Strange Land - Putting on a Show

Strange Land Solo Show
The Wynd Gallery, Letchworth Garden City
07 September – 15th September 2024

Though I have my dedicated page to photos from my solo show, I wanted to put down at least some of my experiences in creating it. I won't be going too deep into the nuts and bolts - just a flavour of what an exhibition entails and a few ideas should you be interested in doing this for yourself!

The Wynd Gallery is a co-operative of artists based in Letchworth GC and I have been a member for around 5 years. We hang a group show every month or so and allocate the space for five solo shows a year. My time had come!

Though it’s good to be part of a group of artists, it can sometimes be frustrating to find your work jostling for space with pieces that do not sit well with your own, or context is lost.
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The show would only last for one week and two weekends, but even so, there was a lot of planning involved. Coming from a design background, my first task was to create a series of plans of the gallery space, onto which I could map out my chosen paintings and virtually ‘hang’ them on the walls (using tracing paper and pencil).

My subject matter, though mostly landscapes, is quite diverse, and so I decided to take the viewer on a journey from one side of the gallery to the other. Beginning with wild upland landscapes (Snowdonia and the Lakes) the paintings became more local, but still rural (the Pegsdons and Purwell meadows). Then I introduced a northern setting, with views of North and West Yorkshire, with buildings coming to the fore. Mid-way, a mixture of rural and cityscapes appear as we headed to Eastern Europe and then across the Atlantic to a series of American landscapes (California and New York), before settling on a large wall of London cityscapes.
The windows, I decided would be relatively uncluttered, with a few small white framed demonstration pieces, and one large painting hanging on either side of the entrance.

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Though I intended to be there in person, I wanted visitors to get a sense of what I did in my art practice, and so I created a small ‘show and tell’ area, with printed covers from Leisure Painter magazine on which my work featured, a few relevant paintings and a TV monitor showing timelapse demonstrations from my YouTube channel.

The hardest part was coming up with a show title! Some of my later paintings had titles derived from songs, and so I looked around for one that would suit the bill for the entire solo. I found it on one of my favourite albums, ‘Legend’, by Clannad.
My paintings can be otherworldly, slightly mysterious, often have a hidden narrative and suited the title that jumped out at me, ‘Strange Land’!

Over the summer I completed a number of new London cityscapes and some local plein air watercolours, with the new title in mind. I chose one of these, ‘Tweyelight’, depicting the London Eye in an evening light, as my poster image in promotional materials.
As the show drew near, my preparations intensified! Many paintings had to be framed, and I’d decided to do as many of these myself as possible – creating tray frames from scratch for the canvasses. All works had to be strung at the rear ready for hanging and finally, after deciding on pricing, labels printed.

In the final few weeks, the most important aspect of the upcoming show was advertising its arrival! Lots could be done on the internet, with social media posts and advertising in local creative and news sites. I still though, went ‘old school’ and handed out printed flyers and posters to local cafes and businesses. Coincidentally, Herts Open Studios was to begin on my opening date, and I was determined to stand out as a separate event to it.

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​The day of the hang was quite intense! Firstly, the previous group show had to be taken down, I had help from three other fellow Wynd artists, but short on a few people due to illness. Once that was down and paintings stowed, my work came out and three of us hung the show. Thankfully, my preparatory planning became crucial, as time was short and hands were few! Once the paintings were up, I was left on my own to place labels and tweak the show.

It was a fantastic, but fleeting feeling, to have my work on display at last, filling the gallery, just as I’d imagined. Everything gelled, there was consistency of style and palette, there was a flow to the ‘journey’ – and I could breath at last!

But not for long, as I still had to prepare the gallery, with the invaluable help of my wife, for my Private View that same evening! 

The Show was on!

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