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Live Facebook Q&A with Mark David Hatwood - owner of The Harbour Gallery
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Message
Posted
If you read the May issue of The Artist you will have seen Mark's feature looking at the partnership between artist and gallery. On Friday April 7 at 11am Mark will be hosting a live Q&A session on our Facebook page. If you have any questions for him let me know here and I will send them to him in advance. Make sure you join us live on Friday!
Posted
Pat - all gallery owners vary of course: it would be interesting to see how this one compares with one or two others who have delivered themselves of an opinion in recent weeks. There was one, and isn't there always?, trying to sell his top tips to appeal to a gallery. Well one of my top tips is never to pay for advice you can get for free, so he's out of luck.....
Posted
Question for Mark...
This has been touched on briefly by another artist but one of the main difficulties of getting your foot in the door of a good gallery seems mainly as though the gallery will have its own 'niche' selection of artists' and aren't prepared to give you a chance. I realise of course that wall space is a valuable commodity and is indeed the owner's only income in many cases, space will also be limited and I understand all that.
Is it better to submit your work online by jpeg and perhaps follow up with a phone call? (this is what I tend to do), or as I used to have to do trawl round with portfolio in hand, and I have found this very satisfactory in the past.
Framing: Do you advocate artist's getting there own work framed or does a gallery prefer to use their own 'house style' of framing.? I see from the photo in your article that all the paintings appear to have very similar frames, all neutral colours and I must say that looks good.
Alan Bickley
Posted
I found it - couldn't get to it in time to watch the live broadcast, but it's still available and I played it through. Of course, I've IMMEDIATELY forgotten the gallery owner's name.... ah: Mark David Hatwood: well if he WILL have three how does he expect me to remember it? .... anyway: yes, he started hesitantly as he'd not done this before and the words wouldn't come, but he soon warmed up and provided some fascinating answers to the questions, one or two of which were perhaps a bit obvious but I did find him interesting on pricing. He said, basically, under-pricing is bad business - I've realized that I've not kept up at all with my website (he also extolled the virtues of these) or my pricing: I've got lazy and not attended to either for far too long even though I keep talking about it. And his words resonated with me, because there was an artist on one website who complained that she just couldn't sell her work: I took a look, and couldn't understand why either; then I saw the prices she was asking - I contacted her and said you should at least treble your price, you'll never sell if you undervalue it: if you do, why wouldn't everyone else? So she did - well, almost - and the painting sold in a week.
Now I don't think I can treble my own prices, but why on earth do I not take my own advice and give my work and approach a firm shaking? Mark is so right about this. He answered my question up above in a round-about but still quite comprehensive way, too. So a very useful exercise, well done to Dawn who hid in the background feeding through questions, and an imaginative, helpful initiative all round - thanks to Mark for patiently sitting there for over an hour sustained only by a mug of tea and jug of water, too.
Another thing he said resonated with me - if you love all the technical stuff, and can work at it to contact people, on social media and elsewhere, push yourself, enjoy meeting people, you probably don't need a gallery. But if you hate all of that - which, frankly, I do: I lurk around social media, but don't enjoy self-promotion - then you do need one; there was also stuff on framing, delayed payments, dodgy galleries .... all manner of subjects covered. Even if you hate Facebook it's worth going there for a watch.
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