I had my first exhibition exactly 20 years ago, April 1:st, 2004.
I had my first oil painting sale in less than 20 minutes into it, which was no coincidence:
This was due to careful planning, back in a world where I could exist.
Please have some coffee before I tell you about what the March of Time can do to you...
Before the exhibition, I had sent oodles of "vernissage letters", which were physical letters that you sent by mail to prospective customers, friends and all. It cost me quite a bit, but even if I had not had the oil sold, the rapid sales of lesser works during the day was harvest enough for what I had sown, it was postage well spent.
In those days, we in Sweden had billboards dedicated to events like mine, and yes, did I shower those billboards all around the area with my posters. Vernissage! Come and See. Freshly Painted.
And last but by no means least, in those days the local rag had a special section where you could try your luck and send your local event for free. And this first time, I got them to publish this little thing, with the efficient results that I mentioned above.
All this worked twenty years ago.
And ten years ago.
Somewhere after that, this stopped working.
I'm an Xennial; my habitat was the shoreline between analogue and digital. I can clean and put a Vinyl on the spinner with no hesitation. I can find music on the web with the same ease (and the music of mine that you find there is an analogue-digital animal too). But I'll try to keep my tale short, as Xennial is now quite worn out.
The first thing that happened was the advent of "social media", a billboard where it's dog-eat-dog and where you have to pay too much to get seen enough (this has been very carefully seen to). People started looking down on their smartphones instead. Our physical billboards-for-culture are still standing up, proud remnants of an ancient civilization and are sometimes graced by posters for local church concerts and messages about lost cats.
The second thing that happened was that people that rather look at paintings than at smartphones grew increasingly rare. I originally had a list of, say, 60 people. When I stopped many years later, down at five, they had moved / moved to heaven / simply were too old. An e-mail list is not the same, and on the whole any trasnsition to the digital cloud world could not be done.
At last the Pandemic came, making everything that was difficult (in the fields of arts, illustration, music and all that I've worked with) ---- impossible. This killed the local rag. No local events announced anymore, virus, virus! But in the paper world, not communicating with your readers means suicide, and I haven't seen it for ages. They obviously didn't care to resurrect it afterwards.
No, what happened at last, really, was that this artist of many trades, all of them vanishing in similar ways, had a jolly breakdown.
I don't know if this is an obituary of sorts; how long I'll hang on.
I no longer have the means, time or energy for oils in my struggles: While I haven't let go of watercolours, I've resorted to my illustrator's digital for art, accnowledging a world where I really don't fit in.
