Capturing the Moment

In April 2017 artist David Bachmann invited some friends and fellow artist to come and paint with him in the Algarve. The ten that flew out to Faro and painted with David were, Tony Dakin, Tim King, David Pilgrim, Valerie Pirlot, Mike Richardson, Andrew Roberts, John Stillman, Haidee-Jo Summers, Mo Teeuw and Karl Terry. Many of the group were up and out painting before breakfast. David took the group to some great painting spots where we picnicked instead of stopping for a full lunch. As you can imagine, by the end of the week there was a great body of work, most of us producing three to five paintings each day.
On the last evening as we were relaxing over a bottle or two of wine and assessing the work someone had a Cliff Richard moment and said 'Hey guys, we should put on a show"
The idea was born. There was much excited chat about where, when, who, how. One of the group at the end of the evening said "it'll never happen".
A week later an email dropped into our inboxes from Valerie. Come on then, lets do it.
Tim King had previous experience of booking the Menier Gallery so he looked into dates and costs there, Tony Dakin offered to be be in charge of finances. But wait, there were only eleven of us, surely we'd need more artists for such a big venue and to help spread the costs. More emails ensued, who else to ask? Valerie came up with a spreadsheet which she shared with us. We all had to put down the names of six artists that we thought would be a good contribution to the show. We ended up with a very impressive list but far too many so we agreed that twenty five would be a good number so we all then voted and those with most votes were approached.
What should we call the show? Another spread sheet, some great ideas were put forward but after a vote "Capturing the Moment" got most votes.
It looked like we were an official group so we needed a name to use in publicity so we procured the domain name 'British Plein Air Painters' (britishpleinairpainters.co.uk) from that Valerie built a web site with the help of David Pilgrim, Haidee -Jo started an Instagram page and Mo started a Facebook page.
We needed images to use in publicity so we all put some paintings into Dropbox which Valerie used to create individual posters for each artist. We needed an official poster so, more after voting, we settled upon a wonderful painting by Adam Ralston. The posters were shared one by one every week on social media to build up interest and a following.
5000 flyers were printed and shared out between the artists to help publicise  the show and several magazines were approached to see if an article could be done.
What else could we do? Haidee and Mo in charge of publicity have organised a couple of 'paint outs' where we hope to distribute more leaflets.