I'd like to recall a story for you. About a year ago I was taking a class at Modesto Junior College. Deciding that I needed to have a good concept of what I should put into a portfolio I decided I would take the Computer Graphics Portfolio course. I somewhat imagined that this would mostly mean a class for making any kind of graphic portfolio on a computer, but once I got into the class I could see that there was a much more specific leaning toward graphics created on the computer.
Of course I have certainly created some visual projects on a computer that I am proud of but I wanted to focus more on my drawing, which was really starting to get some passing attention and praise from the internet and passersby while I drew between classes.
According to the seating in the class I was one of the first people called up in the class to show some of my work on the projector. By this time I had seen that most of my classmates were working in digital art proper and that I was the fuck up that was about to show everybody a gallery of ballpoint pen doodles.
I pulled up my deviantART profile and immediately started flipping through the gallery. I usually tend to hover on my work for a while to point out all of the details but I didn't want to linger too much on my misunderstanding on the medium we would be using. So, I opened up one of my drawings that show off the recurring characteristics of my drawings (weird faces, lots of clutter, hidden messages and signatures) and shot through those characteristics as fast as I could and then just shot through my gallery. I opened maybe five drawings, quickly described them and then showed the thumbnails in the gallery and then wanted to get away from the computer and back to my desk where I could wait for the professor to tell me that he thinks that I have the wrong class.
Turned out the whole class thought that my art was mind blowing. I could write a whole other post on how I don't comprehend compliments but to make it short I was extremely surprised when they wanted me to flip through some more of it. Here I thought that I was going to be a waste of class time but the professor actually had interest in my art.
Now, the whole point of the class was to create a portfolio that would show off our art to a potential employer. Since I have no idea what my art can be used for I set mine up like one of those art appreciation books that talk about Dali or Picasso or any of the other greats but without all of the self service garbage about the history of the drawings. I just straight up showed the drawings, what their titles were, when they were drawn and what they were drawn with and on. I decided to just make the book white with the drawings and black text to avoid any kind of visually distracting element to the book.
We were designing our books in a program called Indesign and, while I've never used the program before I caught on pretty fast. The plan for the semester was that we would spend all of our class hours working on the books and then our professor would send our Indesign files to Blurb to create the books. While most people indeed spent the entire class worrying about specific visual aspects and styles of their books my simplistic design choice had me finished with the process in two days. This allowed me to spend most of the time during these class hours to either work on other class projects or help my friends in using the program. I didn't submit the project file right away anyway because I wanted to make sure it would include my work that I was creating in the meantime, which ended up including some of my best work.
So it was a few weeks into the semester that our professor mentioned that he was going to try to get a gallery exhibition for our class. He said that there were some outstanding artists and he'd try to get the school's gallery to set up an exhibit of our work. I was shocked. I didn't know that the school had a gallery. Then, when I went to check it out it turned out that the gallery was awesome. So, understandably, I got very excited about this and had no idea what was going on.
So I went right ahead and lost 100% of my sanity waiting for the five months or whatever it took for the gallery exhibit to happen. I visited the gallery exhibits from beforehand something like fifty times trying to feel out the gallery and imagine what it would be like with all of our work on the walls. I had never had my work printed in larger format and shown in a public place before so I was psyched.
When all was said and done and I had the exhibit with the books shown off I was feeling like a celebrity on campus. During the reception for the opening of the exhibit I wore my conceited asshole uniform and showed up with my family and friends.
Yep, even the exhibit's mission statement had a backdrop of my work. My head was certainly inflating at a very steady pace at that point. Not pictured are the promotional fliers and posters around the school which also featured my art but at this point I'm just showing off.
I hadn't done any real work to get my art into a show in the gallery other than sign up for a class. I hadn't helped out with the setup at all (which in retrospect I completely regret and feel like a douche) but somehow I managed to get my work and my book shown off.
Nowadays people who see my book usually ask me where they can buy it, much to my chagrin. There's not really a version of it available for sale right now. All of the work that was in it can be seen at either my deviantART page of my Facebook page. If you want to see what it looks like I took some pictures:
Anyway, the reception went off really well. I ate way too much of the food that was intended for the people who weren't the artists but I was really not able to control myself.
After the reception was over the gallery's exhibit stood for roughly a month before it was replaced with something much better than my shit. During that time I got to know the art club folk that put together the exhibit pretty well and learned that the whole thing was a bit of a controversial subject considering that they usually plan the exhibits far in advanced and this whole project had been thrust upon them by the school.
I also learned the wonders of not letting people know that I'm the person whose work they painstakingly printed and put up in their gallery with absolutely no help from me. Naturally they figured out who I was pretty quickly but I managed to get some good, honest feedback on my art in the meantime. It ranged from my work having no merit as art because it wasn't, "a simple, flowing piece depicting one subject," to thoughts that my work is too doodle-y to my art being the saving grace of the whole exhibit. I took all of it in the most flattering way possible.
Also, getting to take the prints and book home afterwards was excellent.
The whole thing was fun and a pretty good learning experience but I have got to say that people have ever since overestimated my role in getting myself into that gallery. The person who got me in was the professor of the portfolio class through the school's money managers and that was mostly done while I was floating around the limbo of hoping I hadn't added too many pages to my book. If you want my advice on how to get into a gallery, my incredibly unqualified answer would be to impress the Hell out of somebody who has the ability to put you into a gallery. That advice is nowhere near as helpful as it could be but it's really all that I've got because it's all that I did, and that much I did on accident.
Love and exhibitionism of said love,
William John Holly III
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