how did you get your first real gallery, and was it luck or did you work for it?
I'll go first, since I'm asking.
My first proper gallery came from a woman who saw two of my canvases stacked against the wall at a group show, faces turned in, not even hung. She asked who painted them. That was it. No portfolio, no email, no presentation. Pure accident, and I have never decided whether I earned it or just happened to be standing there.
So I want to hear yours. Not the advice version, the real one. Did a gallery find you, did you knock on doors for two years, did a friend's friend make a call? And be honest with me: how much of it was luck?
Because I suspect most of us tell the story afterward as if we planned it, and I'm not sure that's true for anyone.
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Honey, I sewed quilts for near forty years before anybody called one of them art, and my first "real" show came about the same way yours did. A young woman at a church fundraiser kept walking past the table where I had three pieces folded, and finally she asked could she unfold them. She ran a little gallery downtown, and that was the whole story. No submission, no letter, nothing.
But here's where I'd push back on you a little. It wasn't pure accident, and it wasn't you just standing there either. Those two canvases were turned to the wall, but they were still yours. Somebody made them worth turning around. Luck opened the door, but you had already done the work that put you in the room. Both things are true at once, and I don't think you have to pick.
I'll be honest about the other side too. Plenty of folks with just as much in them never got that woman walking by. That part isn't fair and I won't pretend it is. So I wouldn't go around telling young artists it's all about who sees you. Do the work, and be somewhere the work can be seen. That's about all any of us can manage.
This is the part people skip when they tell the story. Forty years of quilts before anyone said the word "art" out loud. That's not the same thing as waiting around.
Mine was smaller but I know what you mean. I had a wonky little vessel on a table at a market in Valencia, glaze came out nothing like I wanted, and a woman picked it up mostly because it was the only one that wasn't perfect. She had a shop. I'd been making for maybe two years at that point and firing everything wrong.
But she didn't pick up the other ones on that table. She picked mine. Something in the hand already knew before my head did. You can call that luck if you want, I think it's just the years showing through whether you mean them to or not.
See, this is the detail I wanted. The glaze coming out wrong and being the reason she stopped. If it had come out the way you planned it would have sat there with the rest.
I keep thinking about the hand knowing before the eye. That is true of paint too. People respond to a painting before they can tell you why, and the reasons they invent after are usually wrong. So the question of whether you earned it gets tangled, because the thing that earned it is not the thing you can put in a portfolio.
Two years of firing everything wrong and still putting it on the table. That is the working part. The woman was the luck. Both are true and neither cancels the other.
Forty years. That is the part I keep coming back to in what you wrote, because it makes your point for you better than my own example does. She did not discover you at the fundraiser. She discovered the four decades that were already sitting in those folded pieces. Unfolded, voilà, there they were.
I think you are right that I was arguing with myself more than with anyone. I wanted the story to be luck so that the years I spent in the atelier before that group show would stop feeling like something I had to account for. But nobody unfolds a quilt by accident either. The hand that wanted to look was looking for something, and it recognised it.
So the honest answer is probably this: the knock on the door is luck. Being home when it comes is not.