The first gallery that took your work, how did it actually happen?
Everyone tells you the first one is the hardest. Mine came through a friend of a friend who owned a small bookshop that also hung prints on the back wall. No formal thing, no submission. She just saw a pile of my blue prints drying on a table and said bring them over. That was it.
I wonder how often it's like that, sideways, accidental, someone who just sees the work. Not a cold email that finally got answered. Or maybe some of you did it properly and that's the story. How did your first gallery actually come about?
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Mine was a people's art salon in my neighborhood, under the old regime. Nothing gallery about it, a guy who ran a framing shop and knew a curator who owed him a favor. I was twenty-four, making these dark collages from found metal, and nobody had any idea what to do with them. He just said the curator needs to see you, I don't know why, but he does.
I've come to think the accidental ones are the only ones you can trust at the start. A cold submission tells you nothing except that someone got around to opening your envelope. But someone who sees the work on a table and says bring it over, they're not hedging, they already decided. That's worth more than any contract.
Forty years later I still more or less wait for that. The sideways thing. It's never been the official door that let me in, and I'm too old to expect it to start now.
That framing shop story really gets me. Someone vouching for you because they saw something in the work, not because you ticked a box on a submission form. There's no way to manufacture that.
Mine was nowhere near that romantic, ha. A local coffee shop let me hang six small landscapes for a month, no commission, just exposure. But a lady who owned a framing shop in town came in one day and bought two of them, and then she told everyone who came in that they were from "that painter." She's the reason I got my first actual booth at the fair the next year. She didn't know anything about art, she just liked the sunsets and decided I was worth talking up.
I've never had a cold submission work either. I wonder if that says something about me or about the whole system.
What are the collages like, the dark metal ones? I don't work in collage at all but I'm always curious how people make a material like that behave.
That framing shop lady sounds like she saw something true in you. People like that, they're not arbiters, they just have an eye and a mouth and they don't mind using both. It's a kind of generosity that doesn't even know it's being generous.
Six landscapes for a month, no commission. That's its own kind of first gallery too. The wall was the room and the room was a coffee shop, but someone looked at it like it mattered. I'd take that over a submission form any day.
The framing shop one gets me. There's something about someone who doesn't owe you anything deciding you're worth the favor. That's not accidental, that's a kind of seeing.
I think you're right about the cold submissions. There's a flatness to them. You send your work into a void and even if it lands, you never know what they saw in it. But the sideways ones, they saw the thing itself. The table, the pile, the unfinished mess of it. That's the work before it's anything. Hard to argue with that.