New Exhibition, New Camera, New Pics!

Lots of new developments to tell you about! The main one is of course, the ongoing exhibition at Eccles Community Art Gallery. The first day that was open to the public was the Saturday just gone, so I went down there for the whole day to go and meet people and chat about my work. The gallery was pretty busy, I think mainly because one of the other artists exhibiting was a local man whose family has posthumously put on an exhibition of his work and invited down many other relatives and family friends. I chatted to several of these people, and sold a few prints to one of them, which was great! I also had a steady stream of other people who came and looked at my work over the course of the day, so as usual I had lots of nice chats about art with people, which I always enjoy. I also got interviewed by a journalist from Salford Online. I've just checked the website and it doesn't appear to be up yet - I will of course post a link to it from here when it comes online.
Ok, here's some photos of the gallery and me and my work hung in it:

The gallery as seen from the outside

The proud artist trying(and failing) to strike a natural looking pose

The work

The exhibition will be up until the 8th of February, and the gallery is open Tuesdays (10am - 3pm) and Saturdays (10am - 4pm) during that period. I will be there most Saturdays, probably just for a two hour time slot, so if you're in the area, do please come on down and say hello!

In other news…. I finally have a new camera! I haven't really mentioned it here much before, but ever since I have gone full time as an art photographer, ironically, I haven't had a camera! I dropped my beloved and much used old Minolta back in June, and as it was badly in need of replacing anyway (I'd had it for about 8 years, which in technology terms is about a century I guess), I didn't even try to get it fixed. Instead, I was planning to buy a new one myself when the sale of our house went through and we released some of the equity tied up in that. But, as regular readers will know, that isn't exactly going to plan, so luckily for me my lovely family clubbed together and bought me one as a Christmas/Birthday/You Owe Us Big Time present.
 I wasn't sure what to go for, so I bought a photography mag and scanned all the reviews, and then with a little research I found the shop in Manchester that seems to cater to professional photographers; a place called Calumet. So I went there and they were really helpful and gave me pretty good advice I think, and in the end I plumped for a Canon EOS 70D

It's not like a real serious professional photographer's camera, but I would say it's probably at the top end of the fairly ambitious hobby photographer's range, and I think that's as good as I need for the type of images I take. Because the photographs I take are pretty up close I also splashed out and got a fancy new Macro lens as well, which will hopefully add another dimension to my photography, so I'm really excited about that. I've only had it just over a week, and I haven't taken it for a good long photography session outside yet (hopefully soon!), but just in playing around with it and learning it's basic functions I've already seen how much better it is than my old camera, so I'm really excited about the kind of shots I should be able to get with it!

One of the jobs I've been doing so far this week, is editing and photoshopping the huge backlog of images I have , from way back when I went to Hungary in October. I borrowed my mother-in-law's Nikon on that trip, and took about 300 of my "Photo Abstract" images there, which I've only slowly begun to process, partly because I knew I already had such a large back catalogue of images to use for launching myself on the art scene. But I'm a big believer in keeping things fresh and challenging yourself to do new things, and now I have my new camera I can do that. So, I've made a deal with myself that I have to get these "old" photos processed before I can fully move onto the new stuff.

You don't always know until you do the Photoshop magic on them, which shots are going to turn out to be your best, and I'm not sure whether any of the ones I've processed yet are up there with my very best work, but here are some of the highlights of the 100 or so pictures I've done so far:

Maybe slightly different colour palettes than usual for me; I've noticed blue is a colour that seems to dominate my work a lot, I guess because of the nautical subject matter of some of them. Anyway, these are in warmer, and more pastel shades than is typical for me, which I like about them.
Drop me a line and let me know what you think of them if you like!

OK, there's loads more news to share, but in the name of brevity lets leave it there for now, and I'll be back soon with the rest of the updates.

New Year, New Adventures!

Hello everyone, and welcome to Photo Abstracts in 2014! The start of a whole new year! I have lots of plans for the coming 12 months, although still no over-arching "master plan". I guess it's early days yet, still. But for now, I have lots of ideas and projects to keep me busy! And so far, 2014 is looking promising!

Well, I think I can safely tell you now about one of the exciting things I was hinting at before the new year. I am going to be one of the exhibiting artists at Eccles Community Art Gallery from January 18th until February 8th! As I mentioned several posts ago, the lovely Karen, who is one of the ladies who runs the gallery, and I kept in touch after meeting at the Salford Arts Development evening, and she has booked me in as one of the artists for their first show of 2014! Yay!

 The gallery is a not-for-profit run place, whose chief aim is to bring art to the local community and to give local artists a platform to exhibit their work. As such, I'm not predicting huge volumes of sales from this event (which is probably the way to approach any exhibition anyway, in my experience so far), but I do think it should be an excellent way for me to build a local audience for my work, so it's really exciting for me!
The gallery is open 10-4pm on Saturdays, and 10-3pm on Tuesdays, and I am planning to be there all day on the opening day, Saturday the 18th of January, and for at least a part of each of the other days that the gallery will be open whilst my work is exhibited there. (That's Jan 21st,25th,28th and Feb.1st, 4th and 8th). So, of course, if you are anywhere near Eccles on any of those dates, you MUST pop in and say hello!.

Other exciting things that may come from this; I popped into the gallery yesterday to talk to Karen and meet Elaine, the other lady who runs the gallery, and they were telling me that they have good links with the local online news outlet,Salford online, so it might be possible to get a profile, and maybe even an interview up on their web page to coincide with the exhibition! Exciting opportunities indeed! Of course, if and when these things appear I shall post links to them here, but for now, here is the gallery's webpage and Facebook page.

In other news…. another little job I had on my "to do" list for the start of the year, was enter a Postcard for the International Postcard Show 2014, which is an annual exhibition run by the Surface Gallery in Nottingham, which sounds really interesting. I was going to explain how it works, but then realised they had already done it far better than I could hope to on their website, so I shall simply quote them;

"Surface Gallery is delighted to present our first exhibition of 2014, the International Postcard Show. This exciting exhibition is a highly popular event at Surface Gallery, with all entries accepted and included in the show. It will feature hundreds of original creations in an array of different media by established artists, students and newcomers from all over the world. Hundreds of postcard-sized artworks will be on sale during the exhibition at £15 each, so this is a fantastic chance for budding art collectors to snap up an original work of art at an affordable price.
Once again all participating artists will have the opportunity to exchange their postcard with another artist selected at random at the end of the exhibition. The aim of this remote exchange is to foster new connections and encourage ongoing communication amongst artists from diverse backgrounds and different parts of the world."

So, even if my postcard doesn't sell, I'll get an artwork back from another artist - I suspect that this is what will actually happen anyway, and I'm fine with that, as it sounds pretty exciting!

Anyway, I have mentioned before how I always leave things to the last minute, and this was no exception. The deadline is this Friday, and of course entries have to be mailed, so I rushed to get my entry completed yesterday morning before dashing to the post office in the pouring rain to get it sent. I only started it yesterday as well, so it was done in a bit of a hurry, but I am quite pleased with the result nonetheless. This is something I've been sort of experimenting with for a while, and want to do more of; using my photos to create collages. Ok, so enough yapping, here's my finished postcard:

The show runs from January 15th to February 8th - pretty much exactly the same as my exhibition in Eccles. But, if I can find the time, I'd quite like to go and have a look at it, as it seems like a really fun idea, and I'm curious to see what the other artists managed to squeeze onto their relatively small canvas! 

The Art of good networking.

Wow, so much to catch up on! It's been a hectic time. So, when I last posted I was just about to go and do the Wednesday evening of my last Art fair, then a Friday and Saturday.
Well, this Art fair was not nearly as successful as the last one. The Wednesday evening saw a steady stream of people, but very few were buying, at least, not at my stall, I think some of the other stallholders did quite well. People who did stop to chat were very complementary about my work, but that was as far as it went. Anyway, I knew that was more of a "looking around" event than the other two days, so I went home in an upbeat frame of mind.

Me at the Art and Craft fair. Note the addition of a print stand!

Friday was… awful. I think I spoke to about a dozen people all day, and made no sales. There just wasn't anybody coming to the venue. Saturday was a little better, but still not very many people. I made a sale of a print, to a friend of mine that had come down specially to see me. (He got a good deal, of course!) I also sold a few cards to a fellow artist at the venue and one to a friend of an artist there. So, when you consider the money I spent getting to the venue each day (car twice and train once), plus the entrance fee, I made a loss. Oh well, it's a learning curve I guess. I made some good contacts with several of the other stallholders, all of whom were lovely. Plus, I went to a really useful talk on Friday evening by a lady who has set up a company called Craftfinder.
 The site is a directory of craft tradespeople, so just the place to go if you want to find hand crafted goods. They also help the craftspeople with promoting their work to the right buyers, so it's useful for producers and consumers alike. The talk was about how to use the internet to market yourself effectively. I proudly told everyone I had a blog! Others suggested Pinterest and Twitter as being valuable tools. I'm resisting Twitter for now, but I am keen to investigate Pinterest some more, so watch this space…
One of my fellow stallholders was a woman called Amy Lilley. She's a recent photography graduate who also does a lot of marketing work for arts venues in Wakefield. She was keen to put one of my pieces in a show she will be curating in the new year, which is great news! We exchanged business cards like you do, and I have since checked out her website and blog, both of which are well worth a look, which you can do from here.

The good networking continued last night, when I went to a meeting of the Salford Creative Network, which has been set up by Arts Development Salford, a local organisation I found my way towards via liking various related things on Facebook. The meeting was a perfect way to meet some fellow artists and there was also some people from various local arts organisations there, so it was perfect for me as someone who has recently moved to the area and wants to get involved with the local arts scene. They also have a great Arts Information pack that can be downloaded from their website, here. I've downloaded it have only given it a quick glance - it looks very useful though.

The guest speaker at the event was a lady that runs Eccles Community Art Gallery, a local organisation that seeks to provide exhibition space for local artists, as well as easy access to art for the local community. I happened to leave at the same time as her after the talk, and we briefly discussed me having an exhibition there, which was very exciting! I must follow it up by emailing her in the coming days. So, as you see, connections are being made and I'm meeting lots of really great people. Yay! This sort of socialising doesn't come naturally to me, I'm a bit shy and introverted by nature, and I don't have the knack of chatting easily with people I don't know, but everyone has been so nice and friendly that it hasn't really been a problem.
Wow, that's a long post. I still haven't told you about the TWO craft fairs I'm doing this coming weekend, but I think that can wait until tomorrow now.
As a reward for getting through this epic post, here's a nice little Instagram I took in Budapest in October.