Good Nature is new show at fast-rising gallery

Good Nature, running until October 28, Tuesday to Saturday, 10-5pm, follows on from Good Figures three years ago, the show which Candida brought to the Weald & Downland Museum and which subsequently led to calls for her to set up her own gallery. Next year will come Good Health – and Candida is already pondering the Good beyond that… all a sign of the extent to which the gallery has now established itself.

“The gallery has been here two and a half years now,” Candida says. “It’s always hard to start up one’s own business. It’s something where you have to have realistic expectations.

“We are not particularly on the high street. We are not particularly high-street product, so we have got to consider this a long-term thing. It is very much about building relationships with people, about helping people to understand and learn about art and enjoying the artists. We have worked with some excellent artists, some of them very well known in the area, some of them not very well known in the area, but known nationally, which is nice because it means that we are carrying on a dialogue with them. And the whole thing just gets better and better. We are getting to know our clients much better so that we can make recommendations to them, knowing them and their style, which is a really good relationship to have, and the artists equally we know better and better. We are exclusive representative gallery for several of our artists in the UK, and that working relationship is a huge part of how a successful gallery works.”

And so the gallery evolves: “Last year we had nine exhibitions. This coming year I am going to do less – better. I want to really, really focus on not just going from one show to the next and then the next, which as a schedule is pretty unforgiving. I want to be able to grow shows with more time in between. The preparation for Good Nature will have been at least a year.”