Portrait Photography Exhibition

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I received a phone call on Wednesday asking me if I’d like to have an exhibition of my portrait photography for the month of May in the Bookshop Gallery at the Mill on the Fleet, in Gatehouse of Fleet, about 15 miles down the road from here.

It’s a converted old cotton-spinning mill with a visitor centre, shop and café. The top floor is half taken up with a 2nd hand bookshop, and the other half is a gallery space. In fact Maggie exhibited some of her work there a couple of years ago.

All excited, I said yes more or less straight away.

Now the panic has set in.

Waves of crippling self-doubt were always going to be a part of something like this. I mean, who ever puts on any kind of exhibition and doesn’t get flooded with fears of not feeling good enough, or people not turning up, or not liking it and so forth?

But there’s a more practical problem, which lies in just how much it’s going to cost to present 20 to 25 images. Unfortunately, printing them our on our home printer and sticking them to the walls with a bit of blu-tack isn’t really an option.

And of course, I won’t make any money back on any framing directly. No one is going to buy portraits of other people. The only way to generate any money from this is if people are impressed enough to commission me to do their portraits.

So I’ll also need some good quality leaflets for visitors to take away with them.

And as it opens on the 1st of May, I really need to have all the images ready for printing, mounting and framing by the beginning of April.

Which is less than 6 weeks away

And I don’t have enough photos of the kind I want to present yet.

So excuse me while I run screaming around the room in ever faster circles...
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