The Transition

A message from Kathy:

As our Moms and all the great sages of the world would say: You don’t know until you try: If you don’t try, you will always regret it,  never having tried.

As a founding member of Catskill Artists Gallery, I want to share what the process and experience has been like, going from a bricks-and-mortar storefront gallery in Liberty, New York for the past nine years, to what we have become, as of March 4, a “gallery without walls.” In this tough economy, sales were down and we just didn’t want the expense of paying rent, electric, phone, etc., any more, but the five original members  really, really wanted to keep the business going. We also had our eye on a few of our former consignors who had shown enthusiasm for the gallery by bringing in new work of the absolute highest quality, and coming to openings, and who seemed to truly like participating in a group such as ours.  We asked several of them to become members, and three of them accepted. Margaret, Tom, and Nada are our new, fantastic, and quickly-proving-to-be-invaluable members. So now we are eight! 

We unanimously agreed that we need to focus our efforts in three areas:

1. Robert, who believes deeply in contributing to the cultural environment and sense of community of our area, especially wanted to keep our presence in Sullivan County as a group that periodically has art exhibits.  We were all on board with that, and decided we could still have exhibitions in venues other than our old storefront.  So far, we have scheduled two exhibits for this year, The Old Stone House in Hasbrouck, NY and the Liberty Museum  in Liberty, NY, and we may have one more that is in the works.
2. We all agreed that we should continue to do craft shows, and more of them. Craft shows, although a lot of physical work, have always been a good income generator for us. Now that we don’t have the physical gallery to take care of, we will have more time and energy to do more fairs, as well as three more people to share in the work. We have expanded our horizons, gotten those applications turned in (thanks to a lot of research by Cate and Nada) and are already scheduled to do fairs in Orange County, NY, Rockland County, NY and Ridgewood, NJ, as well as our usual local craft fairs in Sullivan County, NY
3. I have always wanted to figure out how I could sell my work on the internet, but had always found it daunting to tackle that project alone. Everyone agreed with me, and with Buff, who was also very interested in the idea of online marketing of our work, that selling from the web would be a very good way to keep in touch with our loyal customers and reach new ones.  We thought that if we had one website for our whole group, we could all learn how to set it up and maintain it ourselves, rather than paying an outside webmaster.

We had initial help from a friend of Buff’s, Ellyane Hutchinson, who is an expert in web design and calmly steered us through the critical first steps. And with Margaret now on board, we had an in-house instructor to help us continue to learn how to navigate this new learning curve of creating and managing the new website. Her skills as a computer graphics designer and professor and administrator at the college level have been very helpful.
 

Buff and I worked closely as a team to learn this information, asking Margaret questions now and then. We gave instructions to the other artists in a few face-to-face (actually three or four faces to the computer screen!) tutoring sessions. We each now manage our own page, i.e. photographing, retouching and sizing in Photoshop, optimizing, embedding keywords, putting up our own work, and topping off each image with a PayPal/Buy Now button.

To step back a bit, before learning how to put our images up on the website, Hank, a professional commercial and art photographer for many years, taught Cate, Nada and me, who all do 3 dimensional work, how to improve our photography skills, including  balancing and diffusing lighting, and becoming more familiar with setting the proper shutter speed and aperture settings on our cameras to achieve the sharpest, truest photos. I found my previously learned Photoshop skills (I had taken two semesters of computer graphics at the local community college and produced our gallery show cards and newspaper ads) proved invaluable in sizing and retouching in preparation for putting photos of our work up on the site, and I was able to give lessons to Cate and Buff, who are now among the ranks of first-level Photoshoppers. Tom and Nada, we found out, already had those necessary skills.

  

Whew! WE DID IT! OUR ONLINE GALLERY IS UP AND RUNNING AND WE HAVE ALREADY MADE SOME SALES!

Lastly, rather than dwell on the sadness of having to close the doors of our sweet gallery after nine years of hard work and good times, I prefer to see that this re-forming of our gallery has been one of the major positive synchronistic events of my life—all the right people together at the right time doing a good and worthwhile thing.

I believe that everyone creates their own luck. I predict we will be very lucky.