I hired a gallery space for a week in Lincoln, for about 6 months I had been working on a collection that would make up most of the exhibition.  I gave myself a month to frame all the paintings and get ready and publicise it.  I was painting the frames myself and it was a lot of work and really I could have done with longer, I was working on everything right up until the last minute.  I had tried to document everything I was doing and had shared a lot of the process on social media, even though I felt I was talking about the exhibition too much, people following along seemed engaged and interested.

I measured up the space and planned it out with all the paintings in my lounge, as I was setting up in the morning and the gallery was open as soon as I was done, so I wanted to be organised.  This really helped and set up went well. 

I wanted to have a range of prices available so that everybody could buy something if they wanted to.  I had cards, small paper pieces, prints and larger pieces on paper and small unframed originals.  I also had my sketchbooks for people to look at and these helped me to talk about the progression of some of the paintings.

People responded really well to the work, the sense of colour and the subject matter, which was  lovely and that feedback is needed after a long time of working on your own.  I also really enjoyed chatting to visitors about the work and my process.

I enjoyed having my own gallery space to curate and look after for the week.  I did have to be there everyday which is quite a time commitment but also concentrates the mind about publicity and makes you go the extra mile to get visitors in.  The times when you are sitting on your own in the gallery can be hard, but there are always going to be times like that.  I did have a sketchbook and did some drawing and would have done a lot more of this if I hadn’t misplaced my studio key for the whole week!

I would definitely do it again, lots of improvements I would make, better signage, obvious sign up forms for my mailing list, more info about my process and I might be braver about bigger publicity, but very happy with the event and sales made this time.