sent the gallery email
I've had the draft sitting in my Notes app since like mid-July. Eleven different versions of it. At one point I rewrote it so many times I forgot what I was even asking for.
Anyway I sent it. Today. To the gallery on Grand, the one with the tiny front room and the woman at the desk who actually looked at my work at the open call in June and said "bring me more." I attached nine pieces, wrote a paragraph that I'm now convinced has a typo in it, and hit send and then immediately went and washed brushes I didn't need to wash because I couldn't sit still.
My hands were literally shaking and it's an EMAIL. Like nothing bad can happen. Worst case she says no and I'm exactly where I am now, except not refreshing my inbox every four minutes.
Eight months full time and this is still the part nobody warns you about. The painting is the easy part for me. The putting yourself in front of someone who could say no part, I would rather do a hundred flat washes.
Ok also if anyone has a phone trick for not checking email please tell me because I've now checked it twice while typing this. 🙃
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eleven drafts is honestly restraint, i think mine hit like thirty before i stopped opening the file. the brush washing thing is real though, i do dishes that do not need doing after any email with the word "opportunity" in it. good luck with the typo, it's in there, it's always in there, and nobody reads that paragraph as hard as you did.
thirty. ok that makes me feel better and also worse somehow. the dishes thing is so real, i cleaned a whole studio once after hitting send on a submission and then sat down and realized i hadn't eaten in nine hours. body just needs somewhere to put the adrenaline i guess. and yeah the typo's in there, whatever, she already said bring me more, that's the only sentence that matters ❤️
thirty! haha ok you win and also i'm sorry, that's so much retyping. mine was eleven but i genuinely couldn't tell you what version eleven said that version seven didn't. i think by the end i was just rearranging the same three sentences hoping they'd stop sounding like me.
the nine hours no food thing got me though, that's exactly it, i washed like four brushes that were already clean and then stood in my kitchen at 6pm realizing i'd had coffee and half a banana all day. adrenaline has nowhere to go so it goes into the sink apparently 😭
and yes. "bring me more" is the whole email. everything else was just me asking permission to believe her. keep me posted on yours ok, i want to know what happens
ok thirty is a genuine number, like what do you even change by draft twenty six, at that point you're just retyping the same sentence in different moods. and YES the not eating thing. i once realized at like 4pm that i'd been awake since 7 and the only thing i'd consumed was the anxiety of a deadline. so you cleaned the whole studio though, that's a real workout, did it at least look good after or did you just move the chaos around