Selling art is easy, or how I don’t know what I’m talking about

Here is my latest painting.

It’s a gift for a friend who gave up her baseball tickets so that my wife and I could attend instead.  Of course, I’ll need to frame it first and I’m waiting for the mats I ordered to finish it.

I give a lot of my art away.  I like to do that because then I don’t have to worry about selling it.  I’ve tried a number of different ways to sell my paintings but it’s hard to do with such a large glut of art on the internet for sale.  For instance, on FineArtAmerica.com, there are over 2,470,839 paintings for sale.  It is hard to get noticed and get your art out there.

I’m on there any way in the hope that some philanthropist will want to endow a museum with my stuff. Actually, that is the same reason I’m on DeviantArt.com and Zazzle.com as well as Etsy.com.  Zazzle has actually been the best sales platform for me as yet.  As of now, I have sold three postcards to residents of Great Britain with a commission of 27 cents.  So in case that sounds horrible, it does also mean I’m an internationally known artist and I can live with that.

I don’t fret too much about whether my art sells online.  Every year I bring my paintings down to the arts and crafts fair we have at the hospital I work at.  Last year I sold over 15 paintings for a grand total of $300.  I’ll do it again this October and raise my prices now that more people are getting familiar with me.

In my office at work, there is a spare cubicle that has become my art gallery.  People will come in at times and buy something they see that catches their eye.  I also get requests for specific subjects being painted, like peonies or a painting of someone’s house.  I’m raising around $75-100 a week now and I absolutely love it.  On the one hand, people like my work and are willing to pay for it and on the other hand, I now have the income to pay for my painting supplies.  That’s a pretty good feeling for someone who spent a lot of money over the years on various hobbies.

So locally I do pretty well.  However, I completely, utterly fail when I try to do anything over the internet.  If anyone has some ideas how I can change that, I’m open to suggestions.

The Split Personality Artist, or how I can’t make up my mind

I can’t make up my mind.  Should I stick to one medium only?  Should I stick to one type of style?  Why do all my paintings look different?  I mean, Van Gogh looks like Van Gogh, Rembrandt like Rembrandt.  You can look at many paintings and know right away or at least a good guess as to the artist.  My paintings look like five different artists painting.  And is that a good thing or a bad thing?  I’ll show you what I mean.

There is this artist in me:

Then this one…

Then sometimes…

 

Or this…

I admit I’m a little crazy, but at least I’m rational about it.  I get bored doing the same thing all time but I would think that would mean painting different subjects and settings, not just completely different styles.  I even think about which style I’m going to use based on the subject.  Being totally OCD, you would think I would have some sort of ritual that I did repetitively to clear my mind, but I don’t.  I don’t know if the way I paint is like other artists and I wonder if I am cheating myself by not honing one specific style.  I also wonder if I am evolving like any other artist who started young but just much later in life and running out of time to figure it out.

In the meantime, I keep painting.

So, I’m an Artist, or how I swapped one expensive hobby for another.

I should have paid better attention in art class in elementary school.  I might have figured out much earlier what kind of painter I wanted to be.  It would have saved a lot of money. It’s funny that to begin painting I bought the cheapest materials I could find and when the paintings turned out awful, I figured it must be the materials because, you know, it can’t be me.

As it turns out, it was me.  I can’t put down here how much money I’ve spent on easels, paint, and brushes because there is always the possibility that someone who knows me will tell my wife.  I paint to eliminate my drama, thank you.

I was beginning to enjoy photography about seven years ago and found that I could find a good angle and take some interesting photos.  My daughter has that knack seemingly without trying. She’ll go on a simple hike and come back with mouth-watering photos of rocks and fungi or a mink or a moose, where I would have just taken some pictures of a bush.  Of course, it’s hard to take a picture hiking when you are breathing so hard you can’t keep the camera still.

When I was researching to see how much money it would take to get a professional camera set I happened upon a youtube video (don’t ask how I ended up there, but quite frankly I don’t remember anyway) and saw an episode of Irish artist Frank Clarke’s “Simply Painting – Introduction to Watercolour”.  In it, he chants the mantra “anyone can paint”. Hmmph, I thought, “you haven’t seen my stick figures”.  But soon I began thinking that it didn’t look that difficult and I decided to investigate.

One of the most interesting things I learned from that is that you really don’t have to draw to paint.  It helps, of course, if you want to paint something technically difficult but it’s amazing what your mind will tell you based on a few little tricks of paint.  For instance, if you want some mountains to look close and the ones behind it to look far away, you simply paint the ones in the back lighter and bluer and the ones in front darker and greener.  Although it’s on a flat piece of two-dimensional paper, your mind tells you the fainter, bluer mountains are farther away and the painting begins to look 3d to the viewer.

Here’s another “mind blown” trick.  See the painting below?  It’s one of my first.

 

Every time someone sees this painting, I ask them what they see.  They will always say they see two people walking with some mountains in the distance.  But what they actually see as people are simply two carrots with dots on top of them.  Your mind doesn’t see carrots and dots.  It fills in the blanks and says there are two people. Mind…blown…

This epiphany was the turning point for me.  Because who can’t draw carrots and dots??  And so I swapped my expensive music hobby and potentially expensive photography hobby and began my expensive art hobby, which has stayed with me for years now until I can honestly finally say (or more importantly, other people say) I am an artist.