My friend Larry and I have decided to hold a two man  (or should I be pc and say two person?) exhibition. Neither of us have ever organised one of these before as most of our shows have been organised by the galleries and expos who have shown our work but we live in a brave new world of social media so why not?

Larry is a well known Ghanaian artist and has his works in collections all over the world. He has recently completed  a residency in Spain and so you can imagine how excited I was when he suggested we hold an exhbition together in London.

I do love a challenge and straight away decided to take it on; we need to find a gallery, get a theme, raise some funds, find buyers, collectors, galleries and really it should be a load of fun I told him.

(c) Larry Otoo - www.larryotoo.com

In the spirit of all the things I do I am dedicating today as day 1 of our project. We have decided the exhibition will be in October in London and already I have a list of galleries and costs. The exhibition will run for 1 week. This is probably the easiest bit.

The next task is to do some fund raising: exhibitions cost money, you have to rent the gallery space, create and print catalogues, make flyers and posters, do some marketing and publicity and then invite people to come along and have a load of fun but above all buy your paintings and add them to their collections.

I have found a great site for the fundraising, it is a crowd funding site called Sponsume. It really is fantastic, you list your project, describe what its all about, create an accompanying short video and then invite people to come along and sponsor you. In order to make them do this, there has to be some inducement, some incentive and Larry and I  have come up with what we feel is a generous list which bottom line allows sponsors to own some of our paintings for a much better price than they would normally buy it for.

Red Lobster (c) Larry Otoo

So this is day one. The site has been set up and the video is is progress. I hope to get that finished soon. I hope to raise our target amount of £5000 in just over 70 days.  Meanwhile here are a couple of pictures from our portfolio.

Please keep checking back soon. We would love to share the journey will you. Or better still join my mailing list or click on the ‘follow’ link below so you get updates as and when they come out.

Wish us luck.

Reflection (c) Anne Blankson-Hemans