Course Outline

Are you ready to move from being an arts enthusiast to becoming a practicing, exhibiting and selling artist, but overwhelmed by the challenges? This course covers everything you always wanted to know about professional practice for artists! Paul McDonald expertly guides you with a practical structure for researching concepts, planning projects, and really understanding the personal investment in time, money, effort and creativity it requires to succeed.

Paul shows what’s expected of you as you step up into the professional art world, and supports you to be confident in articulating your objectives, researching your field of art and knowing your audience. The program commences with identifying the foundations of your practice and the importance of research to understand and inform your work and make the right decisions to consolidate it to the point of being exhibition ready.

Paul imparts techniques in building and sustaining practical, realistic and structured timelines to bring this to fruition. He introduces various project management tools and software for planning and structuring the workload, while managing your time efficiently. This includes improving your skills in budgeting, creating forecasts, and allocating resources to specific tasks, learning how to take full responsibility for the success of your art projects. Paul also covers how to effectively learn social media and promotional strategies to build your audiences quickly.

Throughout the course there will be group critiques, individual tuition and you’ll find out how to pitch ideas, develop and build relationships with curators and gallerists, understand potential audiences and learn who you need to be in front of, by engaging either online or face to face, to present your ideas. Key to this is the creation of a strong, meaningful and confident artist’s statement and biography for the media release and exhibition catalogue. The course covers discussions around the different modes of professional presentation and ways of showing your work, ranging from the traditional ‘white cube’ gallery to alternative exhibition spaces, public venues and self-publishing options.

The course is suitable for students with considerable experience of artmaking in any medium who are ready to take their body of work up to the next level of professional exhibiting practices.

*Short courses are open to students of ages 16 years and over. For students under 16 years of age there are School Holiday Workshops, Art Club and other youth art programs.

Lecturer Profile

Paul McDonald is a socially engaged artist, educator and curator whose personal practice explores masculinity and mental health. His photographic work has been published and collected both nationally and internationally. Paul has developed and presented a number of participatory arts programs discussing social issues and engaging with local communities and diverse groups. He was the Associate Director at the Australian Centre for Photography, before founding Contact Sheet in 2014. Paul has curated and presented over 50 exhibitions. Paul completed his MA in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at the University of the Arts London in December 2016 with Distinction. He currently is a lecturer at Macleay College teaching Photojournalism, News Photography and Mobile Journalism and a guest lecturer at the University of the Arts London for the Master’s Program.

COVID-19 Policy

Whilst NAS strongly encourages vaccination, students are not required to be vaccinated as a condition of their enrolment at NAS.

Fine Art Supplies

Parkers Fine Art Supplies have a location of the NAS campus and offer a discount for NAS short courses students. To discuss and order art materials please contact Parkers on +61 2 9247 9979 or email [email protected]
Website https://www.parkersartsupplies.com/