Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat – Vincent van Gogh (1887)
When I was seven or eight, our teacher put this painting in front of us and taught us about Van Gogh. Then she handed out mirrors and a pile of random floppy hats, sat us down, and told us to draw ourselves.
Mine is still framed on the wall at my grandparents' house, more than 30 years later.
Is it anywhere near as good as Van Gogh's? No. Not even a hint. But there's something quite captivating about it all the same. I can draw a bit (my mum is the real artist in the family, and one of her pieces featured in an earlier Raise your eyes), but I'm no pro. Even so, by copying a master and looking really hard at what he did, a seven-year-old managed to catch something of its essence.
Copying is fine. Copy the masters.
When you're running a small charity, you don't have to reinvent the wheel every day. There's a lot to learn from the masters. They just might not be who you think.
For the last three years I've been freelancing with Buxton Crescent Heritage Trust. One of the last things I've been finishing with them, as I move full time onto Raiser, is a new friends scheme. We read the research on why people give, and on how finding a new donor costs a lot up front but pays off over the years. We looked at the big players, like the National Trust. All useful.
But what we learned most from was another local heritage property. They were friendly, happy to help, and told us straight: this worked for us, this didn't.
Then, at our launch event, someone from another local arts organisation came up to us. That was really interesting, she said. We're redesigning ours. Can we have a chat? So we did. We passed on what we'd learned straight away, and learned something back from her.
Look at what others do, learn from it, and have a go yourself. The charity sector is brilliant at this.
If you're looking for some masters to learn from, that's exactly what Bigger Slice is for: learning from people who actually do this work, in a context like yours. A good place to start might be with the person I've been building the BCHT friends scheme with!
