths….)
There’s always lots of national press coverage (not always positive, I have to admit, but you can’t have everything.) Even I was featured in the Sunday Express one year – although I made the mistake of mentioning my three children and the whole article made me look like a 1950’s housewife, squeezing in the Art between boiling potatoes and washing nappies….
One of the most popular and prolific printmakers I know has enjoyed a conspicuous lack of success at the Summer Show. Finally he got in with a fantastic etching, sold out the edition (of 150 gulp!) in a few weeks, the RA used his image for one of their cards and has not got a look in ever since…
And another colleague got in on her first try while still at art college – unfortunately it took her another seventeen years before she repeated the feat…
As for me, the year before last I had no luck at all, last year I got both in, and this year I’m fully expecting another rejection. It’s nothing personal…
So, yes, the RA is a bit of a lottery but if you don’t try at all, then you definitely won’t get in. And if you do, it’s great fun.
Bite
This is the artist’s print show which the Mall Galleries host every year. It used to be called Originals, and long before that, the National Print Exhibition.
There are lots of prizes and a catalogue. It costs £12 per entry, with a maximum of 6 entries, though only 3 will be hung. This might sound odd but a friend of mine, fed up with rejections every year, decided to load her car up with six of her extremely large abstract woodcuts and enter them all. She only got one in (perhaps she wore them down) but she was delighted.
All my printmaking friends, almost without exception, have exhibited at this one over the years – I think it’s the biggest national open submission exhibition solely for prints.
The Discerning Eye
The majority of the exhibits here are paintings, I’d say, but there are always a good range of artist’s prints too. Only around half of the exhibited works are from the open submission however – the rest are invited by the selectors. Again it has lots of prizes.
On the other hand, the selectors are always high-powered art world people – each selector has their own display and I think it results in an interesting collection of work. Your work could get chosen by the likes of Albert Irvin (2012) or Eileen Cooper and Brian Sewell (2011).
And you never know, you might get to meet them if they turn up at the PV but be brave – you will have to introduce yourself….
Mini Print Exhibition
This is run by the Printmakers Council (PMC) and is a biennial, touring show. There’s a full colour catalogue which is sent free to all exhibitors.
It costs £22 to enter three works but you can deliver them unframed as the organisers will frame the selected work themselves. That’s got to be a bonus for artists outside the South East.
Be aware that your print and ten copies have to be available for the exhibition for up to two years and it has to be truly tiny, 8 x 10cm, but then it isn’t called the Mini-Print for nothing…..
I guess the moral is don’t enter an open exhibition unless you’re confident that success will potentially advance your career in some way – you just need to be selective and to cultivate the hide of a rhino…..
Here is the first rough proof of my new linocut of Liverpool Street Station (dreadful image courtesy of my iPhone). The top skylight and the platforms are left in pale yellow…
And here is the second proof, with the top skylight in blue and the platforms knocked back a bit. I thought I liked it better but now I’m not so sure. I may be back to it after the New Year. Sigh….
Christmas Day at our house – twelve adults, ten children, three dogs – bring it on.
So here’s the thing – you’re enjoying making your work, and you feel you’re progressing with it. The only problem is, no-one sees it. ‘How nice would it be to exhibit regularly and maybe even sell something?’, you ask yourself. Easier said than done, I know.
It may seem self-evident but the most important thing is to get your work out there – no-one’s going to see it if it’s stacked up under the bed or on top of the wardrobe.
Open Exhibitions.
This is a good way to start – with luck, you’ll get your work shown in a prestigious gallery, albeit temporarily, and occasionally you might be hung next to a ‘name’ which is exciting. It also helps to build up your exhibiting history on your CV.
Art Fairs
My studio takes a stand at the Affordable Art Fair in London every Autumn. Local ones, though, are a good place to start – they’re cheaper and you can polish up your sales techniques, chat to your fellow exhibitors and take note of what visitors like (and don’t like) about your work.
Hopefully you’ll make enough sales to cover your costs but if not, then try and see it as a marketing exercise. Overall, 20,000 people visit the AAF during the four days that it’s open – that’s a huge number of viewers – and although they may not buy this time, they may do in the future.
Co-operative Galleries
When I felt ready to take the next step on the ladder, I joined a co-operative printmaker’s gallery. It was a brilliant way to gain experience in presenting your work and to gain some insight into how a commercial gallery functions. Most importantly, looking back, it opened up a whole new world of fellow printmakers, some of whom are still friends and colleagues today.
If you don’t have an artist-run space near you, then how about joining an open access print studio or even a class at an adult education centre? Not everyone has the room/funds for their own equipment and it’s a good way to meet other artists and to make contacts.
The Internet
And what about the virtual world? Facebook, Twitter etc, are excellent ways of making contact with fellow artists without leaving the comfort of your own home. Join in with on-line forums/discussion groups, comment on blogs – hell, why not start your own? There are whole communities of artists out there, offering support, information, gossip and it’s an important way to make connections….
And this leads me on to what is really the most important marketing tool you can have – a website. It doesn’t have to be too elaborate, just a few images and a bit of blurb.
This one is non-negotiable – you absolutely have to have a presence on the web, especially as a visual artist. If a gallery or a potential buyer has seen your work at an open exhibition or art fair and wants to find out more, they will use the internet for initial research. You really need an up to date and easily navigatable site and of course it’s an easy and pain-free way for you to approach galleries as well.
I suppose what a lot of this comes down to is that dreaded word, networking. The fact is that most of my initial exhibiting opportunities came through fellow artists inviting me to show with them, or by generously recommending me to one of their galleries. (I’m often involved in organising group shows and I have to say that no-one within these groups would dream of asking an unknown artist to exhibit with them – it’s just too risky as they could be a real liability.) You need to get your work out there but you also need get yourself out there too.
And lastly, be prepared to be in it for the long haul- as much as it takes time to build up a strong body of work, so it takes just as much time to build up a good network of galleries and contacts….
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….
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…..
It all starts so innocently with a page from my sketchbook…
Working on the prep drawing……
Two weeks later, the finished prep drawing…….
Tracing the drawing and transferring it to each of the four lino blocks.
Many, many huge piles of lino cuttings later…….
The first block is cut and ready to print….
And the second…..
And this is the proof with the third block printed….
Finally this is the finished print – Poetry of Departures.
And here it is framed up and ready to go. Never again, I tell you.