Getting work into galleries

How do I get work into galleries when they only are prepared to see emailed images and not the real work?

Reason galleries don’t want to see you one to one is

a)      time involved – much faster to scan through an email and see if the work may be in the genre you are looking for and some galleries get 20+ artists a week. At 30 minutes a person that’s an extra day and a half per week to their workload.

b)      It’s easier emotionally to say no in an email than face to face. Is less personal.

It’s just like the writing world where books are rejected with only a brief synopsis having been read and not the actual book.

Tends to be that if one gallery who is respected has your work, then others are more receptive valuing the other galleries choice.

So the key is to crack the first respected gallery.

Dangling a carrot such as: ‘To date in my private capacity I have sold xx works, so I know there is a market out there for my work…’ may be tempting for a gallery to look further (provided of course that you have sold an impressive amount of work independently.

Try a different approach so your email stands out.

I got “The girl who bites her nails and the man who is always late” published in the UK with an opening line: “Have you ever bitten your nails? Procrastinated? Etc What does it say about you as a person? ” I figured that the person reading the email would have had one of these habits mentioned and being human would be interested in finding out more about themselves. It worked!

You’re creative so think up a fresh approach that will intrigue/astound them. It may not work every time but at least you’ll stand out from all the “Hi my name is Susan and I‘m an artist and here are some examples of my work… yawn.”

Failing stalking the owners, (not recommended) that’s about the best advice I can offer.

How much work do you need in the marketplace to make a viable income?

I've created a formula that works for me. Obviously its not cast in stone and will vary depending on the popularity of the artist, but I work with an average return factor of 10% of the consigned value of the work. So for instance if you have R100,000 rands worth of consigned work in the marketplace, I'd expect an average monthly return of R10,000. In summer that'll rise to 20-30% but decrease to maybe only 5% in the winter months. This formula excludes special exhibitions etc. Point is if you have R100,000 worth of work in galleries its unlikely that you'll be erning R50,000 a month. Seems obvious but many artists are afraid to have too much consigned work - they want everything to sell as its completed. If you want a R50,000 average monthly gross income and your work sells price to artist for say R5,000, then in order to achieve R50,000, you'll need R5000,000's worth of art in galleries which translates to 100 paintings. Try it and see if it works for you.