Sprout café- 1st solo exhibition 16/12/2013

 

This was my first exhibition and boy did I pile the pressure on. After the venue was booked I started to realise the magnitude of what I was doing. There was a lot of space to fill and I had 3 months to fill it. My first target was to create the work and I had set myself a target of 15 paintings minimum, 3 of which I already had, only 12 to go. This meant working early and working late... really late, sometimes I worked until 3.30 am and was up and about again for 7am.

Once these paintings were completed my role as the artist was complete, my next task was advertising. I had already created an event on Facebook but it was time to spruce it up a little and create some chatter on here so that people would remember. I asked friends, family and colleagues to share the link over Facebook. I also made my own flyer to post around University, Library’s and town halls.

That only left the transportation and hanging of the paintings and as one of these was too big for the car, I had no access to a van this meant hiring a man and van for 20 minutes. Things were getting exciting for me now, time for hanging my work ready for the open evening. This proved more complex than I thought as I had painted all different content and sizes (as I had not sold artwork before and didn’t know what sizes would sell) so some of the pieces I wanted together could not go together. In the end I had to drop 1 piece and the rest of the art went well together.

The open evening went really well and I was happy when the 1st people turned up (it was a big worry that no one would) and although it wasn’t overly busy there was enough to call it a success. The biggest error here was the quantity of alcohol I bought, there was way too much but I would rather have too much than not enough. From this exhibition I got 3 commissions for Christmas presents so although no direct sales were made from the exhibition it was great to get some commission work.