The art business waltz, lesson 5

Tonight's fashionable portrait painter is an American, Gilbert Stuart, 1783 - 1872
images from the artrenewal .org.
Living in the Boston area I have a fondness for Stuart. We have a lot of good ones here in the Boston Museum, he was a local hero. His portraits have a silvery tonality that I find really attractive.Stuart also was a a very fine draftsman. He was sort of a rounder, accepting payment for portraits that were not produced and using way too much snuff. I think down the road on this blog, I will do a series of posts entitled something like 25 artists you should know, profiling them and showing samples of their work. Or perhaps I could just start throwing them in to the rotation. Incidentally the next thing in the rotation is the reader critique, if you want to e mail me an image, I may include it. ( It has to have something wrong with it ) My e- mail address is stapletonkearns@gmail.com

I have a couple more points on web sites. The first is a recommendation from one of you, concerning a host that has a site tailored to the needs of artists. Here's what she said:

I chose to use Fine Art Studio Online, a web hosting service specifically for artists. There are a couple of different levels, mostly depending on how many images you want to display. I have been totally pleased with their service. I have the highest level and it is only $28 a month. For that, I get 24 hour customer service, some marketing newsletters with really some very practical information in them, and I can add, delete, or edit images on my site in a snap. I am moderately computer savvy, but I do not know html code or Morse code or any other kind of code, and this is the easiest thing to use. I can re-design it at any time I wish. They also offer a FREE 60 day trial - it is really free.. they don't even ask for your credit card info. I have no financial interest here, but I've recommended this service to many artist friends, and I think its a good one. You can get a site for as little as $10 a month. They will also register a domain name for you.

This may be a good way for you to get a site up and working. I have not actually used this site.

The second item is this: A lot of people have been doing the "painting a day" thing and selling very modestly priced art over their websites. I think if a gallery goes to your website and sees you are selling 100 dollar paintings there, yet you want to sell more expensive ones in their gallery even of a larger size, you may have a problem. I think if you want to go the commercial gallery route you may have to quit posting cheap paintings on the web. Now someone is going to e mail me and tell me about so and so who is doing both. I know a guy who claims to have driven 100,000 miles without an oil change. Maybe they have, but I wouldn't recommend it as the best course of action. The same thing applies to doing a lot of charity auctions where your work sells for far less than you want to receive in a gallery. Customers do research online, and if they keep finding your art selling for far less than in the gallery you will probably lose sales.

Does he have more hair than me?

The next item on our list of must-haves for hunting galleries is picture frames.While touring those galleries you have been noticing what sort of framing seems to be expected by those galleries. You provide the frames, not the gallery. There are essentially three types of frames. There are "modern frames" like shadow box frames and narrow lipped frames, the occasional metal frame and who knows what else. I think that painting the edge of the canvas and hanging the painting like that is even acceptable in some of those venues.That's not my world I don't keep up with it.

If I ruled the world, picture frames would be made out of wrought iron, rusted wrought iron. I have had so many frames damaged by dealers and even damaged a few myself. You can keep the percentage down, but I think there will always be some attrition.

The two kinds of frames in the galleries in which I show are metal leaf and 22 carat gold, closed cornered frames. When you go to a local frame shop and order a frame or buy one from a wholesaler, they are generally "open cornered frames" That means that the frame was made by taking prefinished sticks of moulding and chopping them to the right size and joining them.

The better fix is a closed cornered frame. That means the raw wood moulding was assembled and the frame was covered with layers of gesso and then leafed. Since it was joined and finished before the leaf went down, the leaf and the finish go right around the corner with no line or crack where the two pieces were joined. That's is pretty much standard in most of the galleries I am in. There is a lot of variation and quality differences among these frames. There is a company called Omega that markets very inexpensive frames that are just OK, they are good for shows where you would be afraid to put a gold frame, or for galleries that want to sell the art at a slightly lower price point. These Chinese frames look like they are carved wood but actually they are molded plastic mounted on wood and metal leafed.

Metal leaf looks like gold, well almost,next to a real gold frame the difference is obvious, the metal looks dead. Often times stores will call it gold leaf but it is actually bronze. It is the cheap fix. If it is done properly it can be acceptable, if it is done badly, it looks like the box Velveeta comes in. I use some metal leaf frames, but I put my own aftermarket tone on them.

The very best galleries generally will expect 22 carat frames. These are very expensive. They are also fragile. But they look GREAT! It can make a painting that looks good into something that will really make a big impression. I use about half metal leaf frames and half 22k gold frames. If you take the metal leaf frame off a piece and put it in a real gold one it makes a a big difference. If you are starting out in the gallery scene you probably won't be using these frames unless you are married to a thoracic surgeon. A frame should at the most cost about 5% of a paintings retail value. ( That is incidentally a valuable thing to know) if a frame costs 250 dollars you should be getting ( and not just asking) 5,000 dollars for the painting.

That's it for tonight, I will return tomorrow with more.