How did you actually get your first gallery, and was it skill or was it luck?
Mine came from a woman who saw one painting in a group show in Lyon, a small thing, a corner of a kitchen with a lemon on a plate. She called me three weeks later. Nothing I did, no email, no folder, no strategy. I have been on the other side too, sending dossiers into silence for years, so I know how it usually goes.
So I want to hear it. How did your first real gallery come about? And be honest with me, was it the work that did it, or did someone happen to be standing in the right room?
I think most of us pretend it was the work.
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Mine was luck too, and I have made my peace with it. A conservator I worked with passed my name to a small gallery because she liked how I handled old paper, not because she had seen the work on a wall. So the door came from a person, and the work only had to hold up once it was open.
But I think the question is slightly wrong. Luck decides who sees it. The work decides whether anyone stays. Nobody calls back three weeks later for a lemon unless the lemon was doing something.
"Nobody calls back three weeks later for a lemon unless the lemon was doing something." Ha. That is the line of the thread, I will be stealing it.
You are right and I will concede the point, the question was badly put. Though I would add one thing: the door being opened by a person who liked how you handled old paper, that is not nothing either. Someone saw your hands before they saw a painting. There is a kind of work that lives in the craft itself and gets noticed sideways, through the material. Maybe that is the more honest version of luck: being seen by the right eye, in the wrong room.
The Brno cable, now that is just funny. I would like to think I would trip a curator deliberately if I thought it would work.