Take on Affiliates or Lower Prices?

Everyone has their own take on these “tough economic times.” Here are some thoughtful words from artist Linda Blondheim:

So many artists have the idea that only the rich buy art. Most of my most faithful patrons are middle class people including store clerks, secretaries, pest control owners, PR people, teachers and plumbers. They are every person you are likely to meet on an average day. A recent conversation with a very rich person revealed that neither he nor any of his friends had any interest at all in the arts.

I think we have to be flexible enough with our pricing to make it possible for a regular person to purchase our work now during the hard times. The little browse bin painting someone buys from me today, may be the beginning of a long relationship with a new collector. Perhaps when the economy improves, that person will decide to buy a serious painting. My hope springs eternal.

Linda expresses the opinion that “we have to be grateful for what we get in these times of uncertainty” and states that “I am not too proud to sell lower end and older work at a price people can afford.”

ArtBusiness.com agrees:

The facts are that artwork is a commodity just like any other, and just like any other, prices fluctuate. And that does not mean they always go up; sometimes they go down. They go up when money flows freely and supply gets tight; they go down when money dries up and studios, back rooms, and storage spaces begin to bulge with the labors of creative endeavor, aka artwork.

Trust Alyson Stanfield, of ArtBizCoach.com, to have an action plan for any situation you can imagine. She recommends that artists set up an affiliate program, because “Someone out there (especially one of your fans) is ready and waiting to help you sell your art.”

This is especially true because an affiliate program rewards your fans.  That means you are paying someone who is part of your artist community, instead of a gallery or retail outlet, to sell your work.

Intrigued? Alyson has a gift for being persuasive. You can read her plan or listen to it. Either way, she is convinced that this method will “keep the buzz going about your art.”

Paying affiliates and lowering your prices might amount to the same thing as far as your wallet is concerned. One has the potential to keep your friends and fans happy and your work circulating. The other rewards your buyer directly. It brings to mind the phrase six of one and half a dozen of the other.

I would be very interested in your opinion about this. I have posed the question in the title of my post as if there were only two choices. Besides the fact that I do not have room to write all the available approaches in such a small space, things are never that simplistic! All of us have valid, individual strategies for promoting and selling our work. Nevertheless, we can learn from each other! As Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “Every now and then a [person's] mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.”

Remember that old phrase about necessity being the mother of invention? There just might be a relationship between increasing the sales of our work and the sizes of our minds!

By the way,  Chris Bolmeier may be serious, or just have her tongue stuck in her cheek, but How To Earn Money Selling My Art will give you a good guffaw or three.

Terra Incognita

Nikolas Schiller is a cartographer who has turned maps into art. Two years ago, the Washington Post described him as a sly, rebel cartographer who “makes maps that look like quilts, masks, feathers, acid trips.” He has been creating these since 2004. I happen to think they are gorgeous.

One of his categories is called a Quilt Series. He also has a Mandala Series (the Jefferson Mandala is my favorite), a Star Series and many others you can explore for yourself.

Just for fun, I went to Google Maps and picked a place randomly. You may, or may not, be able to decipher the location. Schiller, of course, would not use Google Maps. He would use something like U.S. Geological Survey, or a source only a professional cartographer would have access to.

This is the Google map I chose:

Google Map

And here are some patterns produced from the map:

Satellite Design 1

Satellite Design 2

Satellite Design 3

This could get addictive! And, if you take a glimpse at Daily Design Papers, in my case it already has. You can find design sources, as I have said before, EVERYWHERE. You can produce a design from ANYTHING and EVERYTHING. That is part of the addiction: you want to achieve that. You know it is impossible, but you can’t stop trying. EVERYTHING is a very challenging amount to deal with.

The Symbolic Language of the Soul

Susan Cornelis, at Susan’s Art and Sketchbook Blog, offers a very inspiring Soul Sketching Demo in her sidebar. I appreciate how she speaks so succinctly about tapping into her imagination,  then demonstrates how she “shows up at her art table” and “watches what happens as images appear on the paper and words come to mind.”

Susan has a deep sense of how important it is to “play” with art:

This art play gives  me immediate access to the symbolic language of the soul.

She has developed a soul honoring ritual, and does not begin until she senses an inner acquiescence:

I take a moment to focus on my breath and the movement of energy in my inner body. When my thoughts have slowed and there is an impulse to begin,  I plunge in.

There is a wonderful rhythm to her ritual: tune inward, slow your thoughts, receive the impulse, plunge in.

Susan has gone beyond art making as “a technical process to achieve a certain affect of beauty or realism that can be admired by others.” Instead:

It has become a vehicle for me to identify suppressed emotions and connect with inner wisdom. Now there is a thrill of showing up to paint with the knowledge that the spirit communicates directly with me using the language of imagery, of colors and forms.

By Susan Cornelis. This piece is "in process" but so powerful already!

Watching her demo will make you eager to see Susan’s artwork. Feast your eyes at her Vision Art Gallery and h20colors. She even does pet portraits! You might be interested in taking one of her workshops.

Whatever route you take to learning more about Susan Cornelis, her art, and her philosophy for creating art, you will be delighted with your discoveries. Susan has a soul stirring approach to art,  and she is keen to pass the torch of her passion to others.

Gossamer Guests

The other day I visited Sharon Tomlinson at all Norah’S art. She had a fun post called “He knows my shadow,” which caught my eye because I am always on the lookout for good shadows to photograph.

I always love to scratch when the inspiration bug bites. Her words prompted the following comment by yours truly:

Shadows. They copy us, they play with us. Sometimes they even overshadow us. They are mysterious and diaphanous, our gossamer guests who love to follow us into the light but flee during darkness.

It brought to mind a post I wrote in October, as well as this shadow photo:

Shadows of the Tree and Me

An Open Plan

My son and I had a conversation yesterday about making plans. January is a month where plan making is a traditional, often dreaded, ritual. We have a special name for January plans, and it is very solemn.

Be it resolved that I lose “x” pounds.

Be it resolved that I become completely organized and efficient.

Be it resolved that I find a mate/dump a mate/get a date.

You know what I’m talking about. Those fairy tales we make up and dub “resolutions” but which seldom end up helping us to “live happily ever after.”

I’d rather make plans than resolutions. It may be a matter of semantics to you, but my name is Carol, not Brenda. I answer to one, and would be annoyed by the other. It is important to call things by names we recognize and resonate to. Plan is short, direct, and easily pronounced. Resolution has four, count them, four syllables, and can seldom be said without slips of the tongue, especially by those who know they are going to abandon it any moment now.

I admit that there are different degrees of planning. Some have plans that are so nebulous, it’s impossible to see a road through the fog. Others construct plans that are as detailed and footnoted as a doctoral thesis. Wherever your plan falls in the scale, successful achievers swear that it is of utmost importance to have one. You must plan, and envision it happening, in glowing technicolor, with great certainty. I hesitate to say absolute certainty, which could be the hallmark of a slightly less successful planner.

But I don’t think so, and let me tell you why. Any plan, no matter how glorious, needs room for some uncertainty. Otherwise, it is likely that the benefits of serendipity will be missed. Like a teacher who has a meticulous lesson plan, but abandons it gladly to pursue a “teachable moment,” the planner needs an openness to chance. None of us have a blueprint for the universe. Our understanding is not wide enough, or deep enough, to take everything into account. It is far more exhilarating to anticipate those miracles of chance that we could not possibly imagine, but which we can certainly embrace once we recognize them.

Dr. Carl Sagan said, “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.” The marvelous thing is that there is no limit to “the incredible.” It is a renewable resource,  and all of us have been given the tools to harvest it:

How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself anything less than a god.

~Alan Watts

So by all means, plan away. Plans are very useful for focusing the mind. But practice staying open to change and chance, to surprise. Invite the Universe to tweak your plans. Be grateful when it does~you are in for a glorious ride!

The stars can bear your weight, my friend, I promise you, they can.

~Carol Wiebe

Stars

Solitude

I am now on my third Høeg book, and have another waiting for me at my local library. I am very intrigued with the way this man writes. His observations cut as keenly as a scalpel.

I feel the same way about solitude as some people feel about the blessing of the church. It’s the light of grace for me. I never close my door behind me without the awareness that I am carrying out an act of mercy towards myself.

~Peter Høeg (Smilla’s Sense of Snow, p. 11 )

Setting Out Alone

A Print a Day

Be sure to check out Yasmine Surovec’s A print a day. Her post for January 15, 2009 is a short & sweet tutorial on how to take simple black and white shapes, develop a color palette from a favorite photograph or magazine page, and  then use those colors to jazz up the black & white originals. This results in a collection of color coordinated design papers.

I gave it a try with a simple triangle design.

Triangle Design 1

I created a palette from my Four Leaf Clover design paper.

Four Leaf Clover DP palette

Here are a couple variations.

Triangle Design 2

Triangle Design 3

Triangle Design 7

Then, of course, you can put the two together in different transparencies, and voila!

Triangle designs combined

It was great fun. Thanks, Yasmine!

White Rooms

But now I saw that .  .  .  she, and maybe every other person, was like row upon row of white rooms. You can go together through some of them, but they have no end, and you cannot accompany anyone through them all.

                                 ~Peter Høeg (Borderliners,  p. 157 )

Novels and poetry are great art activators for me. Some lines are like start buttons: the images just start flowing, accompanied by a feeling so deep it is challenging to try and express why those words evoked that feeling. But when you read the words to another, and recognize their reaction, you have entered a white room together.

Primordial Ideas and Deeper Mysteries

Color Wheel From Wikipedia

Judy Coates Perez has been mentioned in my blog a number of times. I appreciate her creative talents, her energy, and her generous spirit. So I bought one of her DVDs during the Christmas season as a gift to myself, and I enrolled in her Color Theory online class. That class begins today, and already I have declared mysef a Color Devotee. What do I mean by that?

Well, it was a quote by Mark McCauley, from his book COLOR THERAPY AT HOME: real-life solutions for adding color to your life (Rockport Publishers Inc., 2000) that got me started:

Ultimately, we don’t color our home, color is our home. Color impacts every waking second of our lives. (Introduction p.5)

We all know color because, as McCauley said, we live in it, it’s our home. We know it like a fish knows water. Just because we are constantly immersed in something doesn’t mean we are consciously aware of it, however. In fact, we often tune out what is always there, take it for granted.  Johannes Itten, a famous color theorist whose profound insights into color have influenced artists and art schools everywhere, said:

Color affords utility to all, but unveils its deeper mysteries only to its devotees.

I am declaring myself a Color Devotee (that sounds so much better than groupie)! I have spent some time studying it, but I am always open to revelations of its deeper mysteries. I especially love color surprises: when several, or many, transparent color washes produce some hues that would be a tremendous challenge to reproduce!

Itten also said:

Color is life; for a world without color appears to us as dead. Colors are primordial ideas, the children of light.

That is definitely a statement to file under the “deeper mysteries” category. No wonder color moves us so profoundly.

And as a clipping for the Itten trivia file, you can buy a Mondaine Johannes Itten Watch with a color wheel on its face.

By the way, for an EXCELLENT color resource, see Katherine Tyrell’s Colour~Resources for Artists on Squidoo.

Born to Shine

There is a school of thought that believes, and advises, that it is the kiss of death to reveal an artwork before it is finished. Thank goodness  Jude Hill doesn’t subscribe to that view. We are all the fortunate recipients of her musing out loud as she shares her  “personal journey into gift giving and story cloth.”

Nor does Katie Kendrick, who allows free access to what she is “joyously becoming.”

Denise Aumick has plenty of show and tell over at Wild Thread Studio, as do Tammy Vitale, Pam Carriker, Twila Grace, Cyndi Lavin, Susie Monday, Leah Piken Kolidas. I have their URLs on my Google Reader and visit often, because they are engaging and fascinating to follow. I have never been able to resist the workings of an open and creative mind.

I could go on and on and on. The web is literally bursting with the fireworks of inventive minds and hands~of artists who, like the women above, share often and well.

Judy Coates Perez would have to be Ms. Share Extraordinaire. Despite her many accomplishments as an artist, in May 2008 she attributed her success to the fact that blog readers spurred her on:

Through the blog I have learned so much from people. Several years ago people asked me if I taught workshops and I had to tell them no because I really didn’t know what I should teach. When people ask me questions on the blog about how I work and what products or tools I use I realize what people would want to learn from me. I appreciate this kind of feedback so much. This has really helped me move forward with taking the plunge into the world of teaching and WRITING!

So pull out all the stops, and share what you know. Heck, share what you don‘t know! There’s help and encouragement just waiting for you to ask. All of us can find a place to contribute in the big art constellation called the Internet. As Andrea Bocelli sings, “Like stars across the sky, we were born to shine.”