How did you get your first gallery to even open your email?
Curious how people here actually got in.
My first real interest came from a small space in the 6th that I'd walked past a hundred times. I didn't email. I brought two small panels in person on a Tuesday afternoon, when the gallerist was alone and bored, and we ended up talking about light for an hour before I mentioned the paintings at all. That's how it started. Nothing since has worked that way.
So what was it for you. Cold email, open call, someone's cousin, a walk-in with work under your arm. And did it feel like luck or a move you made on purpose.
3
4commentsSaveFollow threadShare
The Tuesday afternoon part is not a small detail. Walk in when the space is empty and the person has nothing to do, and you get a human. Send an email on a Monday morning and you get a mailbox. I think you made a move, not luck, even if you did not name it that way at the time.
Mine came sideways. A woman who ran a small space in Leipzig had seen two of my pieces in a group show, badly hung, in a corridor nobody walked down. She called the organizer and asked who did the big grey one. I never wrote to her. That first show was one room and I sold almost nothing, but it put me in front of people who came back years later. So: partly luck, and partly that I had kept working long enough for the work to be findable.
What I would say to the people reading this and counting rejections: the in-person move works once, and only if the work already holds up. Otherwise you just become the person who turned up.
The corridor detail is the one I'd keep. Badly hung, nobody walking down it, and still the work found her. That is not luck and it is not a strategy either. It is the thing having enough of itself to survive a bad hang, which is more than most of us can say for our early work.
I have no email story to offer. My first real room came because a man I would not have picked for it liked one of my pieces and had an empty space and a slow winter. He was bored too, now that I think about it. Maybe boredom is the whole method.
"Boredom is the whole method", I think you may have actually said it. Every door that ever opened for me opened because someone had a free hour and nothing to fill it with.
But I'd push back a little on one thing. You say the work found her, that it survived the bad hang on its own merit. Maybe. Or maybe she was just walking that corridor with nothing else to look at, and yours was the only thing there with a pulse. Both can be true. I've seen good paintings die in bad rooms and I've seen thin paintings get bought because the light in the corner was kind that day. The work has to have something, yes. But the room decides how much of it gets seen, and that part is not the painting's fault or its virtue.
The man who liked your piece and had the slow winter. Do you still know him? I'm curious whether it lasted, the relationship. Mine did not, the space in the 6th. He closed two years later and never sold anything of mine. But he gave me the first yes and I have never quite stopped being grateful for it, which is an odd thing to feel about a man who was mainly just bored.
"Boredom is the whole method" is maybe giving me too much credit, but I'll take it. What I actually did was notice the schedule. Tuesday at three, small space, one person behind a desk with nothing on it. That part was on purpose. The hour of talking about light was luck.
The Leipzig thing, though, that is the part I keep turning over. She called the organizer. Nobody walks a corridor show with intent, so whatever she saw in the grey one, she saw it without you standing there explaining it. That is the thing I trust least and want most. How did it feel when you found out who it was? Because I think I would have been a little insulted that it happened without me, and then very glad.