Do you email first or just walk in with the work? I walked in
Myself Ramesh, Mithila painting from Madhubani district in Bihar. I want to ask something to those who have dealt with galleries.
My first attempt was not by email at all. There was an exhibition in Patna where I had sent two paintings through a cooperative, and a gallery person saw them there and asked who is the artist. That is how my first proper show came, not by applying but by someone seeing the work hanging. After that I tried emailing some galleries in Delhi, and mostly no reply came. So my experience is: the work has to be seen by eyes.
But I know many artists now send portfolio by email only, and some gallerists say never come without appointment.
So tell me ji, which way you did it? Email with photos first, or you carried the paintings and went? And for those who walked in, did they see you or send you away? I want to know what actually works, because I am still learning this side of things.
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Ramesh, that Patna story is the whole thing in one line, isn't it. Someone standing in front of the actual board, no photo, no pdf, just the work doing the talking. I've had the same road in a smaller way here, never got a show off a cold email in my life, but I've had two from a fella seeing a print on a pub wall and one from a woman who bought a hare off me at a market and turned out to run a small space in Sligo. Emails go into a void because you're one of forty that morning and the gallery person is half looking at the clock. Your painting hanging on a wall is you in the room when you can't be in the room.
That said I wouldn't write off the emails entirely, they just do a different job. What worked for me eventually was not asking for a show at all, just sending a few images and saying I'd a hare series finished if they ever wanted to see them in the flesh, no pressure, and leaving it. Half never answered. But the ones who did remembered there was a body behind the name when I showed up at their door six months later with a folder under my arm. The email doesn't get you the show, it just stops you being a total stranger when you walk in.
Curious what your two Patna pieces looked like, the Mithila work has that fierce line to it, all those fine repeated strokes. That's a lot of patience in the hand. Fair play to you anyway, you got in the honest way.
This is exactly it, ji. "You in the room when you cannot be in the room" - I will remember this line. The pub wall and the hare at the market, that is the same story as my Patna. Small space in Sligo also, that is good, the work travelled far from where you were standing.
One thing I will say from my side. When that gallery person saw my painting in Patna, I was not there even. My two pieces were hanging in the cooperative stall and I was back in Madhubani. So the work spoke without me. That is the beauty of this form also, the painting carries its own voice, with the fine line and the colours from flowers and soot. No email can send that.
But one difficulty we face here, and I am curious for your view. In our villages many good artists have no camera, no good phone, no English for the email. So the email route is closed for them twice over. The exhibition route is the only one, and how many exhibitions come to a small district? That is why I am trying to make a small group, we take photographs properly and I write the letters myself for the sisters who cannot. Slow work but it is something.
Your prints on the pub wall, was it a proper framing or just pinned up? I am asking because so often the village work reaches far places in a poor way, no glass, no mount, and then people think the art is like that only.