How Do You Buy Art?

Hope in a Storm

copyright © Joan Kerrigan

A recent thread on the ImageKind forums dealt with the question of how a person buys art? This is perhaps more complicated than it sounds as one has to take into account everything about the buyer and the seller and the art itself. Price, artist reputation, skill, medium and on and on, all count in the world of art buying. Different posters discussed both financial and emotional issues, and it seems that no one can really know everything that goes into an individual's decision to buy or not.

Interestingly, this topic came up in a NYTimes article yesterday called The Terrible Toll of Art Anxiety. It described the anguish that people with plenty of money to spend freeze up when it comes to buying art. These reasons range from fear of buying the wrong thing and subjecting themselves to social ridicule, to fear of losing money on a bad investment. Unlike buying a new car or home, art isn't well understood. When someone doesn't understand something, they aren't likely to spend a lot (or any) money on it.

My lesson here, as an artist who wishes to sell, is that it is part of my job to educate the public on the specifics of my art. To that end, I have a lot of information on my website and my ImageKind gallery profile about fractal art, history and why I like particular images. I think this is going to be only a part of my efforts but it's a start in the right direction.

Mathematical Art

Drawing Hands by M C Escher

As a fractal artist, I am fascinated by the fact that mathematics are the basis of my medium of choice. I don't understand fractal geometry but I appreciate it. I also appreciate the work of M C Escher, although I have no idea how he did it. The son of a Dutch civil engineer, M C Escher was the ultimate mathematical artist. His impossible structures are famous and he was quite prolific in his lifetime (1898-1972). Over the years he produced 448 lithographs, woodcuts and wood engravings and over 2000 drawings and sketches.

Sky and Water by M C Escher

In addition to his impossible drawings, I especially like his tesselations. Maybe, the fact that besides fractal art, I also like quilting. Patchwork quilting is also putting pieces of a puzzle together to create patterns and is heavily dependent on math.

Mosaic II by M C Escher

In Mosaic II, the white and black spaces are completely filled with design and perfectly balanced. No matter where you look, a well defined drawing exists in the space. This is a fun design and obviously the product of a master artist and mathematician. All the M C Escher works in this post are available at ImageKind, along with many others. Clicking on the pictures will take you to Escher's IK gallery.

If you are interested in M C Escher some resources are:

M C Escher: The Official Website

Wikipedia: M C Escher

National Gallery of Art: Tour--M C Escher Life and Work

My First Interview

In the Spotlight

copyright © Joan Kerrigan

I had the good fortune earlier this week to be interviewed by artist/author Elizabeth Edwards, otherwise known as 1stAngel. She is doing a wonderful job interviewing artists and putting together a blog that is filled with information, resourses and links. If you're interested in reading the interview it can be found here. The link to 1stAngel and Friends is found in my blogroll to the right.

Fractal Quilts

When I first discovered fractals and started generating these interesting designs for myself, I was very involved in quilting. I thought why not make one of these patterns into a quilt? After some research, I found to my surprise that someone had already had that idea and was creating amazing art quilts.

Rose Rushbrooke is a fractal art quilter based in Virginia. She creates one-of-a-kind art quilts using fractal images combined with traditional needlework, fabric manipulation and embellishments. To avoid copyright infringement, I have avoided showing her images but they can be found at Rendevous Gallery.

After reading about her, I decided to try my own fractal quilt and after a short time it languished and became another "UFO" or "UnFinished Object". After some years, I decided to get it done one way or another, so I cut what I had done in half. Using one piece for the front and one piece for the back, I put it together and bound it with the leftover scraps. I machine quilted it to finish. It is a mini fractal quilt of 8 1/2 inches by 11 inches. and I can proudly say that it is done.

Fractal UFO (front)

copyright © Joan Kerrigan

Fractal UFO (reverse)
copyright © Joan Kerrigan

Just to show that this incident wasn't the end of my interest in fractal quilts, I made another later using fusible web and machine quilting. It was quick and fun and may lead one day to more of these little quilts.

First Fractal Flame
copyright © Joan Kerrigan

Stumbling Along

Drapery

copyright © Joan Kerrigan

As I try to get a real business going with my art, I have been looking at many online marketing techniques and trying my hand at a few. I have found that I learn best by doing, so I jump in with way more stuff than I can handle and then scale back my efforts. Anyway, since I’m new to all of this, I know that my list of options is short and incomplete but here goes:

Website-done but revamping soon
Blog or blogs-ongoing
Forum participation-some
Free gallery space-some
Entering contests-not yet
Social bookmarking-see below
Guest blogging-not yet but working on it
Affiliate sales-ongoing
Google adSense-ongoing

Social bookmarking is a new idea to me. I don’t belong to MySpace or Facebook…yet. It seems to be the venue of choice for the young adult crowd, basically the age of my children. These sites also have some bad press about them and I'm not convinced that it would be worth my limited time.

So I’m not ready to join those but I have set up an account on StumbleUpon. This is an interesting site that downloads a toolbar to your browser and lets you rate and review websites that you either create or come across in your web surfing. You can find other users who share the same interests and see the sites that they are reviewing.

You can also push a “Stumble” button on the toolbar and it randomly takes you to sites that are tagged with the items that you have designated as your interests. You can filter out adult sites as well as flash, video or other file formats that you don’t want to deal with. It takes a little time to get going but I’ve enjoyed seeing a lot of new sites and artist’s galleries that I wouldn’t have found otherwise. Some people seem to have a knack for finding unusual and interesting sites and it’s fun to look at their choices.

So, as far as increasing sales in my art business, I would have to say that I haven’t seen any benefit yet. But it is a way to target my websurfing to things I like. With more time, perhaps it may help. I’ll give an update in 4 to 6 months, so stay tuned.

Sunday Best February 24, 2008

I am Fawn, hiding in Stillness, minding my Mama by David Haenn

Indian Cress by Joni Gruber

Pelican by Jane Hards

Divisions in The Fractal Community

Fractal art is changing as the software to make it improves and becomes more powerful. The fractal art community, although fairly small, is also changing and becoming more diverse and more divisive. Today you can find more than just a generic mandelbrot set, but art that is as different as the artists who create it. You will also see more opinions on whether or not some fractal art is even a fractal or art at all.

To the Stars --copyright by Joan Kerrigan

Some critics complain that the UltraFractal community is trying to make its art into the only definition of what good fractal art should be, excluding all other software. On the other hand, an artist on another site is dismayed that UltraFractal appears to now be a second class citizen, as art made with another program, Apophysis, takes the lead in views and comments.

Canyon Fire --copyright by Joan Kerrigan

For me, I have tried several programs and love UltraFractal. I like making art that is typically fractal and I like the challenge of making fractal art that doesn’t look like a fractal at all. I see my art evolving and changing and appreciate that I don’t have to adhere to any rules set by any faction of the community. I’ve only entered one contest, which was on deviantArt. I won second place with my entry, but only after being required to send my parameter set to the judges to prove I made it in UltraFractal!

Iris--copyright by Joan Kerrigan

So although I keep up in a casual way with both sides of the discussion, I will continue to do my own thing and create my art in my own way. I’ll also be taking an online course in UltraFractal Artistry at the Visual Arts Academy starting in March. I’ll post periodically on my progress and you can decide for yourself if it’s art or not. I welcome your feedback.

The Benefit of Story

Tribal Memory

I love textures and patterns in art and nature. It took a long time developing as an artist to appreciate texture the way I do now, but heavy textures often show up in my current work. I created this piece, "Tribal Memory", in response to the Online Visual Artists Community competition for February. The theme this month is Grunge and grunge is right up my alley these days. These are the words I used to describe the picture at ImageKind:

An ancient tribal society used to live here, in step with nature and protective of its people and the land. They vanished over time; no one knows what happened. Were they conquered or assimilated into other societies? It's a mystery, but they left their mark, a spiral tattooed on the texture of time and history. A tribal memory as it were. I was able, fortunately, to recreate this mark and submit it to the Online Visual Artists Grunge Contest in February of 2008.

Part of what I enjoyed about this upload was the storywriting aspect. I have read that story is what sells and if you can create a story around your product, art in this case, more people can relate to you and your creation. You are selling entertainment as well as a product. So an ongoing goal of mine is to work on my personal "story" and the "stories" of each work I offer to the public.

Renoir

"Self Portrait"

A couple of years ago, I went with a community college group to the Barnes Foundation . Located in Lower Merion Township, PA, near Philadelphia, it houses a large collection of French Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and early Modern paintings. It was the first time I had seen any of these paintings in person. Although the internet has made viewing the world's art easy, it remains important and inspiring to be able to see the real thing up close. I would have a hard time choosing a favorite among the artists represented, but the the paintings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir stood out for me, especially the portraits.

"La famille d`artiste"

Renoir's paintings from his early maturity show a saturation of color and the dappled light that the Impressionists were known for. The painting shown below, Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette, done in 1876 is one of the best known Impressionist paintings.

"Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette "

Through his years of painting, Renoir was prolific, producing several thousand paintings. As he influenced and was influenced by other artists, his style and methods changed. In his later years, he developed rheumatoid arthritis and eventually had to paint with his brush strapped to paralyzed fingers. He remains today one of the favorite painters from the French Impressionist Era and his works are widely reproduced.

"Girls at the Piano"

Note: All of these reproductions of Renoir's paintings are in the public domain and available from Wikimedia Commons.

Some links to information about Renoir are:

Wikipedia-Pierre-Auguste Renoir

WebMuseum

Expo-Renoir

No More Excuses

"Tea for Two with Lemon"

I used to be a pastellist. I say “used to be” because I haven’t actually gotten my fingers dusty for the better part of a year. I have all kinds of excuses for not painting, too. Last year I was working on planning my daughter’s wedding and then we had the wedding and then she and her new husband temporarily moved in with us and then there was Christmas and well…you get the idea. There’s always an excuse.

"Iris Trio"

However, I happen to be the webmaster and now the secretary for our local pastel society, NJPPS, so to not be working in pastel is a crime. We also have several shows coming up and I’m supposed to be in one of them. I’ll have to take an old painting but that’s okay. I’m hoping to get inspired because I know as soon as I set up my easel, the pleasure I always feel mixing the colors on paper will come back. And then with no more excuses to offer, I can once again say I am a pastellist.

Amsterdam Part 2

This statue of Multatuli is one of the artworks we found on our walking tour of Amsterdam last month. I also found a lot of little sculptures tucked away as I worked my way around the canals, but the sculpture of Multatuli is a major one as he is a hero to the Dutch.

My second museum stop was the Rijksmuseum, right down the road from the Van Gogh Museum. Unfortunately, most of the museum was under construction while we visited. One wing, which housed the major works of art and history, was open to the public. I enjoyed the audio tour very much. It not only narrated some of the history of the Netherlands and the artists but also blocked out a lot of the noise that came with visiting school groups.

The highlight of the Rijksmuseum, of course, was standing before Rembrandt's Night Watch. I feel blessed to have seen it in person and was amazed at the grandeur and size. It is huge and many visitors can view it at the same time.

Here are some links to resources about Rembrandt.

Rembrandt--Wikipedia

Rembrandt Painting

Artcyclopedia

Amsterdam Part 1

Last month, I had the good fortune to be able to tag along with my husband on a business trip to Amsterdam. I didn't know much about the city before we went but learned a lot while we were there.

First, it's a beautiful city with so much history and intriging architecture that we could have spent more time there and not seen it all. But I feel lucky to have gone in the first place. When I am able to accompany him, we like to stay somewhere downtown so I can walk anywhere I want to go. Being a total suburbanite, I don't know how to do trains and subways so walking suits me. Good exercise, too. Usually, I walk to the museum district to tour all the art museums alone. This goes back to a trip where my husband managed to zip through an entire aquarium in 15 minutes, and see everything--fast! I tend to spend hours at these places. In Amsterdam, I spent time at 2 major museums, the Van Gogh Museum and the Rijksmuseum. The Van Gogh Museum was amazing. To see Van Gogh's work up close and in his own country is a memory I’ll treasure. I used the audio tour headphones which was the first time I've ever done that. And I think unless I'm going with a group, this is how I'll always tour a museum. I got to hear a lot more about Van Gogh and his art and life than I ever would have gotten from the wall mounted text alone. Since the entire history of Van Gogh is beyond the scope of this blog, I've provided some links so you can research this interesting artist yourself. And if you're ever in Amsterdam, make sure this is a stop on your itinerary. I'll talk about the Rijksmuseum in my next post. Vincent van Gogh--Wikipedia The Vincent van Gogh Gallery WebMuseum van Gogh's Letters This is just a sampling of the resources available on van Gogh!

The Battle Rages On

"Singing the Blues"

Everyone has an opinion and on the ImageKind Forum these days, everyone is expressing theirs. Members are in complete disagreement about the changes we all found last week when we woke up and checked our galleries. ImageKind is up to its eyeballs with the issues they've created by releasing a "soft beta" version of their new features without notifying their artist contributors. I'm still having trouble with the pricing mechanism. I thought I had resolved it by clearing out my cache but my images are still showing different prices depending on the screen. This is a problem but maybe not as much for me as for some of the artists who are currently realizing higher sales.

I think part of the problem is that IK still hasn't sent the artists an email regarding any of this. If I hadn't become more active the last couple of months, I wouldn't even know of the changes. This seems to me to be a betrayal, at least of open communication, even though the changes were all made in expectation of them being positive. I do understand the need to be competitive and I'd rather see greeting cards offered than t-shirts or mugs. I'll go somewhere else for those. I think their intentions were good but implementation lacked.

I'm hoping the issues are resolved soon. I like the site and have started linking all of my blogs and signatures to them as my main print on demand service.

Online Visual Artists

"Spiral Roses"

I joined a forum called Online Visual Artists Community a short while ago. The forum boasts a membership to date of 343 and exists to support artists in their efforts to sell art. The members seem very friendly and willing to answer questions of all kinds, from legal issues to licensing, from software to artist sites.

There are sub-boards for many of the online sales venues, like ImageKind and Cafepress. Many of the members, as well as forum moderators, are very involved in Imagekind so there is a lot of information and up to date news about it. But, being an independent site, any other venue can be discussed on its boards.

For fun, they also host a monthly contest and have a few galleries of members' work. I would heartily recommend it to any artist who wishes to use the internet to market and sell their work.

Online Chaos

"Carlo's Chaos"

I've been looking at all the options available online for promoting my art and it's overwhelming. There are artist forums, online galleries, forums in each gallery, blog and website registries, social bookmarking programs. It's truly chaos. In my next post, I'll highlight and write about one of the online options that I'm trying and whether or not I think it's working as hoped. I'm thinking that most of these will require more time to determine their effectiveness, but one has to start somewhere.

Happy Valentine's Day

"Valentine Heart"

Happy Valentine's Day to everyone, especially my wonderful family who supports me in this crazy venture to show and sell my art!

Changes at ImageKind

"Golden Beauty"

A lot is going on at ImageKind this week. To the delight of some and the dismay of others, IK has introduced greeting cards as an option. I generally like the idea of this as they need to be able to compete with other online print-on-demand services. On the other hand, I'm not sure it's being implemented well. I'm willing to withhold judgement for a time as the dust settles and the site gets back to normal.

Meanwhile, the picture above, "Golden Beauty", is the only image I have that conforms to the 7x5 or 5x7 dimensions of the card, so it is the only image I have opted in on with this new feature. I'm waiting to see if I want to rerender some of my fractals to the correct dimension or simply crop them or even do nothing at all. Time will tell.

On another very happy note: My youngest daughter turns 20 today! Happy Birthday, Stephanie!

Below Freezing Today

" Patriotic Abstract"

It's below freezing today and I'm trying to think ahead to the summer with July 4th in mind. This is another fractal image at Dreamstime and totally unlike anything I've done before, but I thought it was fun! And now, my feet are cold and I'm looking forward to warmer weather...

Backgrounds Needed (but not at LO)

"Blue Grid Glow"

Trying something new, I'm linking directly to this background image on Lucky Oliver. Backgrounds are always needed and buyers seem to like an unending flow of new and different ones. Unfortunately, on Lucky Oliver, buyers don't seem to need much of anything from me. I have to admit that having over 700 images on the site is starting to seem like a bust. My images are selling on the 2 other sites that I contribute regularly to, but at this point, uploading to LO is more to get my name into search engines for other ventures that have greater possibilites. It's a shame really that such an interesting site is such a dud.

Microstock Group Returns

"Ceramic Swan"

Happily, Microstock Group Discussion Forum is back. Apparently there was a problem with the host and bandwidth and poor communication. But I'm glad to see the site is okay and from the posts I've read there, the members of the forum are extremely relieved.

What Happened to Microstock Group Discussion?

"Spiral Steps"

One thing about the internet that I've learned is that nothing ever stays the same. Everything is in flux. I don't belong to any of the independent microstock discussion groups but I do read them to keep on top of news and opinions. This morning one of the forums is gone. Microstock Group Discussion Forum has vanished-evaporated into cyberspace like it was never there. Maybe tomorrow it will be back, maybe not. Either way, the only thing I can do is keep my own business going.

Simplicity

"Star in the Night"

This is just proof that sometimes simple is best. In microstock, you never know what the customer is going to buy.