...And so !!!...This is the end!!!...What have I learned from this year?...Well...I have been inspired by Graeme and his lessons every time! Each lesson in some ways made me a little more confident in myself and my art. They have reminded me of what I CAN do, not what I used to be able to do. One of the main reasons I joined this course was not only to make my art better, but also to learn how to take my "business" of art further. How to structure the way I go about promoting myself and my artwork, how to sell it and myself. I feel that I have made a start on this and I now have a munch better knowledge and understanding of the art "business". The course itself was made clear by Graeme and I couldn't have asked for more encouragement or inspiration given in a professional manner. As for the 53 Degrees group? I am glad it's over. I have learned a lot and I am extremely glad that I did it and I have always believed that to get things right, things have to go wrong first. I feel that the start of the group, the building of the group, was right, to a point. There were some people that weren't pulling there weight way back then. This should have been addressed straight away to get everybody working equally as a team. I believe that there should have been a team leader. Someone to delegate and also to be a part of the work itself. Too many people were jumping into different rolls. For example, The assignment of creating a webpage was delegated to Monica and Dominique who spent a lot of time creating it and then this was somehow absorbed into Dale being in charge of it. I had been in touch with Patrick with the Steel Rooms and got the exhibition booked, but then all of a sudden someone else was contacting him and sorting everything with him. Our rolls should have been more defined and a weekly update should have been had within the group. We did have these in the lessons but if someone hadn't heard from an email that they sent a week ago they should make a call to them there and then!
There should have been more social interaction! The Facebook page was hardly touched by anyone. There were about 3 or 4 people that posted on that page, myself included when it should have been all 9 of us! Everyone was an admin! 9 people covering a Facebook page should have been so easy! The lack of press attention was a real shame. I had to step in for the last exhibition because it seemed that no one else could do it. 2 5 minute phone calls and we had 2 newspapers coming to interview and take pictures! Imagine what that would have been like if we had the mayors that we had for each one as a part of the stories.
There should have been consistency throughout all three exhibitions. I shall use The Steel Rooms as a perfect example of our Exhibition because it had great organisation and communication between the team, it had a focus on what we were doing. It was well planned with the placards for each piece, the booklets, the drink and nibbles, even down to the glasses and plates and entertainment and publicized well by the Steel Rooms, not so well by us, (I put this down to naivety on our part) but we still got quite a few people, friends and family to come along to the opening.
The Lincoln exhibition was a shambles compared to this. Hardly any organisation or communication, no placards for the pieces, no prices. It wasn't publicized at all except for flyers. The opening was a handful of the group with the mayor of Lincoln, and that was pretty much it. It was too far away costing too much for each individual with no monetary gain at all.
The Grimsby exhibition was pulled together ( and I literally mean "Pulled" because it seemed such hard work to get any one enthusiastic about it). The space wasn't the best of all three but the atmosphere was there. It was far better organised than the Lincoln exhibition but the communication was lacking in some ways. Although we had no placards a suggestion was made to cut out the brochures and place the page of each artist with their work. The group had pretty much dissolved by this time so the actual work on show was not to the caliber of either Lincoln or Brigg. The "undercurrent" theme had been completely lost by the lack of this. The promotion for this exhibition was better than Lincoln and pretty much on a par with The Steel Rooms as this time we had the newspaper on board along with the help of Howard who actually made and printed posters for us! Something that we didn't even do!! (even though this was delegated to someone but was only done for Lincoln).
If I sound frustrated, it's because I am!!! A lot of these things I knew already and was doing and am doing even now. I felt like I kept wanting to shout at them what needed to be done, but there are areas to this that are new to some people, even me, and I had to keep reminding myself that although I know what I would do in this circumstance, that doesn't necessarily mean that I am right and I can't tell someone else what to do, they have to learn it the same as I do, by getting it wrong!!! And although I am frustrated, the whole purpose of this exercise was not to get it perfectly right, but to make mistakes, get it wrong and learn from those mistakes and accept them to make it better next time because even then, there will still be things that won't be right, not the same mistakes, but others, and then those can be made right for the next time because even then there will still be other things that will not be right so.....................
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