Lynn Karlin makes it happen – all the way to the New York Times.
Garlic Scapes©Lynn Karlin. All Rights Reserved.
Lynn Karlin, a Belfast, Maine resident, is not afraid to get the word out about her photographs. She recently told me she realizes she now spends 60% of her time marketing her work, and 40% creating it.
Karlin’s work was recently featured in the New York Times. The result was, of course, many sales at her current show at Gallery on the Green in Pawling, NY – just over an hour’s drive from the Big Apple. A little scrolling on the fine art photographs portion of her website quickly proves this is one artist who doesn’t wait for the knock on the door. Karlin has work in venues from Surry, Maine’s Sweet Pea Garden and Gallery – which has been extremely successful sales-wise – to Delaware and many places in between, including a months-long stint of 14 pieces exhibited outdoors at the Stonewall Kitchen center in York – handily located next door to the York Visitors Bureau. 2011 and 2012 were and are chock full of shows. And two are scheduled already for 2013. None of this happened without her making it happen.
Okay, catch your breath.
And now, take another deep one: Karlin’s fine art photographs have been available since…the summer of 2010. That’s less than two years from the date of this posting. True, her commercial career goes back decades, but little of that has come into play to date with the marketing success of these new fine art photographs bodies of work.
Flowering Leek©Lynn Karlin. Merit Award received after entering B&W/Color magazine’s Portfolio Competition and published in the April 2012 Competition Winners issue. All Rights Reserved
Lynn contacted me in the winter/spring of 2010 and scheduled a portfolio review. We talked about how to organize the group of fine art photographs she had spent the past few months creating. Sizes, prices, presentation, editing – all the vital info. a photographer new to the fine art photographs world could use a little input on. I soon sent her a referral to a midcoast Maine gallery I thought would be a good fit for her work. And she was off and running. In January 2011 I started representing her work at VoxPhotographs.
Now I see Lynn Karlin is faintly blurring the lines between her fine art and commercial work as a long time fashion, interiors and gardens photographer – the Garden Writers Association just awarded her a Silver Award of Achievement in the cover/photography category of their annual Media Awards program for her cover photograph on a recent issue of The Hook magazine – yes, it’s a photo from her fine art Pedestal Series. She worked hard to re-activate a very old contact with the NY Times and the result was the feature two weeks ago.
None of this marketing stuff is fun. None of it is easy. Many artists can’t stomach it. But when an artist has work she believes in and works hard to get the word out – well, anything can happen. And it does.
Squash Blossoms/The Hook, March/April 2011 ©Lynn Karlin. All Rights Reserved
