How did you land your first gallery? I walked in with wet paintings and a bad folder

I'll go first, and it's not a good story.

My first real gallery, I had no connection, no CV worth the paper, nothing. I printed twelve photos of recent work, put them in one of those plastic sleeves, and walked in on a Tuesday afternoon because I'd convinced myself email was for cowards. The woman at the desk looked at the folder the way you'd look at a fish left out overnight. She took it anyway. Two weeks later she called. Not for a show. She wanted to know if I could paint a copy of a portrait she had a photo of, for her mother. I said yes. I painted it badly, I was too proud of it. She hung it in her hallway and never showed my work.

But she introduced me to the man who did, three years later, and that is the whole of how it happened. Nothing about my portfolio mattered. It was one person who remembered my face.

So I want the real versions. Not the tidy ones. How did you actually get your first gallery? Did someone vouch for you, did you get lucky at a group show, did you send forty emails and get one reply, did you sleep with somebody's framing budget? And how long did it take.

I ask because I teach now and I watch students believe there is a procedure. There is no procedure. There is a person somewhere who says yes.

4comments

Add your reply to this discussion…

4 comments

Kasia Nowak·4h

The wet paintings and the plastic sleeve are somehow the most believable part. I think the thing nobody says out loud is that the first "yes" is almost never the yes you wanted, and the trick is just taking it anyway. I've not done the walk-in myself (Kraków galleries would probably just stare at me until I left), but I keep hearing the same shape of story from people: the copy of somebody's mother's portrait, the tiny commission, the group show in a cafe. And then one day it isn't.

Also the line about painting it badly because you were too proud of it. That one landed. I do that with pastel all the time, keep going back into a face until I've smudged the life out of it. Anyway, thank you for telling the unglamorous version, those are the ones that actually help.

Camille LaurentOP·3h

Twelve copies of the same hand. That's the real apprenticeship nobody puts on a CV. And yes, the pride thing. I've come to think the bad painting you make out of pride is often more honest than the good one you make to please. C'est ça.

Kraków, though. I'd not write off the staring. Here they stare too, but the staring is often just them deciding whether you're serious. The walk-in only works if the work is under the arm and you don't apologize for it. Mine worked because the folder was bad, not despite it, maybe. She could see I had nothing to hide behind.

The yes you didn't want is the whole thing. You take the mother's portrait and you paint it properly, without the pride this time, and the next thing is a wall in the back room.

Mateo Serrano·3h

the plastic sleeve is killing me because I did the exact same thing, except mine was a folder my mum had from work with a coffee ring on the front. guy at the desk flipped through it in like four seconds flat.

but the part that gets me is the copy job. everyone wants the first yes to be the gallery wall and it almost never is. mine was a restaurant that wanted "rustic" bowls, forty of them, identical. joder, identical. I hate making identical. did it anyway, learned more from that order than from a year of my own pieces, and it paid for the next kiln load. so yeah, you painted her mother badly and too proud, and she still called back. that's the whole thing really.

Camille LaurentOP·3h

A coffee ring. That's better than the plastic sleeve, honestly. At least yours had a history.

The forty identical bowls hit me though. I did twelve copies of the same hand once for a client who wanted a set of gifts, and by number nine I understood something about my own brushwork I'd never seen before, because there was nowhere to hide. Repetition is a brutal teacher but it is a teacher. I would not have chosen it. I did it anyway.

And yes, I painted her mother badly. Too much pride in the wrong places, I wanted it to be my painting. She wanted her mother. Those are two different jobs and I only learned that afterward.