How did your first gallery actually happen? Mine was pure luck and I still feel bad about it
I got my first real gallery because my framer's assistant happened to be married to the woman who ran it. That's it. No portfolio, no proposal, no clever approach. She saw two canvases leaning against the wall when she came to pick him up. I was thirty-one and had no idea what I was doing, and I said yes to a show I wasn't ready for.
Now I watch people write these careful emails with ten images and a statement and get nothing back, and I wonder how many doors actually open that way. So tell me honestly, how did yours happen?
The intro from someone. The open call you nearly didn't send. The walk-in. The one that came from a conversation at a bar. The one that came from a friend of a friend. I want the real version, not the one for the website.
And if you're still waiting for yours, say that too. It took me a decade of nothing after that first show, so I'm not pretending it's a formula.
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Mine came from a woman who ran a small bookshop and hung local work on one wall. I had shown her a print, mostly out of nervousness, and she asked if I had more. That was the whole "approach." Nothing careful about it.
I understand the feeling of not being ready. My first show was seven pieces that did not belong together, and I could see it once they were on the wall. But I think the work knows when it is being looked at honestly, even if the timing is wrong. The careful emails are not wasted. They are just a slower kind of door. Not every room opens because someone's husband came to collect a frame.
There is something tender in how you tell this, like you are still apologising to the people whose emails go unanswered. You do not have to. Luck is not a debt.
The bookshop wall, yes. That is a good beginning ji. In my own case it was a cooperative exhibition in Patna, arranged by a lady who used to buy paper from the same supplier as my family. Twenty two paintings, all on the floor of one room, and I remember thinking they were looking at each other and not agreeing. But one gentleman stood very long in front of a Kohbar and asked me about the meaning. That is how the first selling started, from the meaning, not from the approach.
What you say about the work knowing when it is looked at honestly, I feel this is true. Our painting does not perform. It waits. Someone either stands long in front of it or they walk past, and you can see from the line itself which one happened.
The seven pieces that did not belong together, do not worry for that. My mother used to say a first show is like the first rice of the season. You eat it and it is not the best, but now the field is known.
"They were looking at each other and not agreeing." I know that feeling exactly. You hang twenty two paintings in one room and by the end they have started arguing with each other, and you wonder if you have made a mistake somewhere around painting nine.
But the gentleman in front of the Kohbar, that is the part that matters. He stayed because of the meaning, not because someone had told him to look. I have a suspicion that this is the only kind of viewer who ever buys anything real. The ones who arrive already convinced are just decorating a wall. The ones who stop and ask a question are the ones the painting has actually caught.
A bookshop wall. Honestly that might be the best version of this story, because she was already in the business of putting things in front of people who weren't looking for them. A painter I know got his first sale because a dentist hung him in the waiting room.
And yes, seven pieces that did not belong together. I had eleven, and by the opening I would have traded half of them for one good one. The thing that still bothers me is that I didn't know which half.
You are probably right about the slow door. I don't believe the careful emails are useless. I just wonder sometimes if we tell young painters that the email is the way in, when mostly it is the sidestep, the framer, the bookshop. Voilà.