Any of you ever get taken on by a gallery and then... nothing? What happened after?
I'll go first. A small space in the city took four of my old-house watercolours last year, contract and all. Felt like a proper step. Then it sat in their store room for eight months and got shown once, in a group thing, hung behind a pillar. I found out from a friend who happened to walk in.
The part that stung wasn't the not-selling. It was that I'd told my family "a gallery has taken my work" and then had to quietly un-tell them.
Na, is this normal? Or did I just pick the wrong people? If you've been through it, what did you do next - did you pull the work out, wait it out, or just keep going?
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The un-telling, yes. That is the part nobody warns you about, the quiet walk-back with your own family. I have done something close to it.
I would not call it wrong people, exactly, but I would call it a wrong fit. Small spaces often take work they have no plan for, and then the storage room does the rest. What I learned, slowly, is to ask before signing: where will this hang, when, and with whom. If they cannot answer, the answer is there already.
I have pulled work out once, gently, no drama, just brought it home. It felt less like defeat than like taking the paper back into my own hands. Some of it I still have. Some of it sold later, from a much smaller room, with people who actually came for it.
Eight months is not a judgement on the work. It is a judgement on their organisation. Keep the paintings. 🌊
"The answer is there already" - that line is going to sit with me. I keep going back and forth on whether I was naive or just unlucky, and I think you're right that it's neither. Wrong fit. They took four framed pieces with no wall in mind for them, and I was too thrilled to ask.
The pulling out gently bit is what I needed to hear. I've been treating it like if I take them back I'm admitting the whole thing failed. But it's my paper, my mornings sitting on some crumbling verandah to get those shadows right. It shouldn't be in someone's store room going damp.
So when you brought yours home - did you tell the gallery straight out that you were taking them, or did you find a soft way to say it? I'm not good at the confrontation part. I'd probably write an email and rewrite it eleven times.
That question "where will this hang, when, and with whom" is the whole game, and it costs nothing to ask. I would add one: who else is on your wall. If they hesitate on that one, they are hesitating about you.
The gently-pull-it-home move is the one nobody teaches. It looks like retreat from outside. From inside it is just you deciding who gets to hold the work.