It's been on my calendar for months, the deadline is 5pm next Monday, so rather than leave it to the last minute, I have pressed send on my application for North Yorkshire Open Studios 15. All I have to do tomorrow is send a paper copy along with my cheque and then I can forget about it for a while.
NYOS 15 takes place in June next year and after my absolutely disgraceful despondency leading up to last year's event, which I actually enjoyed once it arrived, I am looking forward to next year's with relish. I have lots of ideas for improvements and plans for some new works in the offing.
Other news: I was contacted by The Brick Lane Gallery inviting me to exhibit with them, but sadly the costs that I would have to bear, (even if the gallery did not charge commission), were far too much; I do not make a lot of money selling work and I cannot justify using the household budget on that scale! I thanked BLG for their interest, after all; it is lovely to have people say that they think my work is "very strong"! Emily Speed would have a thing or two to say about this type of offer for artists.
On a more positive note, I have been in email contact with a man from Spain for the past two weeks regarding the purchase of some of my work. If all goes to plan, he will be the owner of two of my small paintings and I will be richer!
Meanwhile, I shall continue to enjoy the Autumn, my favourite season.
So, happy new year and all that!
I set out to be all motivated and brisk today - rewrote my action plan for 2013 to take in to account the lack of funding and re-planned my schedule for the upcoming exhibition and the rest of the year. I wrote emails to the publicist and gallery manager to inform them of the situation and emails to set up fresh planning meetings where I shall seek advice and gather information.
The lack of money has made me think hard about how to produce a document for publicity and I have come up with one idea that should be easy to home produce with a bit of help from computer design experts that I know of.
I think there may be just enough money available for setting up a decent web site too, and I am going to aim to have it up and running for the opening of my show. It will provide me with a more formal representation of me and my work to run alongside this blog and my facebook page. I am taking lots of advice from various experts in the field and drawing lots of sketches of the layout to get it going.
I have organised a work space at home to run alongside my studio space in Stonegrave so that I can work on small pieces and sketches for the larger works in the studio. It will enable me to work pretty much non stop, even if the weather gets too cold or wet, and for when I need to be at home for other reasons like builders coming back on site to complete some of the small outstanding jobs.
I am keeping a sharp eye out for any relevant open submissions and will start a list of likely galleries to contact this year. Ryedale ArtWorks will take up some time this year too, unless we can manage to recruit more committee members.
I discovered Emily Speed's blog today and recommend it to all artists; interesting, informative and relevant.
http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/497389
So, all in all, a pretty positive start to the year! I remain optimistic and hope that once this exhibition is completed I will be successful with another funding application for future projects.
www.facebook.com/SueGoughArtist
www.ryedaleartworks.com
