The Difficult Job

Ah, now here's a taboo topic!

One of the more difficult parts of professional art is pricing your work. You are told to add up your materials cost and factor in a dollar per hour fee or to use a price per square inch scale or to price all your pieces of one size the same amount or... there are a lot of formulas. So far I haven't really been pricing my work at a living wage by any means. In fact I'm barely recuperating costs. But then there's the issue of "price at what the market will bear." I've mostly sold via personal connections and haven't through a business venue. I assume that galleries and dealers could get a bit more for my work (but will charge me the normal 50% or more to do so), because they have direct connections with art collectors. I've been selling my work for almost 2 years now mostly to family, friends, and their acquaintances. At first I was just happy that people wanted my work. I still am thrilled about that factor, but it doesn't pay for me to pursue making more art.

There is also the myth out there that artists should just create their work and never think about money. Hence the starving artists out there. Many people feel that art shouldn't be worth anything until the artist is dead. There are many current ideas about how artists "should" and "should not" be that are derived from nineteenth century art critic Theophile Gautier (written by Tom Wolfe): "[W]ith Gautier's own red vests, black scarves, crazy hats, outrageous pronouncements, huge thirsts, and ravenous groin... the modern picture of The Artist began to form: the poor but free spirit, plebian but aspiring only to be classless, to cut himself forever free from the bonds of the greedy and hypocritical bouqeoisie, to be whatever the fat burghers feared most, to cross the line wherever they drew it, to look at the world in a way they couldn't see, to be high, live low, stay young forever - in short, to be the bohemian."

There are things about that quote that I agree with. We all want to ride on the excitement the artist experiences when their work is created and to imagine the rush it must surely give them with every stroke. Watching Chihuly work and live very much demonstrates this experience. It's thrilling just to see. But Chihuly is not exactly a starving artist (though he may have been 30 years ago). And not all artists fit the Gautier mold.

In the art world the vast majority of the funds are accrued by galleries, curators, dealers, etc. Artists as a category make the least in the food chain. It is to be recognized that the galleries often make it possible for most artists to exist. It is also often too common for artists to be taken advantage of by unscrupulous business deals. Part of the reason that happens is that there are so many variables in the industry, with each 'product' being unique in entirity. Also because the work of creating art itself is rather consuming, it is difficult to also be abreast of legal, tax, business, marketing, and other issues that affect artists.

There are many in the general public that are either intimidated by art and it's often high prices, or look at artists as undisciplined adolescents who don't deserve to make a living because their work "should be payment in and of itself." I've had plenty of people drop the, "Wow, but that's so great that you get to do what you LOVE." It's true. I do love it. I would do it regardless of pay.

Transitioning from the world of 'hobbyist' to 'professional' is not an easy one. Many full-time artists spend any where from 50-80% of their time 'conducting business'. Preparing presentations to galleries, press releases, and lots of other activities that increase the dollar value of their body of work (sold and future), is considerably energy and time consuming. But to be able to have the time to create art, those activities are necessary. Being able to guarantee that the value of their collection will increase because the artist is pursing greater recognition, is one of the driving forces behind collectors. Collectors make the world of art possible. They want to know that what they buy today will be worth more in a few years because the artist will be working the system actively to increase their value (kind of the opposite of the bohemian role we're supposed to also fulfill). There are a few rare individuals who have a wealthy benefactor who pay for them to do whatever they like and actually play the 'role of the artist' that we've all heard about since grade school. But most artists don't fit into the box we've all imagined they live in.

I'm going to keep my prices low probably for the remainder of the summer. I'm planning on taking some time off from painting new pieces to refocus and sketch. Late summer/early fall I will begin working on larger series of works. I am going to move toward a more cohesive body of work that will be based upon the things I have previously done, but will be done in larger series and with a more connected feel among all my pieces. I'm moving toward a more personal style that reflects more of my love for color and the graceful way that it combines. I'll do series of 5-15 pieces at a time when I restart. At that point I will have to decide if I want to go through galleries only and cease from selling directly to the public on my own, or not. I'll have to really reconsider the pricing of my work because I will put 4 months of planning into the work I'll be doing, as well as the actual work creating them. I may just sell prints from my website and paintings through galleries... I don't know. I have a stack of books on art business sitting next to my stack on art history that I'm pouring through. Hopefully I'll read something that will answer all of my questions, but probably not.

My to-do list of getting started as a 'legitimate' artist gets longer every day but the more I read the better I feel that I can do this. The learning curve is huge but if there's anything I love, it's taking on something with a bit of impossibility to it and learning something new and difficult. When I was 17 I got hired by a web designer and was given a key to his downtown office and access to a library of 4" thick books on html and photoshop. I rarely ever saw the guy who was supposed to mentor me, and he still owes me several paychecks, but the job did a lot for me. I had to teach myself everything but just having access to the material was all I needed. That was my internship in web and graphic design and I made a living off those skills for the next 9 years.

I've had a lot of other opportunities to learn a variety of technical and other business skills that I'm finding myself drawing on heavily as I attempt to start a a career. There is an incredible weight of things to accomplish to get this thing off the ground. At times I get a bit depressed as I realize how much further away the next mile stone really is, but a lot of times that just makes me run harder. I may run myself into the ground (Ryan's seen me do that I lot of times in our 6 years we've been together). But I always do get myself back up and find my pace again.

So, here's to the horizon I'm chasing: