Leeds Gallery exhibition opening

A couple of sneaky pictures taken at the opening of my exhibition at the Leeds Gallery.  Nice thing about exhibitions is that you don't have to announce yourself at all and take any ownership of which work you've done.  Which is quite nice for a while but in this case - due to being there on my own - I got a bit bored and ended up speaking to people, which leads to the inevitable question "who do you know that's exhibiting here?" which I answer by "I did those six over there."

It is often easier to remain anonymous; hide in the corner or slink out after ten minutes or sometimes not even turn up at all... but I think there are definite opportunities to be had if I'm there to be spoken to.  Like just in case someone decided to give me a load of money.  The benefits to being anonymous though is that you can gauge people's reactions to your artwork and even take sneaky photos of people whilst they look at your work.  The couple above look like rather well to do art collectors.  Even though they probably aren't.

Wasn't able to capture the wild gesticulations of the young boy in this photo though it's nice to know my work does appeal to younger people.  Exhibitions seem to be mostly frequented by the mid to older age range.  Going to this opening in Leeds where I don't know anyone was of benefit due to being able to see some actual honest reactions from people who I don't know and who initially didn't know who I was or that I was even there.  Most exhibitions I've been to have mostly been attended by my friends or friends of other artists so the criticism of your work is at best biased - also it's not that there isn't any value in hearing your friend's perspective on your artwork more that you've usually already heard it already because they've saw it when they came round your house a few weeks before.

Never sure how much I actually want to exhibit sometimes - my work tends to be purely motivated by something interior to myself and I get the most reward by making work rather than by exhibiting it.  I think that I'm exhibiting mostly in the attempt to make some form of income from my artwork so I don't have to do anything else aside from my artwork... so my real motivaton is not to exhibit but to make my work better all the time in order to create a more unique and personal vision.  What is interesting however when I do exhibit and when people talk to me about my artwork (and this includes friends) is the amount of interpretations there is for the work that never actually occured to myself.  Do these interpretations submerge themselves into my subconscious and actually become a part of the inspiration for future work - even if it's in 3 years time?  Slotting into place finally after years of suspension.

Anyway the Leeds Gallery exhibition ends on the 30th September and should be open most days of the week - visit their website for more details.  Only a section of my work is featured on this blog post due to me mostly standing around one area of the room so there's a whole other two corners not featured in the photos.