November 2024
from Nancy Ori and New Jersey Media Center
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Dear Fellow Artists,
Winter will soon be here. I have been stocking up on some things in case there is a loss of electricity. I have to also admit that I am a little paranoid about how things will go after the election. To balance this feeling, I am making an effort to be kind, not that I was not before, but I am totally conscious about living that way now all the time. I hope you are doing it too. I am always pleasantly surprised at the reactions I get. So many people are taken for granted or even treated with disrespect today. I am making an effort to stop that. Join me, please.
Our next Forum meeting is November 13th. If you would like to attend, let me know and I will send you the free Zoom link. We will have a presentation on AI along with member images.
Tomorrow: Join me at the art center in Watchung on the circle for an opening reception of the International Juried Photography Exhibit. This is our 30th year!! The reception is free and open to the public from 1-4.
I encourage you to continue to find ways of being inspired and to keep doing your art. Do whatever brings a smile to your face. A smile can change everything. Celebrate the best of what is right with our world, acknowledge it to those around you, and be safe. This is time to take stock of all the positive and truly great things and especially important people in our lives. Spread the love!
All the best,
Contact me with any questions.
Workshops make a great gift!
nance
nancyori@comcast.net
www.nancyoriworkshops.com
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Give the gift of education or artwork.
Support your local artists or art organizations.
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Zoom workshops with Nancy Ori
All workshops include a comprehensive handout that is yours to keep for future reference and to follow along with during the workshop. Contact me for workshop details. Payment is currently through PayPal with credit card or by snail mail with a check. You do not need to have a PayPal account to pay through them. All workshops will be done on Zoom.
Private Tutoring: is ongoing with Personal Projects and Portfolio Development for photographers, critiques, and college prep applications for art students. 6 hours: $395 Makes a great Gift!
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2024 Workshops
November 10 Seeing in Black and White 11-4 $150
December 1 Developing Photographic Style 11-4 $150
2025 Fall:
Ireland September 7-18, 2025 County Mayo to Dingle
Italy September 19-29, 2025 Puglia
Contact Nancy to register
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Free and open to the public: | |
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New Book Launch
Check it out. Great gift for any level photographer. In-depth discussion of all the elements involved in creating a great composition. The images are of nature but the content is about any type of photograph. Go to Amazon and check out my other book offerings:
www.amazon.com/author/nancyori
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Editorial: Name Recognition | |
For those of you who have followed my teaching basics over the years, you already know how much I speak about name recognition as being an important key to becoming a successful artist. It is the key to success in any business actually with some good tips here. When you are just starting out on the journey, how do you go about building your resume and getting name recognition? It is the age old problem…nobody will hire me because I have no experience so how can I build a resume?
You will need to consider a couple of things. You must have a plan, some money, skill and passion. How do they each relate to our topics of building your resume and the art of name recognition with your artwork?
The plan. Many artists don’t think about this as being a real thing that is under their control. They mostly react to what is going on around them bouncing from one thing to the next. I find that writing a plan out on a piece of paper helps to solidify things more clearly. This goes for any artist at any stage of their career because things change in your life and so do your priorities. Be flexible and realistic, but most of all take control over your list with a good plan.
How many shows would you like to be part of in a year? Do some homework and choose a variety of local and regional venues to exhibit your work that offer balance. Just to help put it in perspective, this may take you a year to figure out. Watch the art calendars and listings for shows within your medium and get sample prospectuses for annual events and exhibits. Make your own list according to your interests and energy level. Look at your calendar and decide what exhibits would fit into your life and when. Do not pick too many at first. You may not even have enough good work to enter in several things at once. You may not have the money to finish them properly. The idea is to engage the brain first. Many artists react to the things that land on their doorstep and miss out on the ones that would be more beneficial to their resume if they had only looked around a bit more.
You want to select places from easy to hard.
Rejection is difficult to deal with, so you want to have the ‘sure thing’ as well as the more prestigious show within your region and medium. You can become a member of an art center and have access to their annual member’s exhibit. These are generally easy to get into and usually have some prize money or awards that you might be able to win. These prizes are good entries on the resume. Becoming a member of at least one or two places will let you get your work up quickly within the year and also open the door for some much-needed networking. If you get into a show, any show, do a press release to your local newspaper or popular Internet spot. Don’t forget to send along a digital image of your piece from the show. Having these ready in advance is part of the planning.
It takes a while to get this plan in place and to have things ready on your computer: bio statement, artist statement, resume, description of your work, a price list, photos of your work, sample cover letter, and the beginnings of a press release. Once you have them though, things get a lot easier and faster to do. It is all part of the list on your plan. There are lots of questions that will need to be answered here to develop a workable plan of attack.
You can join a small art group in your area who will help to find shows that you can be part of at first. After you get your feet wet, you can approach some of these venues for a solo show or a group show that you can pull together with your friends. There will also be a lot of experienced artists in a group like this that you can learn from.
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The money. This is such a major part of your plan that it deserves its own discussion. How much money can you realistically devote to your art in a month or year? Look at what you are taking in and paying out. This sounds basic but I think this is where the term ‘poor starving artist’ comes from. Poor planning. Don’t quit your day job. Once you have a good hard look at your income and payouts, you maybe even need a part time job to pay for your art. There are a lot of expenses in order to do things right. Museum quality frames, entry fees, photographing your work, a website, creating digital files, creating a portfolio of prints to show, or making a hardcover book of your work to show off to a gallery all cost money. It adds up quickly if you don’t have a plan of what are the necessary basics.
When I first started out in this crazy business of art, I had very little money. I was working full time and trying to pay my first mortgage as a single homeowner while getting my Masters Degree at night. I had been working for a major pharmaceutical company for several years as their staff photographer and was ready to test my fine art capabilities. After looking at my plan and deciding what to do about the money issue, I got a part time job. It was clear that I did not have any extra money per month to do anything. Reality has to be part of this thinking.
My plan was to devote no more than $500 per year for the first couple of years to get started. It was not a lot to work with, so I had to manage it carefully. I created what I called my press kits. At the time, galleries were only looking at slides of your work, so I created a number of identical slide pages of my work, wrote a sample cover letter, made copies of my artist statement, created a business card and packaged it all up in a folder. Fortunately, I was a photographer and could copy my work easily without cost to me. I guess I need to give credit to my boss and Ciba-Geigy Pharmaceuticals for supporting the artistic career of Nancy Ori here. Thank you.
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I did research into all the exhibit spaces that I could find in my area and chose 50 gallery spaces to send my press kits. The kits looked so professional that I am sure it made me stand out from other artist’s presentations who were less organized. I had a 10% return and got 5 shows for the following year. I asked for all the kits back and even included return postage but only got about half of them back. Some were thrown out, some were filed and those that came back were reworked and sent out again and again until I finally got nothing back. The rest is history. Within the first three years I used up all my press kits and built my exhibit schedule to doing 35 exhibits a year for several years. Several were solo shows, and the rest were group shows all over the place. Now I had a resume that spoke for itself. Once you have that you are good to go but cannot let time go by without your name being out there. People forget you fast, so you have to keep connected and keep pushing.
Today you could do the same thing but would have to have a website of images to send a curator or gallery administrator to. The younger gallery people do not know how to deal well with phone calls or visits. They want to see your work and to do that, you must have a professional presentation, not unlike my press kit. The quest is to be contemporary. If you don’t have the skills to get this done, find someone to help you. Life is going so quickly in this direction that you will not only be left at the station, you will be standing alone in the desert. There will be no train for you. Get over it.
So, my $500 that year went for mostly postage, business cards, postcards for my exhibits, postage to mail out my press releases and juried show entry fees. It was a good balance and can be done exactly the same today for less money if you have some computer skills to set yourself up properly from the start. There are several websites that are just for collections of artists. They offer templates to work with easily to build your site and you basically get a nice page out of it. It is a place with your web address that you can send people to so they can review your work and goes directly to your page. I use Zenfolio but there are lots of cheaper things out there. Let your fingers do the walking and ask around to other artist for recommendations. Go to gallery openings and talk to people. That is also a good way to build your database of emails and give out your business cards.
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Juried shows are a great way to get started, meet some people and measure yourself against others in your medium. You may not get accepted and need to take a hard look at your work. Jurors change and so does your work. Being accepted into a juried show and winning awards can certainly help your resume when you approach a gallery, but I would seriously use the opportunity to meet people and network.
The gallery may like your work but having an artist with a nice bio and a list of exhibitions and awards will help confirm your potential for sales in their mind. Buyers may need familiarity. They read your name someplace. Today you will not get any press for your activities unless you do it yourself. I also do not trust that an exhibition administrator will do it or do it well. Learn how to write your own press release and develop a database of places to send it. There are lots of little local newspapers out there who love to get something already written and illustrated. The days of the big newspapers are over, so you also need to post things on social media and try to develop a following. Do not put a lot of stock in social media, however. Your time is better spent doing leg work and having a solid plan of attack. Knowing how to get that name recognition has been the key to much of my success. Of course, having a fairly decent portfolio and a lot of energy didn’t hurt the process either.
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Your skill. And then the third item, of course, is the skill needed for your particular type of medium. This goes without saying and can be handled nicely by continuing to take classes and workshops on an as-needed basis as you develop your style and expertise. Do you have enough good work? I think that you should have at least 15-20 good pieces that are framed and ready to go before you start looking for galleries. Join critique groups to get some feedback as you go along. Network with other artists and get medium-specific magazines like the Pastel Journal or Photo Review to see what other people are doing.
As mentioned, your skills will need to expand into the digital world. This seems to be especially difficult for many painters. Think about it, if a painter wanted to be a digital player, they would have probably become a photographer and not a painter! Seems simple enough but the story today is digital submissions to galleries and juried shows. Not only digital submissions, but specific digital submissions will be necessary. This means that you need to have a decent camera and at least something like Photoshop Elements on your computer to create specific file sizes according to the prospectus guidelines. If you do not create things properly, most venues will not even look at your work. This is what is happening now. Look for free courses that are on-line or maybe offered locally to get your computer skills up to where they need to be.
Your skills should also include proper finishing techniques for your particular medium. The presentation of a piece is just as important a part of the work as the work itself. I have curated and juried enough shows in my time to be able to tell you that if the artist has treated their work poorly in matting and framing, I will also treat it the same way in the jury process. Why should I have the same respect for it when placed up against the next piece that is beautifully presented? Presentation, presentation, presentation.
Your passion. This is a given for any artist or for success in any business. You must believe in what you are doing and work with great passion. If you truly commit to this, you will be taken care of. Your life and your work will progress forward as you are learning to see more clearly. It’s not important how many great photographs I can make. For me now, it is more about emotion and how many lives I can touch along the way that matters. But that behavior doesn’t come until much later in the process. Look at it this way, making a living as an artist is a gift. Sharing this gift is the most important part of the process--either by teaching or exhibiting your work. The only way that you can do this is by working very hard and very smart. The rest will come.
There are a lot of good artists out there. The ones who will succeed over the rest will be the ones with some savvy.
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AI Newsletter
If you want to get on board with AI and follow someone you can trust, you will want to subscribe to the newsletter that Umesh and I are putting out this year. You already received a free one. The rest is up to you to see how you can use it with your art or just keep up with what is happening.
The AI Newsletter is a great way to start slowly and build on the info the same way we did when digital first appeared. We will definitely do the workshop again so stay tuned. Things are changing every day. Contact me if you are interested in getting the newsletter or signing up for a workshop. $59 annual fee for the newsletter. nancyori@comcast.net
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Join me on one of my 'off the beaten path' tours. | | |
"You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.” ~Ansel Adams
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