Here's the theory: I'm trying to paint for a living. In order to do that, you need to find people to buy your paintings. That generally means getting a gallery to represent you and exhibit your work. (There's eBay, too, but let's set that aside for the moment.) I've found no coherent plan for getting galleries to show your work except the one put forth by Mark Kostabi in his advice column. And Kostabi's pretty successful -- as successful as I need to be, anyway -- so his advice goes a long way with me. He says you should go to gallery openings and talk to people. Make friends. Make contacts. Find out who likes work similar to your own and chat with them. Show up at enough openings that people start to know who you are. Eventually, someone will ask to see your own work, and then you can whip out the slides you've been carrying in your pocket all this time.
It sounds good to me. I put this plan into action a couple of years ago, but ran out of steam. I'm not sure why. I get derailed easily. Maybe the site of openings I went to shut down for a bit, maybe I got bored, whatever.
So I tried thinking of how I could motivate myself. And I thought about how critics sometimes turn into artists, and vice versa. And I thought about the Web and how it's got a hold on me like nothing else. And I combined these thoughts and came up with the idea of doing a gallery blog. That might motivate me -- if enough people read it, and commented on it, I'd feel obligated to keep it going. And lord knows I can type.
And here it is, the NYC art blog, where I plan to write about my trips to galleries in New York. I'll probably offer some obnoxious opinions on what I find there. And maybe I'll entertain you a bit, too.
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