Catching the eye of a gallery with a fancy portfolio

The cover of my portfolio!

Here’s a tip for budding artists and photographers who wish to have their work show to an eager and waiting world….  Until someone knows your art exists, the chances are quite slim that your friends, family and future fans will ever actually see your work in the coffee house on the corner, the gallery by the curb, or the magazine on the counter. Yes, it’s true.

Therefore, it’s a good idea to create monuments and totems to yourself so that others might share in and discover all your artistic goodness. This web site, for example, is a way for me to post information about my art. It’s here for the finding by anyone browsing the internet, sharing a link or googling my name.

Ah! But there’s only so much someday-I’ll-be-discovered luck in posting your art on a website. That being the case, a proactive alternative is to take a page from the pre-digital age and create a nice, old fashioned portfolio to send around to galleries and agencies.  And that’s exactly what I did….

I spent about four weeks creating a portfolio that I felt would be representative of my photography, including all the gotta-have stuff like an artist’s statement, biography, and nice samples of my work — plus other bonus information like a list of past exhibits and recent press clippings.

Basically, I created my portfolio in a format that would give the reviewer an idea what he or she could expect from my work, so each section utilizes the same motifs I use in my photographs… toys, records, found objects. I like it and it was a lot of fun to produce.

hough I certainly would have preferred to have people just magically know that I create art and would like to have my art seen (and potentially bought) by real live people, I now have a very nice, organized document that shows off what I do and what I’ve done in the past.

I included 18 “tear sheets” in the portfolio, just like those appearing on this page. I chose what I believe to be my very best work, reasoning that my very worst work would probably not draw the attention of many gallery owners, but that’s just me….

So… did my portfolio work??

Yes! Within 30 minutes of dropping it off at a coffee house (where I’ve always wanted to show my work) I received a call from the owners offering me a solo show in September! Yay!! I’ll have more information about the show in future postings. For now, though, all you artists out there… get busy with your portfolios!