Should I make and sell prints of my art?

I'm NOT on the table, I'm in the bowl.

I left off last night with the question, Should I make and sell prints of my art? I am going to go after that question from a business and not an ethical viewpoint. I don't feel that they are a good way to grow your career and income today, so I can for now avoid the ethics questions. There are fine painters who have done prints and I don't mean do imply that that is unethical, although if people are being deceived into believing these prints have a high investment value rather than being affordable reproductions of real art, I do have a problem with that. I would never support fooling people about what they are being sold.

I have done lithographic prints and I have done giclees. I still have mixed feelings about it. I currently show no prints and I am not interested in doing that. When I owned my own gallery it made some sense. I was in a tourist town and people wanted to buy something of mine. My cheapest painting in those days was about 950.00 dollars for an 11 by 14 so I had prints that I sold. They kept the family in groceries, literally. There were many times we lived on print sales until the next painting sold. I also sold about a zillion greeting cards.

I had lithographic prints and giclees too for a couple of hundred dollars framed, I had about two images of Rockport Harbor that we sold in a frame under glass for about 300.00 dollars.Whenever I sold one I always told people "this is a reproduction of a painting and not an original work of art. It has no investment value and is just a decorative item. Since the prints weren't sold any where else other than my gallery I had control over their presentation and I was comfortable with that.

I no longer have a retail shop and I don't want to market prints. It is simply to much work for too little return. When I had my gallery, I had to be there anyway..... I certainly don't want to do trade shows like art expo, advertise in Decor magazine or cold call frame shops! The number of units you have to sell to make anything is staggering. For some of you selling the occasional on demand giclee for a couple of hundred bucks seems like a great idea, but it is tough to market and sell enough to support a family if you don't already have a store. Some of you have read this blog long enough to remember a post I did breaking out the amount of art it is necessary to sell to keep a family of four afloat. I have always thought it was one of my best posts it is here.

So I guess my advice would be... that even if you can sell a few to your friends and family, unless you have a retail outlet that you own or are perhaps doing outdoor shows, marketing prints is probably not time well spent.You may sell a few but I don't see them as a logical addition to most painters marketing. This is more true now than it used to be. Twenty years ago the market for prints was stronger. I think the excesses of the market taught many people to buy real art. So I think the market for original paintings is expanding and the market for prints is contracting. They are not the future, at least not the great landrush sure fire way to an art career. I don't feel for most of us it is the way to build a career of sustainable sales.

Let me tell you a story to show how bad the print thing once was. Back in the late seventies after I had trained with R. H. Ives Gammell I moved back to my home state of Minnesota
. I thought I would make a living there. Wildlife art was everything. There was no interest in anything I did at all. In fact it was hard to sell paintings. People wanted to buy prints, they figured if it was good enough to make a print out of ,it must be pretty good. That it was a print was actually verifying to them. I was pretty young, wet behind the ears and literally hungry. I had to sell to eat.

I for a period of time was making paintings in acrylic on paper and leaving a white border around their edge. I signed them in pencil in the white border at the bottom and matted and framed them under glass. I tried to make my paintings look like prints! I remembered what Frank Zappa said "its not getting any smarter out there, you've got to come to grips with stupidity and make it work for you!"

After a a few months I quit doing that because it wasn't making any difference. A landscape was nothing more than a stage for an animal to pose upon, and my paintings lacked the main actor. The artists out there weren't selling art, they were selling animals.Ultimately I realized I was beating my head against the wall and I moved to Rockport to open my first gallery. That was 1983.