What was your worst ever gallery experience? or one that you know of?

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All right, I’ll go first.  I have a few experiences with art galleries and let me just say they are not all bad.  But I’ll share the first one that pops into my mind. A  gallery owner asked if I would participate in a fund raising auction.  I was to receive one half of the sales price and I set the starting bid.  This is the only way to go (if) you are going to participate in a charity auction, which generally I do NOT recommend.

Anyway, one of the two framed paintings I offered sold and fetched a good price.  The other painting was actually returned to me in a perfectly sound and stable box.  But when I opened it, I discovered the frame had been shattered into smithereens and the oil painting was just laying on top of the frame fragments.  No note, no call, nothing from the gallery owner who sent it. I think the gallery owner was just being hateful and to this day, I honestly don’t know why. I wrote him emails, I left him messages, and I sent him letters trying to get an explanation and payment for the broken frame.  Again, nothing, no response.

So I contacted the Executive Director of the charity and I let her know what had happened, and I shared my obvious displeasure.   She was appropriately horrified about the way I had been treated and the charity promptly reimbursed me for the frame.  The gallery owner, I’ve never heard from him.

Needless to say, this gallery may offer excellent representation to some artists.  But just in case, I’m happy to offer fair warning below and to a provide a blog that  explores profitable alternatives.

https://www.efgallery.com/

https://www.artistswhothrive.com/

Biggest Mistake Artists make in their Careers

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I was recently interviewed for an article profiling successful artists.  The interviewer asked, “What are the biggest mistakes that you see artists making in planning their careers?”

That was easy to answer.  The biggest mistake that I see an artist making early, and sometimes too late, is that they do not recognize and or respect the fact that they are “in business”.  It’s not a career!

Artists are not sure how to even start to be savvy entrepreneurs.  They are trying, often without much success, to follow a prescribed career model of working solely with art galleries and keeping their fingers crossed that one day that this tired formula will work.  The problem is that this scarcity and permission based model does not work 99.9% of the time.  And if it does, too many art galleries fold.  Those are not good odds and this does not make for sound risk management.

Part of this mindset is ingrained by a cultural stereotype that artists should not, or could not, be concerned with money and business.  I can’t tell you how much I hear this disrespectful crap. So I purposely have my full title on my business cards and the footer of my emails, “Ann Rea, Artist, CEO, Ann Rea, Inc.”

One of my favorite quotes by Oscar Wilde is “When bankers get together they talk about art. When artists get together, they talk about money.”

The good news is that there’s a lot of money changing hands in the art industry, and artists can get their piece of the pie.

I’ll remind artists that I consult with that no one is going to “discover” them, no one is coming to save them.   But once an artist recognizes, respects, and embraces their business, we’re ready to work together.

And those artists who I work with have surprised and delighted me with the leaps of progress that they make.  And they even inspire me to up my game, to dream bigger, make a plan, and move into planned action.