Real-Life Adventures with Galleries

In the first 20 years or so of my painting and etching career I had gallery shows all over the world. It seemed important in those days to get my work out and about where people could see it and the press could comment on it. Also, the money was a factor. I had to sell my work in order to go on creating it.

My gallery experiences were hit and miss. Some of them were delightful opportunities to deal with gracious, professional gallery owners who knew how to sell art. Other experiences—the majority—left something to be desired. They seemed to represent the practical proof of Murphy's Law. And, believe me, there are a lot of things that can go wrong in an art exhibit! A few examples from my own experience:

• The invitations weren't sent out in time and nobody came to the opening.

• The transport company didn't deliver the work in time to be hung. Once I spent a year preparing a show for a museum in Agen, France, but the paintings and etchings never made it across the Spanish-French border. The museum had sent out the invitations, and I had bought my plane ticket, but the transport company, Spain's most expensive, had forgotten to provide one of the necessary documents at customs.

• The bank took its pound of flesh. I exhibited at a bank gallery and part of the deal was that they pick a painting for their collection at the end of the show. When it was over I hadn't sold much, but the bank's “artistic adviser” turned up and chose one of my biggest, best paintings. That stung.

• Etchings went missing, lost or stolen. Once I left a zinc etching plate—one of my best ever—in a gallery show to illustrate the process, and it disappeared. I can't rid myself of the sneaking suspicion that the plate found its way into the gallery owner's collection.

• Leaving work in the galleries' permanent collections also seems to me a bad business. The work is always thrown in with that of dozens of other artists, something which seems to me to limit severely its visablity and devalue its worth. Then there's the question of pricing in these situations. One of my paintings was sold from a “fondo de galería,” and the gallery refused to tell me who had bought it. Years later it turned up in one of Germany's most prestigious art collections. I had been paid my humble local price. How much did the gallery make on that operation? I'll never know.

To sum up my experiences with art galleries, I always noted an unsettling element of “cast your fate to the wind” whenever I dealt with them. I missed any form of control over how my work was exhibited and commercialized. I always had the feeling that I was an inert element in a buyers' market. They, the galleries, were “businesses” and therefore powerful and important. We, the artists, were looked upon as mendicants—or worse, vagrants—and were therefore significantly less import. At least that's the way I saw it, and still do.

A Happenstance Change of Plans

Then one year—it was some time in the mid-1980's—I needed a new studio large enough to incorporate etching, but we didn't have the money for the building project. It was early spring and my husband, Mike, suggested that we smarten up my existing studio and the garden and have a show at home in order to get started on the new studio. At that point we had been living for 15 years in a village on the outskirts of Granada, and we had a lot of friends and clients in the city. So we whitewashed the entrance, the house, the studio and the garden walls, and we dotted the terraces with flowers purchased from the local garden center. (It's cheating, but it looks great!)

Mike designed a simple invitation and had it printed at a friend's print shop. I sat down for a couple of days and phoned 50 or 60 of the most-likely art buyers, making sure everybody knew it was a fund-raising exhibit for a new studio. I think that “good-cause” factor was helpful.

In the end the show in mid-June was a big success and we made enough money to put up the walls and roof of the new studio. Not only that, but the Open Studio show at our house became an annual event. Now we send the invitations by email, but I still phone people, as well. They appreciate the personal touch.

So Many Good Things

So many good things have happened over the years thanks to these home shows. Friends start asking a couple of months beforehand, “When is your next Open Studio, Maureen?” Naturally, they are all aware that they save themselves the gallery commission by buying directly from the artist. At one of these shows, about 10 years ago, a French friend who was retired in Granada brought along his daughter, the director of a Paris real-estate firm with 1,000 employees. This chance contact led to the largest commission I ever had—etchings as Christmas gifts for all their employees and clients. That first job was followed by more commissions in subsequent years.

Recently, after a long time without exhibiting in a gallery, an old friend, a good painter, opened a beautiful new gallery in a provincial town a couple of hours' drive north of here. He invited me to exhibit there before Christmas (2008), and of course I said yes. To make a long story short, despite his honest best efforts the economic crisis loomed so large over everything that the three-week exhibit was not successful. I barely covered the cost of the frames. We picked the work up when the show closed and brought it home.

Mike said, “There's still more than three weeks of Christmas shopping left.” (The Spanish don't give their gifts till the Epiphany on January sixth.) “And you've got all the work framed. Why don't we try selling it directly from your studio?” So he prepared an invitation and sent it out by email, I made the phone calls and we had the Open Studio show on the weekend of December 19-21. We had respectable sales, so the show was definitely worthwhile. Best of all, talking with one of the business people who came and bought art, I was able to find a job for a dear friend who needed it badly. So, despite everything, we had a very Merry Christmas, thanks to an improvised Open Studio show.

Getting Systematic About It

Afterwards, with the world economic situation worsening by the week, Mike and I began asking ourselves if there might not be a way to attract clients to my studio on a regular basis. Over the years we had seen that if we could get people out here they would almost always buy something. The question was how to entice them out to the studio. Mike's solution was typical: a website.

Then I remembered I had a friend, Maribel, who owned three hotels in Granada. I could suggest that she offer her guests an excursion to an artist's studio. In the end we decided to both do the website—a very simple, single-objective site—and speak with my friend, Maribel.

She was very receptive to the idea and typically elegant. “You prepare some provisional brochures and let me know when they're ready,” she said. “Then I'll take you around and introduce you to all the receptionists.”

That's where we stand right now. Mike spent a couple of mornings creating the website (http://granadastudiovisits.com). He says that anybody capable of following simple instructions could do the same thing just by using the services of one of the popular blog platforms—Blogger or WordPress, for example—which are, by the way, free.

It remains to be seen if this project will be successful. Times are tough, but I'm optimistic. The basic concept has already been successful in a modest, informal way. There's no reason to think that it can't work better if we go about it systematically.

I write this down here in order to share the concept with other working artists around the world. I suspect a lot of you could also make this plan—or some variation on it—work for you. If there's a secret to succeeding in this, it's the same secret for success in everything else you do: Be creative!

This article was previously published on http://cutthegalleryoutofthepicture.com