The art business waltz, lesson 10

Tonight s illustrations are again by Ivan Shiskin 1832-1898 and are courtesy artrenewal.org

I will start the great reader critique about the middle of the coming week. I have a nice group of images from many readers. There is still time to e mail me yours at stapletonkearns@gmail.com

I just can't seem to finish off this dance of commerce, A couple more good questions have come in that I will answer. I love it when people e- mail me questions or ask them in the comments page.
Several of you have asked questions about pricing, so I will begin there. I mentioned before that your art should be the same everywhere. That's real important ,and nowhere more important than when you are selling out of your studio. If it gets around that your work can always be had more cheaply, directly from you, few dealers will want to handle your art. Watch out for that.


Another question was; should I go up on my paintings in this economy? That depends on a lot of things. If your prices are ridiculously low, yes of course. I think it is partly a function of inventory, if your inventory is selling at a pace that makes you feel pressured to keep up, it may be time to go up.

Paintings that won't sell, are a percentage of your inventory and you will have to back them out of the equation when you track how fast your paintings are selling. They need to be replaced also, not just the ones you have sold. Ultimately the idea is to get your price to effort ratio to a point where it makes financial sense for you to spend your time painting. If you have a good job, or are married to a thoracic surgeon, that may not be important to you. But for many of us, painting has to pay because we need to make a living, or at least add to our incomes. It is a very reasonable expectation that if you work hard you should at least make pin money painting. Going fully professional is another matter though and I think I will discuss that later.


When you have developed an idea of how fast your paintings are selling and find that you are having trouble keeping up, you should go up. Don't go for the sky though, just take them up perhaps 10% and then stay there for a year or more. It is not very graceful backing down so be careful of going up on your prices too fast, if sales stall you may have a major problem.

A story I have seen myself is this. A young, or even a well established painter gets picked up by a New York gallery. They sit the artist down and say, our rent is 50, 00 dollars a month and we have to get big prices for things to make that work. They tell the artist "we love your art, and it should be selling for three times , or even ten times what you are getting now. The artist thinks, wow I have made it! My financial worries are over, I can buy my wife that diamond tennis bracelet she always wanted, and Ill get her a snowmobile and a bass boat too!

For a year or so things go swimmingly, the sales are happening and our artists wife is hooking the big ones up at the lake, everything is great. But then things slow down, way down, until the sales stop. What has happened is this. Every gallery has a group of customers who are likely to buy this artists work, some galleries have a longer list than others, but particularly at a high price point, that list can get exhausted and then its over. The gallery gets a new artist that the clients on the mailing list don't already have, the new kid in town. After a year or so of no sales, our artist is quietly dropped from the roster and now he has a big problem. He has been getting 12,000 dollars for his 8 by 10s. Where else other than in a high end gallery in New York is that going to happen? He can no longer get anything like that. When he drops his prices by the huge amount it is going to take to put him back in business in Squaresville, his customers are very disappointed that the artists 12000 dollar 8 by 10s are now bringing 950 dollars. There's a reputation damaging scenario.

So the moral of this story is keep your price increases within reason. If a dealer wants to take your prices to a stupendous level and you are not a very successful established artist, tell em no.
Its easier to go up then down, There may be other artists in your current price bracket who will have your sales if you go up too fast, so be careful and incremental.


There are artists who mass produce their art and sell it very cheaply. Some are very good, but most are hacks. You probably don't want to turn your painting time into frantic piecework. There are artists for whom what the actually want to make lends itself to that. But in general I recommend not to play at the bottom of the market as there is always someone who can make their art a little worse and sell it a little more cheaply. At that level in the market it is so much about price that quality totally goes out the window.

When I had my gallery in Rockport Massachusetts I would occasionally get a customer who would make an insultingly low offer on one of my fine paintings. I knew from long experience with these cats that if I agreed to their offer they would still walk away. The point was to strip me of my dignity for having the appalling nerve to present them with something they couldn't or most likely wouldn't afford. So I developed this line for skewering them, since they usually played this game to impress their wives or girlfriends with how tough they were at negotiation. The line was:

SIR, IF I COULD GET THE ART TO YOU CHEAPLY ENOUGH, WOULD YOU BE WILLING TO DISREGARD QUALITY ALTOGETHER?

On occasion I actually got their girlfriends to laugh with me.....at them.
That sort of thing is one of the reasons I am not really suited to retail. I will do a a post sometime of all the outrages things I have had said to me or have inflicted on others in my gallery. Rockport was a tourist town that saw every different level of society, so you had to be thick skinned, and sometimes it was necessary to bark at em.

Something else to be wary of is this, you go into a gallery that shows your art and one of your paintings is "out on approval" or "just sold today" of course that does happen, but try to read the dealers body language and be very suspicious if it happens twice. If you hear that, go back to the gallery unannounced in about two weeks and surprise inspect em. If the dealer stammers that they haven't got the painting back yet or the client can't decide etc,what mat have happened is this. The dealer sold that painting three months ago, but because he was behind on his rent, instead of giving you your money, he paid some bills and now he has neither the money or your painting. It happens, so watch out for it.

The art business being s consignment business is a trust business like few others. If you are a dealer and I catch you lying to me, I have to pull my work, before you rip me off for my entire inventory. I won't lie to my dealers and I FIRE THEM FOR LYING TO ME.

One of you, ( who for the sake of privacy I will call Linda,) emailed me that he was having trouble finding a dealer who wanted to handle watercolors. I went on his web site and they were very nice. Unfortunately watercolors are not popular right now. They used to be huge until the 70's anyway. But something happened. Perhaps there were too many production watercolorists making tricky technique laden crap I don't know. Some of my friends who were fabulous water colorists have painted only in oils for years. But that's the deal, its unfair and Linda is not going to have an easy time getting around that. Over the years watercolors will return to favor, its just a fashion. Oil painting seems never to go out of style. Linda asked me what he ought to do, and I will suggest this. Paint in oil, if you can draw well. the change of medium won't be too hard. When a dealer takes your oils, get them to take a few watercolors also. There are a few people out there selling watercolors, but right now its like pushing a rope.