…and why I steered away from the Traditional Gallery Route to sell my work.
Alyson Sheldrake is a creative and successful artist living and working in the Algarve, Portugal, with her photographer husband Dave. Her paintings are in private homes across the world; her last solo exhibition was an almost sell-out success; and she has a steady stream of commissions that keep her ticking over.
Her paintings might not sell for thousands of euros – most sell for between 250-500€ – but they sell well – and often. She has never exhibited in an art gallery, preferring to set up and run her own ‘Pop-Up’ gallery events; and she is also not afraid to be creative in other areas of work too, having recently set up an Algarve Society of Artists, an associated website and online quarterly free Algarve Art! magazine. She tells us her story here:
Six years ago, I gave up a successful – yet exhausting – career in education in the UK. I was working 70+ hours a week as a Director of Education, that left me little time to do anything else each evening but eat a hurried meal, clean my teeth and crawl into bed each night waiting for the alarm clock to ring the next morning.
But my dream of being a full-time artist and having my own studio space was always there inside me, tucked away – but there, insistent in its quiet roar of longing. My husband’s retirement from the Police gave us the chance to chase the ultimate dream – to pack up, sell up and move to live in the Algarve Portugal and both start new careers and lives. I was aged 42 and I was finally off! I did take a big gulp when I handed in my notice from what was essentially the ‘dream job’. Have I regretted it? Not a bit!!
And that is my first big advice to you – Be brave! Go for it! If you wait for someone to hand you a creative break – you are going to die with those paints and brushes still sat in a drawer. No-one will stop you – or help you – with this one. If you want to create – or sculpt – or paint – then just do it! Make time – make space – make a step forward … even a small one – or a giant one if you can! Not everyone can give up their job and move to a new country, but you have to go for it if the creative bug is ticking away inside you.
I gave up a secure career – and a big salary – to leap into the Algarve sunshine and the unknown. I woke up the first morning in our new home with a plan – to spend the next eight months just painting. I had always dabbled, done the odd course, bought lots of paints and never had the time to use them. Now I had time – lots of time – days and months stretching ahead of me – and my very own ‘space’ to work. So I just dived straight in, picked up my brushes and went for it.
That was actually the easy part. I had waited so long to be able to do this ‘for real’ that I went wild and painted virtually every day. If I wasn’t actually painting I was out photographing ideas for paintings, writing down notes and sketching, prepping and sanding boards and priming them ready to paint.
And then suddenly I had 32 paintings all finished. And a style of my own that came out of that painting frenzy. Bright bold waves of colour that surround a realistically painted focal point; no doubt inspired by the warm sunshine and bright blue skies and seas of the Algarve.
‘Girl on the Beach’ © Alyson Sheldrake
My husband had been equally busy, his project was to take one photo every day and post it up on his Facebook Page under the title ‘Algarve 365’
We inched our way through discovering how to use Social Media back then, in the days when a good photo could hit 46,000 Likes in one day – yes that happened to us! We quickly built up a good genuine following of ‘real’ people that seemed to like what we were both doing.
I also knew that we needed a good internet presence and spent hours and hours learning how to build a website for each of us. Trial – and much error! But we have both had websites for several years now, the stats are good on them, and I sell my art work directly through my site using Paypal. And yes – I do make sales – and post worldwide. But much more than that, my website www.artbyalysonsheldrake.com is a showcase for my work, it ‘professionalises’ what I do, and it is a great way for people to connect with me and my work and to share it with their friends. My website and Facebook have been brilliant for making connections that have been invaluable to us.
Traditional Gallery ? No thanks!
Right from the start I knew that I didn’t want to take the traditional gallery route with my work. 50% commission is standard out here, and we have heard rumours of 70% commission rates – or even worse – the ‘vanity gallery’ route – “you pay me lots of money to display your work on the wall, and if you are lucky, well I might be able to sell it for you.” Erm .. no thanks!
My view has always been that I know my work better than anyone else, and people seem to really like being able to say that they ‘met the artist that painted that’ when they show off a painting in their home. With a background that included organising and running conferences for over 100 Headteachers; the thought of setting up a gallery event of our own hardly seemed daunting. Although I quickly realised that not having a PA and admin team to support me was something that I did miss! The big problem was where could we hold an event?
Social media came to the rescue! We posted up our ideas on my Facebook page and within half-an-hour one of our followers – head of marketing at one of the biggest and best hotels on the Algarve no less – had contacted me and said that they wanted to host a ‘Pop-Up’ event in their hotel and could they meet with us.
We met them – they were great – the space was fab, the timing was excellent – there was only one small snag. It is a hotel – with a posh conference space – and we were told that “you cannot put anything up on the walls”.
“No problem” we replied (!) and the deal was in place. At no cost to us we had a fab place to run an exhibition – and here is my second piece of advice: Follow your gut instinct! It doesn’t let you down – sometimes you just have to say “yes” and figure out the details later!
Run an art exhibition -showing paintings and framed photographic prints – with no wall space available to us. No problem! We went away, husband scratched his head in a local DIY store, and we bought 18 ‘cavaletes’. They are the wooden A-frame structures you buy to balance a table top or board on at each end. We backed each side with white melamine coated board – stood them on tables and voilá we had the perfect – and portable – display system for our work. For very little cost. We are still using them today – over six years – and more than 12 Pop-Up exhibitions later.
And we have never looked back! Within an hour of our first opening we had sold 4 photo prints and 2 original paintings. At my last solo event I sold 20 of the 24 paintings I had for sale. We have refined and amended the process of course along the way, and at each event we have added new ideas and got better at what we do.
My two best pieces of advice are start a mailing list and treasure it – and don’t skimp on your advertising and promotional materials.
At every event I run a Free Prize Draw – usually to win a small painting, limited edition print or even a photo shoot with the photographer husband. We always make it something worth winning. Then make sure that there is a ‘would like to keep in touch with you’ tick box on the form. That – and a ‘Join now’ on the front page of my website – has resulted in almost 500 loyal subscribers to our mailing list. And we look after them – every month – on the first of the month we send out a free e-mail newsletter. It started out small, and now it is 10-12 A4 pages send out via Mailchimp and set up as a free online mini-magazine format designed through publitas.com (a great free programme)
You can click here to see an example:
http://artbyalysonsheldrake.com/Newsletters.html
The feedback we get is very positive, people really seem to look forward to receiving our newsletter each month and enjoy reading it. We share our work of course, special offers, work in progress, client feedback, upcoming events and information. We also promote and share other artists, photographers, websites and products that we can genuinely recommend and like too. Our retention rate for subscribers is amazing, our ‘open rate’ sits well above 65% every month, and results in repeat customers, commissions and new clients on a regular basis. You have to put the work in at the computer – but it is worth it.
We have also worked hard to build good credible relationships with our local media – both newspapers and magazines. I am always amused to recall a conversation with a local artist who asked me incredulously “how come you are always featured in the local newspaper whenever you have an event?” .. Seriously?!? Well we send them a press release and they publish it. Her reply “Oh I didn’t know that you could do that” !!
The press need good copy and nice bright images – and we have those in abundance as artists. Often we will send over photos of events for them to use free of charge (with a credit of course!) and the resulting links we have forged are both strong and genuine. We try to act professionally and make their lives easier, and it works both ways; they are then genuinely happy to share our events and news items with their readers.
The Artist as a Professional Career Choice
And that is the trick really, you have to see yourself as a business – as well as a creative artist. If you don’t take the traditional gallery route – then you have to be your own publicist and promoter. No-one else will do it for you! Sure, friends will share things for you on Facebook – as long as you give them something worth sharing. But then those people have to have somewhere to ‘land’. You have to create the attractive tree full of fruit to entice the birds to come and perch on your branches. And then you have to encourage them to nest there too! Because if you don’t – they will fly off and perch themselves on someone else’s tree!
The hardest part of all was actually a simple thing – to take the step of calling myself an ‘Artist’ (note the capital letter A!). When someone asks you “what do you do?” (and they will!) you have to be brave enough to reply “I am an artist” – not “oh I paint” or “I dabble in art”. Actually give yourself the job title of ‘Artist’. Funnily enough, when I started to do this, everything else fell into place too.
So spend some money – get a website – make it yourself if you can if you want to save some money; there are plenty of good sites out there that give you basic templates and ‘what you see is what you get’ layouts to play with. Buy the business cards – design them well – and get them professionally printed. You would be amazed at how many artists I meet that don’t have a business card – or they write their e-mail address on a scrappy piece of paper. Those scraps always end up getting lost or land in the bin … if they even make it home .. that’s what happens to scraps of paper (you do know that right?!?)
And then when you have that shiny new business card full of examples of your colourful art work .. carry them with you wherever you go – and give them out!! – to everyone that you can! You might be surprised to find out how many people are interested in what you do – so share it with them. My cards always have a small range of my art work displayed on them – it’s a teaser to encourage people to visit my website. “And oh – did I mention that I have a monthly newsletter too?” Oh yes – you can be bold – and polite – but brave! What is the worst they can do? – say no thanks! (Trust me – they don’t!)
Creating a Society of Artists
My final piece of advice is this – you know those 4am moments when you wake up and have a great idea? (tell me it is not just me that has those!?!) Well write them down – and when you wake up again before 7am (I have a dog – we walk the beach in the quiet dawn every morning!) – if the 4am idea still seems like a good one – then go for it!
I spent months with some small but exciting ideas whirling round in my head .. those ‘I’d love to do that’ ..and the ‘Why isn’t there a {insert your own idea here} already?’ – thoughts that persist in popping up in your mind in the middle of the night … sometimes being a creative person can be an exhausting – as well as exhilarating – experience!
The Algarve didn’t have any form of Society set up for artists – a group to support and encourage – and promote art and artists in the region. Something to wave an artistic flag and bring people together. So that was one of my ideas to set up such a group.
Then I met a bunch of artists over a period of time, none of whom had their own website – or even a business card! or any social media presence at all. So another 4am idea was ‘what if I set up a website for art in the Algarve, every artist can have their own listing on the site giving them a URL and we can all share it across social media and other platforms and try to increase their exposure for their work?’. The idea of creating a Directory of art and artists for the Algarve was born.
Then another 4am idea brought together lots of smaller ideas I had been incubating for a while. I have long wanted to expand our little monthly newsletter into a proper magazine which could showcase art and artists – promote events and exhibitions before they happened (the Algarve is famous for promoting things after they have happened!) and also to be an interesting and informative resource for art lovers to read and share online. So the idea of a quarterly free online Algarve Art! magazine was developed.
It might sound like a lot of extra work – and it is – but this summer I decided to just go for it! I brought all of my ideas together and launched the Algarve Society of Artists. I had no idea how it would be received, although testing it out with some trusted art friends I knew I had a good idea in the making. Well – it has been a crazy three months! We already have over 80 members – a website www.algarve-art.com and a quarterly online magazine that had over 57,000 page views in the first 3 weeks of publishing Edition 1 in October. The second edition is due out in time for Christmas.
The new Algarve Art! Magazine was launched on the 5th October – with Edition 1 – Autumn 2017. You can click the link here to read this free online:
http://en.calameo.com/read/005290311cfc89830c3e2
The spin-offs to all of this have been amazingly positive and exciting too. Suddenly I am getting phone calls from all sorts of interesting people – I am starting to be a ‘go-to’ person for art in the Algarve which is obviously great for me as an artist too. I have helped one of our members, an art tutor, to find accommodation to run a new art class from. I have helped some of our members to find excellent corporate sponsorship and funding for a local art project, and I am in talks with a local art tour company that want to link up with local artists and galleries.
We now have a dedicated 2 page spread each month in a local magazine showcasing one of our members each month in a new ‘meet the artist’ feature; and I am always busy negotiating discounts and special offers for our members. We have our second ‘members lunch’ and get-together planned in time for Christmas, and plans for running our own ‘Pop-Up’ events and exhibitions in the future.
All that in the first three months!
So if there isn’t the opportunity for you to ‘put yourself on the map’ locally as an artist already – have a look around – be creative – maybe you need to draw out the map yourself first!
And don’t be afraid to steer a different path to everyone else. Social media and the internet has opened up a whole new world of marketing opportunities for artists. No longer do we have to drop off our precious paintings to a shop or gallery and then sit back and wait for them to let us know they have sold one of our paintings – taken their 50% commission – and have an envelope with some money in waiting for us to collect next time we are passing. We can be fantastically involved in our own promotion and marketing, we can build our own loyal following, and enjoy being creative, original and supportive to other artists in so many different ways. The path of the ‘artist’ does not have to be a long and lonely one anymore!
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Alyson works as a full-time artist in her studio in the Algarve. Her work is for sale, she is always interested in new commissions and work; and if she is not busy painting or working at her computer; you can find her walking her rescue Spanish Water Dog on a local beach.
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