2024 Show Season Cancelled

Yes, you have read that right, we are cancelling our Show Season for 2024. Well, maybe not all shows but a majority of them.

Why is our 2024 Show Season Cancelled? After very careful consideration we, (Esther and I) have decided that for the Summer of 2024 we are not going to be attending our planned shows. In total we had pencilled in about 40 days of shows which we are now reducing to about 5. This sounds very drastic, and for us it actually is. The decision has been made for purely commercial reasons and not one that we have taken lightly. Fortunately we work well as a team and jointly we felt it was best to have a year off from the majority of shows and events for the main 2024 season. You can see how our event planner looks now here. Please note that I still will be giving the planned talks and presentations in my diary.

Ironically it was just over a week ago that we gave at short presentation at the Bowes Show President’s Dinner on the topic of us attending shows. And now with our 2024 Show Season Cancelled it would appear that we are doing an about-turn. In truth this is sort of the case.

The reasoning behind the decision.

We love doing these shows, they are hard work but they have proven to be very fruitful, both financially and commercially as they increase our brand awareness. So why would we “kill the goose that lays the golden egg”? Firstly we must stress that this is only a temporary measure, we are considering attending a small number of local shows towards the end of the season and plan to be fully comitted to events for 2025. This will all depend on Andy’s output of artwork.

For the past couple of years at these events we have displayed a variety of Andy’s work, both paintings and photography. As we have expanded the display space it has been easier to fill the walls with more photographs than artwork. Printing and framing photographs is a much quicker process than producing original artwork. Consequently the perception is that Andy is firstly a photographer and not an artist. The intention is to rectify this misconception.

Following the end of the show season in 2023 the intention was for Andy to produce a brand new range of paintings for the 2024 season. For one reason and another this hasn’t happened, not to the volume required anyway. We are now only 8 weeks away from when the season would start and there is not enough work to fill the whole display stand with paintings that have impact and the quailty required.

Reverting to displaying photographs as well as paintings would, we feel, be a backward step.

Our new plans.

Don’t be thinking that we are going to be putting our feet up over the next few months, far from it. This break from shows will be a fantastic opportunity to work on projects and paintings. Ideas that have been slow to progress when we have had to focus on shows and events.

Andy has a head full of ideas for new paintings, both watercolour and oils. In addition, projects such as the Lakeland 365 which have progessed slowly can now move on at a faster pace. There are also new books in the pipeline which can be developed. For those of you who follow Andy on YouTube you will be pleased to hear that he will now be able to add new content to the channel. Already he has 9 films just waiting to be edited and uploaded. New films will include walks, art tips and even Wainwright related content.

The intention is that over the coming months new work will be uploaded here on the website as well as across Andy’s usual social media platforms. If all goes according to plan we will be back on the show circuit with a whole new range of Artwork by Andy in 2025.

But we need your help.

By cancelling the 2024 Show Season we will be losing out on expanding our “brand awareness”, there is even a risk that some visitors to shows may even assume that we have retired (or worse). Here’s where you, as a follower or subscriber to this website can help. We need you to help spread the word about us. All we ask is that if you see any of our posts, paintings, videos or any content that you like on any of our platforms then just simply like it, or even better share it with your friends who may be interested. These easy actions make a big difference to us. We are not fans of using the new “@followers” tag on Facebook, I find it very impersonal. It is much better to have genuine followers who like what we do and grow our audience organically through friends who follow us already. Too many social media pages have huge numbers of followers who don’t interact with the content, that isn’t our goal.

In the meantime..

Now that we have made this rather drastic decision we have our work cut out to make sure we don’t lose out in the short term. Andy will be concentrating on producing exciting new work and behind the scenes Esther will be keeping the administration side of the business in order. We will miss the interaction that we have with thousands of visitors to our stand over the season but we know that in 2025 we will be even better than ever before.

Do keep following us and if you haven’t done so already why not subscribe to this website? Just click on the box and fill in the form.

Thank you for reading.

Andy