My first yes came from a framing shop. Did you walk in or send the email?

So my first ever "yes" was not a gallery at all. It was a little framing shop off Grodzka, the owner saw the pastels I brought in to be framed and asked if I wanted to hang two on her back wall. I said yes before she could change her mind. I had emailed maybe fifteen real galleries before that and got silence from every one, so honestly? The walk-in worked and the emails did not.

Question for you all, and I know there is no right answer so please argue with me: when you were starting out, did you walk in with your work or did you send the email? And which one actually worked?

I have a feeling the people who walk in get further, but I am too nervous to do it again, so tell me I am wrong or tell me I am right 🙂

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Gloria Mae Jackson·3w

Honey, I never sent a single email, because for most of my life I didn't have anybody to send one to. Quilts went where they always went, to a wedding or a funeral or a baby's crib, and that was the whole gallery as far as we knew. So I'd say you already found the thing that matters: that framing shop lady looked at your work with her own eyes and wanted it on her wall. That's a yes from a person, not from a form.

The emails aren't wrong, some folks do get through that way. But there's a kind of seeing that only happens face to face, when somebody can stand close and feel the thing in their hands. You can't email that. Keep that little shop close to your heart, she was your first door and the Lord always uses somebody's back wall to get you going.

Kasia NowakOP·3w

Honey, this got me a little. The baby's crib and the funeral, the whole gallery being the people who actually needed the thing. I keep thinking about that and I think you are right in a way I have not managed to be right about it.

I get so caught up in the gallery question, who said no, who never answered, and you just made a quilt for a person and handed it over. That is the seeing. The wall she hung it on is almost a detail, really.

Can I ask, did you ever know which of them lasted? The quilts I mean. I would want to know. I made a portrait of my grandmother and my aunt keeps it over a radiator, which is probably the most honest review I will ever get.

Dimitra Vasilakis·3w

Neither, honestly. My first paid work came from a neighbour who ran a little cafe and wanted something for the wall behind the till. She'd seen me working on my balcony, which in Thessaloniki means the whole street has seen it.

I've done both since. The emails are not useless but they're brutal at the start, because a gallery gets dozens a week and you're nothing to them yet. Walk-ins get you a face, and faces get remembered. The framing shop thing makes sense to me for a different reason though: she'd already held your work in her hands, she knew the paper and the edge of it. That's the part galleries never get from a jpeg.

The one caveat, walk in with two pieces, not twelve. I learned that the hard way, standing in a shop doorway with a box while the man politely waited for me to leave.

Kasia NowakOP·3w

The balcony part made me laugh, and then it made me think. There is no hiding in Thessaloniki, is there. But I like that she had already seen you work, not just the finished thing. That is a different kind of yes.

And the part about the paper, yes, exactly. She had the sheet in her hands before she had any idea who I was. She could feel the tooth of it. A gallery director looking at a jpg of a pastel is not really looking at the pastel, they cannot see how the light catches the pigment dust at all. That is my whole argument and you said it better than me.

So did the cafe one lead to anything after? Or was it just that one wall and then quiet again for a while. Asking because mine went quiet for months and I want to know if that is normal or just me.