Remember, your art is not ready to show publicly until you have amassed a serious body of work that shows a consistency of ideas. Of course, you must have mastered the medium used as well as all the tools necessary to finish your artwork. When you have accomplished this, then is the time to consider the path to being a known and respected artist. There are many paths to take, but you must have a goal and a clear understanding of these paths. Some will be for you and some will not. Only you can decide. Some artists paint for years before they feel they are ready.

I actually had a number of opportunities to show my work and I chose not to until 1968 and that was a very conscious decision that had to do with the work. I had a very strong–I still do–strong belief that the act of going public is a very important decision and everything you do from the point in which you go public is part of the public record and is out there and you cannot get it back. anything before the time you go public is nobody’s business and you don’t have to talk about it, you don’t have to show it, you’re not responsible, you can destroy it, you’re not responsible, you can destroy it all or whatever. But there is something about that decision. “OK I can put my neck on the line for this work and I feel strongly enough about it that I will live with however I feel about it later. This is now part of the public realm.”–

–Chuck Close, quoted in Joe Fig, In the Painter’s Studio: Artist Joe Fig Interviews 25 Contemporary artists (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2009)