Pricing For the Rest of Us

Pricing For the Rest of Us

Are you in that inbetween world of keeping your prices low so you can sell to your friends and neighbors

but you need them high enough so a gallery will still look at your work? The truth is that if your prices are low enough to sell to friends, a gallery won't look at your stuff. Sigh. What to do?

Solution 1: a tiered approach. Produce printed or quasi printed pieces that you can sell more cheaply and other stuff that is more costly or high end and can be placed in a gallery. You can go the giclee route or print something on a home computer or even at the drugstore. The key is appropriate disclosure. I do pen and ink subjects that I print on artist grade papers, heat set and then add a layer of watercolor. They are in between all the usual definitions of edition numbered prints and original watercolors. They are somewhat mass producible but each one is unique. Like a monoprint. 

The two paintings below have a heat-set computer printed base done on high-end papers and then worked over with watercolor. They are each a little different, but take a little less time as the design and inking process has been repeated. I sometimes add more ink work to each one.

Solution 2: "De-ascension 2nd's and pieces of lesser artistic value. They clutter up the studio. Have a once a year sale and ditch a bunch of stuff. Rational: your friends wouldn't know a good piece of art if it fell on them. That was harsh! Philosophically, Thomas Kinkade and Bob Ross aside, I'm not sure I agree with that. I believe that a good piece of art has a depth of feeling that even the most wooden (or less education or discerning) of observers can sense. There is a downside. Your reputation has value and those lesser works could come back to haunt you. So If you've been hoarding a stash of paintings on velvet done in your student days and now want to quietly sell them off, the rules of Karma demand that your local gallery manager will find out.

-insert photo of favorite work of lesser genius here-

-this space intentionally left blank as I have no works of lesser genius. They are all brilliant!-

Solution 3: Don't even try to sell to friends. They often don't buy artwork anyway so don't even go there. Period. Yes, they buy expensive shoes, but just try to get them to buy a lasting piece of art (for the same price as that pair of shoes!) that will last a hundred years and not go out of fashion after one season. It's not completely their fault. There are no million dollar ad campaigns on commercial TV shilling the value of brand Vicky when it comes to wall décor. Even the large art museums are loath to spend on TV coverage. The concept of buying art is totally foreign to most consumers and social media has not come close to changing that. VanGogh and Rembrandt are not going to go viral anytime soon.

More on pricing methods another time. The price per square inch method needs a serious redux.

Happy painting!
Vicky

Rainbows in Winter

Rainbows in Winter

2020 is here and with it snow, rain, melting, more snow, and more brown on brown landscapes peering back at me from the windows of my house. I'm thinking that I now know what Monet was really up to and it wasn't exploring the effects of light. It was pure laziness. It was the inconvenience of physically dealing with the weather (umbrella? No umbrella? Cold today? Snow? Wet? Wool suit or linen?) and dragging all that that equipment from here to there. Of course, he had servants, but still, its the mentality of it. One just gets tired. Though Monet worked on location he actually did quite of bit of his painting in his studio. So, here I am painting the scenery outside my studio window and getting bored with what I'm seeing and with the results of my efforts. They are all beginning to look alike. Oh, pooh. I need to pull a page from the Monet Manuscript and change up what I'm doing. He painting the same grain stack multiple times. Here I am painting the same darn trees multiple times.

My solutions:

1. I can slavishly slant the color palette of each painting towards a particular hue. Let's say the color of the week is red. Here we go, mixing reds into either everything or only discrete sections, exploring their tertiary and complimentary colors. Do-able and fun, but a little superficial, maybe.
2. I can focus on color combinations, going in the direction of Pierre Bonnard, exploring different hue relationships, using the specific landscape in front of me as scaffolding for this type of work. This one is even more fun. If you have a background as a decorator, you're all set.
3. I could regress totally and treat each day as a stylistic journey into the past, being an uber realist one day, cubist another. A cubist tree might be kind of interesting. But, what do you do with the finished work? It's not really your style and definitely not salable. Oops!
4. I could focus, not on color, but on design. I have a long abused and unfinished copy of “The Artistic Anatomy of Trees” by Rex Vicat Cole. It's extremely dry. You'll want to add a mixer into it. It's also in black and white, so I did some research and posted the color versions of the works that I could find on my Pinterest site. It's one of those books that you need to work your way through and do some self-designed exercises for each chapter, otherwise you'll never remember the concepts he is trying to teach.
5. And last, to return to a variation on my first solution, I can look more deeply into each window scape, and go full on impressionistic, seeing the underlying hues in that particular light on that

Or maybe I'll just rotate through these approaches or combine them all together. It is the challenges in life that bring growth. For me this winter, it is the boredom that is forcing me to grow some, by exploring more facets of the scenery around me. I am by nature, somewhat journalistic in my approach to landscapes. I tend to paint what I see. With my watercolors, I work in series and it is the second and third iterations where imagination and creativity bring sparks of insight into the finished painting. My watercolors work up faster than my oils. I can do several watercolors in a couple of days. My oils are another story. Each one is more of a commitment. Heck, being an artist is a commitment in itself. Good thing the winter is long.