The Wishing Well | 24 x 30 oil, Private Collection

A collector friend who happens to live in town asked me to bring some new works by his place a couple of weeks ago.  Above his kitchen table hangs this painting.  When he bought it several years back, he asked me to put an extra coat of varnish on it.  “I like grapefruit,” he explained with a smile.  “It tends to squirt.”

It’s hard to describe what an honor it is when someone chooses to make a painting part of their home.    This guy likes grapefruit, and he likes my painting — hanging right over his breakfast table so he can enjoy it every morning. 

Visiting Jack reminded me why I paint.  It’s about giving a gift to the viewer.  That connection is, of course, a gift to the artist also.

If somebody enjoys your work, be encouraged.  If they have chosen to live with it, (even a reproduction of it), as part of their daily life, you have achieved the ultimate honor for an artist.

Somebody needs the art you are about to make.  Keep going…

Branding Your Cow
The Importance of Branding in the Sale of Art
A Marketing Message from Art Publisher Eric Rhoads

Moos of panic filled the dusty air as cowboys pressed the hot branding iron against the flesh of the cattle out West. This painful exercise, branding, served the purpose of marking ownership of the cow. But the mark on the cow was less important than the reputation of the rancher. For instance, cattle rustlers knew which farmers would overlook the loss of an occasional cow and which were so tough they would hang cattle thieves on sight. Rustlers would avoid stealing cattle with certain brands. The behavior of the rancher became the meaning of the brand.

If you’re marketing art, you’ve probably heard a lot about branding, and you may be wondering how it relates to you. We know companies like Apple, Coke, and McDonald’s have the most recognizable brands, but those brands also have meaning. For instance, the McDonald’s brand means consistent quality and fast service.

Think about the meaning of each of these brands.

Harley-Davidson: Loud, thunderous mufflers, radical, non-conforming
Apple: Innovation
Louis Vuitton: Elegance
Walmart: Lowest prices
Target: Low prices with style

Smart marketers seek to define a brand and make everything they do a relentless reinforcement of that image. Once established, a brand never, ever changes.

If I were to ask art collectors for the names of the most successful artists who command the highest prices, I would hear the same names, over and over. Though there may be painters whose quality of work is equal to or better than those top names, they cannot command the same prices and see little demand for their artwork because their brands are not strong in the eyes of the collectors. I could also ask art collectors for the names of the most successful galleries in the world, and they would cite the same top galleries.

A Strong Brand = Goals Achieved
A strong, quality brand brings higher prices because the brand gives buyers confidence. I know a dealer who recently commanded a premium of about 40 percent for paintings he sold — though collectors could buy equally good paintings, from the same artists, from other dealers for less money. The brand of this dealer is so strong that collectors feel more comfortable buying from him, knowing they won’t get a fraud, knowing he will stand behind them, and knowing he always finds the best paintings.

Galleries with strong brands have worked tirelessly to make sure everything they do is a reinforcement of that brand. If the brand is about top price and top quality, you will never see that gallery running a sale. These owners invest in elaborate decor for their galleries and have elegant locations in the best neighborhoods, giving confidence to high-end art buyers.

Branding Is Either Controlled or Accidental
Think of your brand as the position you hold in the mind of the potential buyer. If you have a brand at all, either you have defined it intentionally or it has been created for you, unintentionally. If you show up drunk at openings and you look like a slob, that becomes the image others have of your brand. If you drive a Bentley and are a natty dresser, you’re sending a signal of success.

But brand isn’t just about appearance, it’s about the whole of what you project over a long period of time. It’s about the quality of your work, the frames you use, the people you’re known to associate with, your politics, the pictures and opinions you post on Facebook, the look and design of your ads and brochures, and everything else seen by the public. Smart brands rarely broadcast their opinions about religion or politics because that’s an automatic turn-off to a large portion of the buying public (though a few brands are all about being radical, irreverent, or political). Sometimes a brand position isn’t about original art sales at all, but about other goals, like acceptance into major museums, selling prints, obtaining licensing deals, or just getting press.

Are You Walmart or Lexus?
One of the keys to brilliant success starts with defining what you want your brand to be and how you will project and reinforce it. What about you? Are you in control of your brand? Is every touchpoint a reinforcement of that brand? What is your brand? Does it accomplish what you need it to accomplish? Does it match the perceptions you need from the people you want as customers? Are you Walmart or Lexus? Each position is valuable, depending on whom you’re targeting and the desired end result.

One of Three Brand Positions
Even if you’ve never stopped to think about your brand, you have one of three brand positions. You are either unknown and have no brand, or you have a brand you’ve intentionally created, or you have a brand that has been created for you by others.

Do you have a brand? Do you know how others perceive your brand? Is it accomplishing the desired result? If you have no brand yet, you have the potential to build one. If your brand isn’t accomplishing your goals, you have the potential for re-branding.

Finding Brand Clarity
Branding is critical to the success of any business or product, including artists and art galleries, but branding is a tactic, based on a solid marketing strategy that is rooted in knowing your exact goals. Once you understand where you want to be and what you need to accomplish, the brand position you need to take will become clear.

For instance, if you need highly affluent people to buy your artwork, you need to determine a brand position you can own in their minds and develop a step-by-step process to build that position. (Branding is a long-term process; it takes lots of repetition over time.)

For some, it’s too much effort to think about creating or managing a brand — and as a result, their careers will go whichever way the wind is blowing. For others who have specific goals,  branding is a critical process that requires a branding plan.

What about you? Does everything you do reflect your brand? Your website, your ads, your business cards, your appearance, and your representatives? Can the people you are targeting reflect your position back to you, or does it exist only in your mind? Implementing a solid branding plan is one of the many critical keys to success as an artist. It’s worth thinking about if you’re not where you want to be.

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Republished by permission. B. Eric Rhoads is publisher of Fine Art Connoisseur and Plein Air magazines and is conducting his marketing bootcamp at the PleinAir convention. You can find his art blog at http://ericrhoads.blogs.com/artist_marketing/

This is the project I wrote about earlier this week– the one I started over after painting the whole book last week.   Boy, am I glad I repainted it.  Much better.

Now it’s heading to New York-

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PATCH by David Slonim                                                                                                                     To be published by Roaring Brook Press (MacMillan), 2013.

PATCH | rough sketch

Last week I wrote about the struggle to begin a project.  Today comes the really fun part- STARTING OVER.

I painted the art for a new children’s book project last week.  (It’s a fast style for this one, so I got all 15 spreads done in five days).    Monday morning I came in and could see that the art was just not good enough.  Color, line, harmony… uggh.

Here’s a secret the pros never mentioned during their dazzling slide shows when I was in art school:  Professional artists are not magicians who nail it on the first try every time.

If you are not satisfied with your work, it is not evidence of a lack of talent.  It means you have the eye to know when it’s right and when it’s not.   Not everybody has that.

Now the question I have to face today is –Do I love the process or only the final result?

Time to fall in love with the process again…

“Talent is the willingness to keep trying until it’s right.” 

-John F. Carlson (Carlson’s Guide to Landscape Painting)

 

 

 

Today I begin final artwork for a children’s book.  Blank illustration board is lying on my table taunting me.   Insecurity surfaces, as always.  Will I be able to do it again?  Do I have what it takes today?  What if the work isn’t good enough? 

The deadline is real.  A promise has been made.    Like any performer, there comes a moment when you must simply step up and deliver.    Didn’t sleep well last night?  Me either.  The deadline doesn’t care.

Here are some strategies I’ve learned for building momentum.  These are simple, but it really does help me to remind myself:

1.  I  can’t paint an entire book.  (For fine art, I can’t paint an entire show).  Not today.  What I can do today is steps.   Break the project into doable action steps.

2.  Prepare materials and the work space.  Enjoy the fact that you get to make art today.  You don’t have to shovel dirt.  This is a blessed day already.  Be grateful.

3.  Review the project.   Divide the number of images needed by the days available.  How many images do I need to complete per day?  Per week?  Set a reasonable goal for each day.

4.  Build in margin.  Expect mistakes and do-overs.   Plan on it.  Amateurs expect magic on the first try.  Experts know when to start again.

5.  Shut out all thoughts of audience response, sales, awards, accolades of any kind.  That’s NOT what this is about.   That’s not where art comes from.

6.  Play music that energizes you.

7.  Forget everything else and lose yourself in the joy of image-making.  The feel of the brush in your hand, the smell of the paints, the textures, colors, line… FIND THE FUN and get lost in it.

These are the things I’m telling myself and doing today.  Because the inertia is real.  The fear is real.

The one other thing I always do is offer the gift back to the Giver and ask for help.  No point in trying to do this alone.

Time to get in there and make some art.

I’ll  be participating in the 2012 Coors Western Art Exhibit and Sale this week in Denver, CO.  My son Michael and I will be flying out Monday night, enjoying some father/ son time, doing some sightseeing, and enjoying the preview reception Tuesday night, followed by the Red Carpet Reception Wednesday night.  Here are my show pieces:

Bison | 24 x 30

Yellowstone Remembered | 60 x 48

Red Rocks at Sundown | 30 x 40

From the official web site:

The 2012 Coors Western Art Exhibit and Sale will open with a Red Carpet Reception on Wednesday, January 4, 2012. Advance reservations are $200.00. For additional information or to receive an invitation, please call National Western, 303-299-5560.

The exhibit will be open to the public each day of the National Western Stock Show, January 7-22, 2012.

Location:
National Western Stock Show Complex
4655 Humboldt St | Denver, CO

Exhibit Hours:
Sunday – Thursday 9 A.M. – 8 P.M. (On the last Sunday the Stock Show closes at 6:00 P.M.).
Friday & Saturday – 9 A.M. – 9 P.M.

Viewing the Willem de Kooning exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York last week, one thing was clear– de Kooning painted like he meant it.   My family and I agreed that many of  the paintings would be difficult to live with over the dining room table.   But they are not easy to look away from either, even less easy to dismiss.

The entire sixth floor of the Museum of Modern Art is devoted to about six decades worth of de Kooning’s explorations.  Due to the crowds waiting at the entrance of the show,  we chose to enter  the last gallery first, viewing the show in reverse.  It turned out to be a good strategy, allowing unhindered views of magnificently large canvases

SCALE

Since scale is an element of design,  I wanted to see these giants in person.   My belief was confirmed:  you haven’t seen de Kooning if you have only seen reproductions. (The grand canyon on a postcard isn’t the grand canyon).  Emotional force comes through loud and clear when you stand in front of a massive wall of paint.

Untitled 1986

The first gallery we entered (the last gallery of the show) displayed de Kooning’s final works, created under the specter of Alzheimer’s.  Large pale or white canvases were cut with swooping ribbons of primary color.  One arrangement of looping lines was done in blue and black.  A few included peach and tangerine.  Simple, direct and somewhat pleasing, none of them  moved  me.

Walking into the next gallery was a jolt.  Suddenly the walls radiated passion, energy, and a restless intelligence animating everything.  Seven-foot canvases floated majestically on the walls.   Vivid colors sang out like jazz improvisations.   These huge paintings are  rich, difficult, and captivating.

LINE

From his early abstract experiments, he emphasizes line cutting space.  His early masterpiece “Excavation” is accompanied by smaller, similar variations on the theme of calligraphic line carving up space.  They struck me with the force of ancient cave paintings.

Excavation, 1950

His highly praised series of black paintings are white lines slicing up black space.

1948

In the disturbing series of “Woman” paintings as well as  works  like “Easter Sunday,” slashing, angular lines provide structure over and pulsing underneath colored spaces.   Newspaper transfers — photos and text ghosted in reverse — appear subtly and surprisingly throughout.  The paint texture is rich and varied, but has a gritty, dry quality.

Woman I, 1950-52

TEXTURE

In the next-to-last gallery, linear angularity gives way to slippery lines floating over and pushing into larger masses of intense color.   The eye is offered little resting place as paint slides, drips, bubbles and clumps with abandon.   Colors threaten discord but never quite tumble into cacophony.

Each painting is a textural tour de force.   From thin paint, sanded back into the canvas,  to luscious liquid strokes as wide as your hand, to heaped up sandcastle structures pushing out from the surface, de Kooning appears to have been intoxicated with  textural possibilities.   I left the show determined to have more fun with paint.

Untitled XII, 1975

Our photography-based popular culture has left most of us without the tools for appreciating non-representational art.   Since any foreign language sounds like gibberish until we learn it, I would humbly challenge my friends who dismiss all abstract art as childish blather to reconsider.  De Kooning has something to say to those who will listen.

Would I like to own a de Kooning?  Some of them, definitely.  Many of them, no, thank you.   They can be visually and emotionally messy, even disturbing.   But this is their strength.  To me, de Kooning’s  body of work feels like a dissection or a surgery.  Not easy, but important.   I’m glad he had the guts to do it.

De Kooning was a man of intelligence and talent struggling with a universal human problem – the attempt to find order and peace in the face of  uncertainty, pain and loss.  I’m not sure he ever achieved resolution, personally or artistically.   Did he even believe  it was possible?  Hard to tell.  But he openly shared the struggle with us.  It feels very honest and very human.  For that, I am grateful.

(Sales tax will be added for Indiana residents). 

He Came With the Couch  $15.99  |  $17.11 with sales tax

Oh Ducky!  A Chocolate Calamity  (paperback only)  $6.95  |  $7.44  with sales tax

Moishe’s Miracle (paperback only)  $6.95  |  $7.44 with 7% IN sales tax

You Think It’s Easy Being The Tooth Fairy? (hardcover) $15.99  |  $17.11 with 7% IN sales tax

(paperback)  $6.95  |  $7.44 with 7% IN sales tax

Ten Turkeys in the Road  $16.99  |  $18.18 with 7% IN sales tax

Bed Hog  $12.99  |  $13.90 with 7% IN sales tax

Silly Tilly, by Eileen Spinelli

Here’s the pencil rough for this illustration:

1)  What are your strengths as an artist?

Think about visual language.  Are you good at color?  Value patterns?  Space division? etc.

Think about style.  Are you naturally wired to paint  Impressionism?  Realism?  Abstraction?  Minimalism?   Have you made peace with your particular bent?

Think about communication.  Can you move an audience?  Can you connect with something deeper than a pleasing surface?

Think about subject matter.   Can you paint show-stopping still lifes?  Are you good at capturing the soul behind the eyes of a portrait?  Do your landscapes sing?

Flannery O’Connor said about writers — this is a paraphrase in my words — that you can write about anything you choose, but you cannot choose what you will write about well.

SO the question is – what are you good at?  What do people tell you they like about your work?

In the workshop session, we went around the room, telling each of the twelve artists what we, as a group, believe are their strengths.

2.  What are your weaknesses as an artist?

One person said “shapes.”  Another said, “color.”  Drawing came up.  Somebody else said dividing space was a problem.  Growth becomes possible when we can identify the areas where it is needed.  You have to know what disease you have before you can treat it.

3.  What do you need to understand better?

This is different from #2.  A “weakness” in question #2 is the inability to adequately put into practice something you already understand.  You are not yet able to get it from your head to the end of your brush.

The question now is not what knowledge you can’t yet fully use, but what knowledge do you lack?  What do you just not “get?”

I remember vividly the time in my career when it was painfully obvious that I didn’t understand color.   It wasn’t that I couldn’t do what I already knew.  I didn’t know.  I wasn’t even sure what the questions should be, let alone the answers.

Another example– It took me years after reading David Leffel’s book “Oil Painting Secrets from a Master” to really understand what a visual concept is.  He introduced me to the importance of having a visual concept for each painting, and did a fine job explaining it, but I really didn’t grasp it for a long time.

4.  What do you need to DO to grow?

Do you know what to do to “move the ball forward?”  I mean things like:  what excercises can you do to work out the things you know but can’t yet control?  What books should you read to gain insight (ask friends, make a list)?  What teachers should you seek out, what workshops you should take?  What actions can you take that will get you over your current hurdles?

And if you continue doing the same things the same way you’ve always done them…well…

5.  What are the top three names on your list of masters you intend to be influenced by?

To become wise, we must choose to be influenced by the wise.  Who are your mentors in the world of master artists?  Do you know what it is about their work that moves you?  How will you absorb the lessons they have to offer?   Are library books of their work stacked next to your bed?  Are you able to explain to a non-painter in easily understandable terms what makes their work great?  Have you copied their work lately?

6.  Who are your art buddies?

Community is a creative person’s secret weapon.  Usually I find that I have been given 80% of what I need, and the other 20% of what I need has been given to someone else.  With whom are you meeting regularly?  Is there someone you call when you crash and begin to doubt whether you have any talent?  Who needs your input and encouragement as much as you need theirs?