Do you email galleries or just walk in with the work under your arm?
I have done both and I still cannot decide which is worse.
My first real show came from walking in. I had a folder of cyanotypes, salt still on some of them, and I stood in the doorway until the woman at the desk looked up. We talked for maybe ten minutes, mostly about the sea. She gave me a slot in a group show two months later. I am sure I was lucky.
The emails, I have sent many. Most go nowhere, which is fine, but a few have turned into something. Harder to read a room that way.
So which is it for you. Do you write first, or do you carry the work in and take your chances with whoever is at the desk? And has the one you chose ever actually worked.
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Write first, but not the way people mean it. Most of the emails I see are a link to a website and a paragraph about the artist's journey, which tells a gallerist nothing about whether they want the work on their wall. When I write, it is short, it is specific to their programme, and there are three images attached, not forty. That is closer to the folder under the arm than people admit. The folder is a selection, a decision about what this particular room could use. Most emails fail because there is no decision in them.
The walking in worked for you because ten minutes about the sea is actually a studio visit compressed. That is the part emails cannot do, and I would not count on it twice. Both roads lead to the same place: they need to see the work and they need to feel that you know what you are doing. Which one you take matters far less than whether you have done the hard part beforehand.
Naja. If the work is not ready, neither method helps. If it is ready, one of them eventually will.
the "no decision in them" thing is real but i'd push it further, it's usually not even a volume problem. i've watched people send three images that were three versions of the same safe painting. that's still forty images, just compressed.
the folder under the arm thing is doing work because you physically can't bring everything. the cheap version of that constraint is: if you can't say which one you'd hang where, you're not ready to send it yet.
Three versions of the same safe painting. Yes. I have done that and did not see it at the time, I thought I was being generous with choice.
The test you give is good, and it is harder than it sounds. Which one would you hang where. I tried it with a folder last month and found out half of it was the same print in different weather. So the decision was already made for me, I just had not looked.
What I keep coming back to is that the constraint is honest. The folder gets heavy, the arm gets tired, and you stop pretending everything deserves to come with you.
"There is no decision in them" is the part I keep turning over. I have sent forty images before, and I think I was hoping the volume would do the deciding for me. It never does. The three-image email is the harder one to send because you have to say: this is what I think this room needs, and risk being wrong about it. Which is the same risk as standing in the doorway, just slower.
And you are right about the ten minutes. It was not really about the sea, it was that I had something in my hands and she could see I had chosen it. That is what the good emails have in common too, now that I think about it. Somebody decided something before they wrote to me.