Every once in a while, when we think of something, or one of you asks advice about something, we will publish specific tips on purchasing, making, hanging art. Whatever seems appropriate and helpful. So check in here, below, to see if there is anything useful to you.
ART TIP #1: PURCHASING A PAINTING
Cardona-Hine Mother of the Ramayana 48 x 72
Let us say you have decided to purchase a work of art. How to go about it? Be aware that art dealers and staff in galleries are salespeople, just as in any shop. Some are reliable, honest and knowledgeable, but a good many are not, though they can seem so and be quite intimidating. So check out your dealer with experienced people–other collectors, or the artists that interest you.
Once you have done that, then what? Be adventurous. Depend on yourself, on your taste, your likes and dislikes. Follow your heart or your gut. The great collectors always do this. It is easy to buy a painting by a well-known artist, pay a high price, and get your ego fix every time you have guests over. It is much more exciting and fulfilling to take a chance, trust yourself, and buy a painting that touches you even if the artist is totally unknown. The many now famous artists Gertrude Stein and her brother, Leo, bought in Paris in the 20th century were unknown, even ridiculed. They included Matisse, Gauguin, Picasso, Monet. The list is nearly endless. Follow their footsteps, not the groove made by people with no sense of adventure, no inner confidence.
Educate yourself for sure, but remember that you have been living on this earth for years; art is drawn from the materials of this earth so you intuitively know and deeply respond to all that art comes from: color, form, composition, balance, energy, surface, depth, light, shadow, emotion. Let these be your guides.
Only you will be living with what you select, so make sure you will want to live with it.
ART TIP #2: HOW PAINTINGS ARE PRICED
When we decided top open our gallery in Truchas, one of our most agonizing problems was how to price the work. You cannot just arbitrarily–well, actually, you can, but it is not the wisest approach–put a big price on your paintings. All of us artists love what we make and the value of it to us individually is very high, as it should be. If we do not value it, why should you? But we live in a real world where value in anything has to be established over time.
Luckily, as we were just opening our space, a workshop was advertised for artists doing just what we were doing. I attended the seminar, led by professionals in various fields who covered how artists should function running their own businesses. Many areas were covered but, for me, the most important one was about pricing art. A well-respected Santa Fe gallery owner gave the presentation.
Her advice was beautifully simple. “I tell new artists to price their work as low as they can, but not below the point where it hurts.”
So that became our rule initially, here at our gallery. Over these 22 years, the value of our work has of course risen, but we still keep the prices as low as we can so that people “like ourselves” will be able to afford them.
ART TIP #3: HOW TO LOOK AT ART
A friend asked me how I would teach someone how to look at art. I could not answer her then, but I thought about it. It seems such an obvious answer: just look. But what does it mean to look? When we look, a host of judgments, emotions, attachments to certain styles, colors, subjects, as well as acknowledged and unacknowledged prejudices, biases, snobbery, even our financial situation, sweeps over us, and we are so used to this, this is so completely who we think we are, that we do not even notice what is happening! The painting in front of us does not have a chance unless it immediately fulfills all these invisible expectations.
Only if we can see that inner flood, become aware of it, and separate ourselves from it for the time it takes to observe the painting as it is in itself, are we truly able to see it. One way we can do this, can look at an art work without all that inner stuff, is to imagine we are just looking at a natural object such as a piece of driftwood, or a sunset. When we pick up a stone, we probably still judge it, as in, well, it is not as nice as the one I found last year in Mexico, but we do not bring as many of the preferences and judgments to it that we do when we call the object art. Just as we do not judge so severely a person who is simply introduced to us in passing, as we do a person who is being introduced as a possible date, we do not judge natural phenomena the way we do something made by one of us.
Try it: either the lopping off of the inner jangle of our thoughts and conditioning, many of them deliciously nasty and negative; or the imagining an art piece as just a natural object. See whether you can just look. Then see what happens to your looking.
It is spring. Everything is blossoming and budding out. Go out and practice looking.
