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:
- 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.
- 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
- 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.
