Solving the Mystery of Selling Art, Part 1

Fish, 1986

Twenty years ago in New Mexico I tried to fix the problem of feeding myself by cranking out dozens of folky fish sculptures and selling them for less than $100. I saturated the market of my friends and acquaintances pretty quickly, so I headed up to the Santa Fe galleries. The guy at Davis Mather Folk Art Gallery was nice enough to buy a few pieces, but I wasn't a legit folk artist. Back then it seemed like a disadvantage to have gone to art school. I put stuff into some gallery on Canyon Road, but I don't recall selling anything. Lesson learned: manic production and low prices don't necessarily translate into sales.

But the internet certainly puts a new spin on things. Yesterday I came across Duane Keiser's A Painting a Day site, and my past came flooding back. Start a blog, open an eBay account, and you're golden. A friend down in Austin mentioned a neighbor who sold paintings of trees on eBay, and I guess this was her deal too. It doesn't take much looking to find dozens of similar blogs-- I have no idea who was first. They commonly are selling unframed, postcard-sized oil paintings on artboard for about $300. Typically they seem to be naturalistic painters. It might be harder to sell abstracts done daily, because that would just reinforce the conventional notion that they take no skill or effort. Some of these studies are really very good. Then again some look like muddy relics out of an estate sale. And few of these artists seem to maintain the daily pace for very long-- I can imagine it would get to be a grind pretty quickly, infecting your attitudes about painting with a commodity mentality. But, hey, art for the people, baby.