Goin' Pro'...
- colin8863
- May 5
- 8 min read
When I was offered redundancy from my reasonable well paid job in 2024, having worked 4 days per week at it since 2018 and the rest of the week devoted my time to developing my art practice, I jumped for joy and also felt a little scared!
I undertook a part-time MA in Illustration at the University of Gloucestershire in 2018 hence dropping a day at work. I completed this successfully in 2021, having survived Covid 19, and felt a sense of freedom to be able to get out and paint in the landscape. Painting 'plein air' was wonderful and after three years wandering the beautiful Cotswolds and selling paintings at a variety of rented venues, I started to find my feet in 2023.
Anyone who thinks 'doing art' is just a lot of fun and a nice 'hobby' has never tried to develop a career as an artist! It takes quite a while to really develop an art practice to a professional standard and the point when this happens isn't something you can plan. Constant work and dedication are the only way to develop what others come to recognise as your 'style' also known as your own 'visual language'. This emerges over time and we recognise it well after others have noticed that we have our own 'language' when we paint, draw or create in any art or craft discipline.
Oddington Bluebells - Oil on canvas 2023.
So by mid 2023 I had developed my work sufficiently for paintings to begin selling well and the comments I was getting about the work suggested that I had reached the point where my 'visual language' was obvious to others. It had taken two years of graft and when I thought back to working as a professional artist in the early 2000's a few things came back to me that suddenly began to offer me the chance to do what I wasn't able to do back when I was working on the breadline.
In 2005 an old friend, who I miss greatly since his death in 2014, introduced me to a a well known professional artist called Charles Neal. Charles painted beautiful, colourful and impressionistic landscapes that sold for a lot of money. Charles very kindly talked to me about my work in his studio looked at what I was producing at the time. He thought that the work I was doing, although competent, would never get me noticed. It was safe, pedestrian and didn't stand out in any way that distinguished it from the work of others.
Charles suggested I spend a few weeks painting with a wide range of oil colours, to choose them intuitively and only paint with a palette knife! He also said that instead of wasting canvases, to paint on bits of cardboard primed with cheap acrylic paint and come back to him with the results. I recognised the expertise in his own work and respected his opinion so did exactly what he said for the next couple of weeks. When I had a handful of paintings that I thought weren't too bad, I contacted him to arrange another visit.
When I turned up at his doorstep I was standing outside for several minutes before anyone answered. Charles didn't look too pleased to see me. I suspect he hoped I would just go away and not darken his doorway again. He was a professional artist after all, and busy with his own work so he really was doing me a favour, and owed me nothing. He told me I might as well show him what i'd done now that I was there and so I produced my meagre efforts on bits of cardboard.
Charles laid out my work around his easel and saying nothing stared for a while at the paintings, occasionally looking back at me with a slightly puzzled expression on his face. I thought this meant I was showing him something awful and was wasting his time. After a while he turned to me and asked why i'd painted them on cardboard! I was a bit taken aback but said that's what he told me to do. He then said that's because he wasn't expecting me to turn up with anything worth looking at!
I breathed a sigh of relief. Charles moved on quickly and told me to only paint this way, not just with a palette knife, for the next 6 months after which I would have a recognisable style that would be noticed by a gallery and I stood a fair chance of getting representation. He also said not to sell any painting for less than £600. I was doing 'paint to order' for a dealer at the time and paid reasonably well for the work although it could be ad-hoc. Charles told me to dump this work and focus on my own practice.
I had to make a decision between work that paid the bills and doing what Charles suggested. I couldn't survive for 6 months if I wasn't selling work so I stuck with the dealer and a few other sales. Within just over a year, the dealer went out of business and I was left high and dry, with no work and no body of work to show a gallery. A few months later I was broke again and in financial trouble. I couldn't afford my studio, I couldn't afford to run a car and I owed money to credit cards and bank loans and PPI didn't pay out. I had to get a job.
Roll forwards from 2007 to 2023 and I was beginning to get the hang of painting again. But when the redundancy money came through in March 2024, I decided to do what Charles Neal had suggested all those years ago and focus on my practice again. Amusingly, I was mainly painting with a palette knife anyway and my visual language was emerging. When I showed images of my work to Darren Chandler in Park Gallery in Cheltenham, he really liked what he saw and asked me to bring a few pieces in so he knew what they were like in reality.
In August 2024, I had representation from a gallery and my work was proudly on display. I had great hopes for sales as Park Gallery was showing some of my finest work.
But as time went by, and even though there was lots of interest in my work, there were no sales from the gallery. By late November 2024 I was starting to become desperate to sell work and decided to hold back one of my oil paintings to show at a Christmas event at the Pump Rooms in Cheltenham. I wanted to guage whether perhaps my work was at fault and although I knew Darren was doing everything he could to sell my work, perhaps the work wasn't the right standard. But within a couple of hours of putting the painting on display, I sold it. So it wasn't the work.
After a break of two weeks during which I had a wonderful holiday in the Highlands with my partner, two close friends and their wonderful extended family (including 7 dogs!), I needed to consider what to do moving forwards as although I did well generally at the Xmas fair, the sales weren't good enough to make up for 3 months of not being able to sell my oil paintings elsewhere due to the agreement I had with Park Gallery. This was quite normal when a gallery represents artists, and I knew sales could be slow in what was a difficult art market due to nervousness about the increasing cost of living.
I just wasn't expecting not to sell work for such a long time considering I had sold pretty well before that point. However, the price I had been selling work was around half of the price tag of the work in the gallery. But Darren didn't think price was the issue. Darren was willing to take my work to Fresh Art Fair at Cheltenham Racecourse in April 2025 and I said if he did that then i'd give him new work to take but again I also knew i'd need to hold fast to our agreement for what would be seven months by the time the fair came round.
With no sales in the lead up to Fresh Art Fair and Park Gallery now holding 11 of my paintings, all my hopes were pinned on good sales at the fair. But fortune wasn't in my favour and only one painting sold at the fair. So now I was in a very difficult position. I needed sales. I had a feeling I could sell my work at my own price and it was time to have a very difficult conversation with someone who had tried their very best and who I respected greatly for the efforts they had made on my behalf to display my work in their lovely gallery.
I discussed taking my work out of the gallery with Darren and I knew this was as disappointing for him as it was for me. But I had little choice. I left a few paintings with the gallery for a further month and took half of them away with me so I could put them in an exhibition in the village of Lower Slaughter with a few other artists. I sold two oil paintings in a couple of days along with a lot of watercolours, prints and cards. But my prices for the oil paintings were a lot lower than they were in the gallery.
Several originals sold to American tourists who wanted a reminder of their stay in the Cotswolds and a large seascape/beach painting sold to a gentleman with a very modern house in the Cotswolds and wanted a painting that reflected the contemporary feel of his home. Although I was happy with my sales, It had been a long time since I'd taken an income from sales rather than using my redundancy money.
So writing this on the early May Bank Holiday 2025, just over a year since 'going pro', I collect the remainder of my work from Park Gallery on the 8th May. I have a few pieces in another gallery as a test run to see if the work gets enough interest for the gallery to take me on. So although Charles Neal was right about pursuing my art practice in a dedicated way to get noticed by a gallery, this is only the start of that journey and it's not a guarantee that success will soon follow.
The art market isn't easy to navigate and it's taking a lot of nerve to hold on before possibly looking for part-time work. I find myself booking on to events and places to sell work including 'pay to display' galleries rather than hunt for other galleries to represent me. In fact i'm unsure how to proceed and being completely honest the decision to make the move to being a full time, professional artist feels a little foolish right now. I know I can sell my work, but I also know it takes a lot of time and enormous effort to get your art seen by those who might buy it.
Even though my work has developed well and i'm still determined to push forwards with my art practice, it's a daunting prospect and i'm currently reviewing all possible avenues to sell work. For anyone reading this who is thinking of becoming a professional artist I recommend what a friend of mine says in her blog on the Living From Art website:
Get a part time job at the very least to sustain you through the difficult times. As my redundancy money begins to run out, I may be doing the same soon. But we'll see.....
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