Well, the new year has hardly started and already I find that I have just two days remaining in which to submit pictures to the Mall Gallery. And as if that wasn’t enough to be going on with, it turns out that the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition opened for submissions today.
As it happens, I’ve got a meeting this morning with a friend at (her suggestion) the National Gallery. And (coincidentally?) I woke early this morning preoccupied by a series a pictures I haven’t thought about for months – or longer.
After breakfast I went out for a thoughtful walk with Peanut, my beloved schnauzer. In the cold, I turned over in my mind how to choose pictures for submission.
This threw up lots of questions!
- Could I submit portraits to the Mall? I mean, I do want my portraits to go on display but the Mall specifies that the submitted artwork, in this particular case, must be available to purchase. Do people buy portraits of other people?
- If the portraits have little prospect of selling, will the Mall simply refuse them for this exhibition?
- What about the RA?
- What would be the consequence of submitting the same picture(s) to both exhibitions? Would that kill some of the energy? I have definitely chosen one picture for the RA, so I think I will keep that one out of consideration for the Mall.
- How to price the pictures (and if they’re in limited editions, how many copies of each)?
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I’m typing in haste – off to see my friend in a moment. She’s someone I first met when I was Interrailing around Europe during a gap year before I went to university. I’ve seen her several times since, though not often: she loves on the West Coast of the US. The latest time we met was just days ago, before New Year, when I gave her a book full of pictures I made during lockdown. The only book of its kind, as it happens:
The actual book.
Each picture in that book features some version of a self-portrait in great, or anyway memorable, artworks from Ancient Egypt onwards. Here are six of them – a random selection of the handful I have already saved to this marvellous website of mine (Established 2003-ish).
Portraits of the artist (me) in variously, from top left: Modigliani, Toulouse-Lautrec, Gainsborough, Giotto, Rouault and Vettriano.
Gratifyingly, the book full of those pictures made my American friend laugh, when she looked into it before New Year.
I’ve wanted for so long to do something more with all those Portraits Of The Artist In A _____, but I keep getting stuck.
Should they be a book? A poster? Now sheer serendipity – the fact that I’m seeing my friend at a gallery, having recently given her that book – tells me that maybe the POTAIAs could be put together into a composite work and sold as a limited edition print.
If they make people laugh, they might appear reasonably commercial to the Mall Gallery.
But what else?
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I mentioned that I woke up early this morning thinking about another set of pictures. I call them The 12 Bird Fellowship. I don’t think I ever mentioned them here before.
Some background: two or three years ago, a woman (also from the West Coast USA, but a different woman, and I don’t want to cause any confusion) commissioned me to draw 20 birds in red. Don’t ask me why. If I ever knew, I forgot.
She didn’t buy the copyright, just wanted to use them. Every so often I look at those red birds again. They make me smile. Birds can do that: look very serious but also funny, which is a happy combination.
Perhaps because I know a lot of people in recovery, I thought about turning the 12 best of the red birds – bear with me on this, I know it’s not exactly the obvious thing to do – into a 12 bird fellowship. Each one would represent one of the 12 Steps.
That’s what woke me up this morning: I pictured a book, with each bird on a right-hand page, and a caption on the left saying only one sentence, closely modelled on the 12 steps, but with the bird’s name at the beginning. This kind of thing:
Aaron came to believe that a power greater than himself could restore him to sanity.
And, sure, this could be a book. Or indeed a T-shirt. But perhaps I can make it into another composite image, for the Mall Gallery? A limited edition print? I mean: why not?
I don’t know. No reason why not.
Thats all for now. I’ve got to go out, and see my friend at the National Gallery.
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