New painting- Putting it all together, maybe, finally

Here's the new painting I just finished. I'd like to blab on about it for a bit, if I may...

"wander heart summer breeze" 36x60 (click for details)

After two or three years of changing my style, and forcing myself out of my artistic comfort zone, I've finally got something in this painting that feels like, uh, hmmm, feels like it's where I wanted to go with this whole style change thing, actually. This piece is integrating comics and narrative, compositional flexibility, and richness of colour.

I think I can really do a lot with this style going forward, and I might actually be done changing my style for quite a while. Which is good, because changing your style for an artist is a risky thing: the partly evolved artwork will vary wildly in quality so it'll be hard to feel good about it. It probably won't sell well, you'll lose customers who like your old work better, and you won't have a consistent series of work that a gallery can promote to their customers. And it can get worse from there:

You end up with a pile of failed experimental paintings, pieces that might have some good bits but overall aren't good enough to put out in public. You not only spend a lot of time making these experimental pieces that don't turn out (and not making any money in the process), but then you have to spend a lot of time thinking about them and dissecting which things worked and which didn't and what to keep going with. Does it just need a small adjustment to make it good? Or should you just toss this whole idea out and start over? This also means you're spending your time thinking and puttering, which is great in and of itself, but you're not making any paintings you can sell, so again, you're still not making any money, while at the same time being frustrated with what you're doing. It's incredibly frustrating.

Don't get me wrong, I really like many of the transition phase paintings I did, and many of them turned out really well, but they just weren't quite 'there', they weren't quite what I was looking for. So that's why I'll say I'm happy I've gotten my work to this stage, because this piece feels like it's 'there', so it's a milestone for me. I can now start to assemble a consistent group of work in this style to bring to art shows and send to galleries. Wooo! (also: relief)

Here's a close up photos with for comparison of my old heavy paint style, with the new one, showing some texture:

Old style: There are probably at least 12 different carefully mixed colours in this section of sky.

New Style. A different (better) way to juxtapose different colours in an area.

What's changed over time is that I'm no longer working with really heavy paint with carefully chosen colour combinations, put down in a way that meant most brush strokes were final. I really loved the texture and colour I was getting from that, but I eventually found that style was, while kind of exciting to do, still too restrictive. I'll try to explain:

"Edna" 2013 - an attempt at more comics,
 but still with heavy paint.

Firstly, comics: the heavy paint didn't mesh well with adding comics style panels and insets,which is something I really wanted to do. Why do I want to integrate comics and text and narrative elements into my painting? That's going to take another blog post, so you'll just have to take my word for it. Anyway, at first I tried mixing comic panels and heavy paint, but the two things just didn't go together really well. (see Edna above) Then I started adding photocopied text in the base layer of the paintings, and simplified the paint, no longer juxtaposing multiple colours in one brush stroke. (see waterfront below) This allowed me to get some of the comics and narrative elements into the paintings that I wanted to, but it still wasn't quite there. It was still a bit too inflexible. Which leads to the second point:

waterfront, 40x48

Secondly, inflexibility: the heavily painted brush strokes and even the type of composition in "waterfront", didn't allow for changing the composition of a painting while partway through. I couldn't really add or move any objects in the painting or change colours without wrecking the quality of the existing brush strokes. I had to get the composition right at the beginning and then stick with it after that, so I spent a lot of time futzing and stressing at the beginning of every piece. This just became too stressful. Now with this new style I've taken what I started with the comics + text elements further, and I'm allowing a lot of areas to stay as transparent glazes so they don't all have to be filled in. The thin layers of paint also mean I can just add in new things at later stages. So, with this new style I can just start painting without having to have every last detail figured out at the beginning, because I know I'll be able to change things as I go along. I can just get some pencils and markers down and then go with it. Which is really exciting.

Things changed quite a bit between the beginning and the end. It's nice not to have to perfect the composition right at the beginning, knowing you can make adjustments later on.

Third, labour intensity: the heavy paint paintings were just taking too long to make, and I couldn't find a way to speed them up. As an artist trying to make at least a partial living from my work, the time it takes to make a painting is always at the back of your mind, applying pressure and stress. If this new style can help me make paintings faster, it will hopefully alleviate some of that stress.

Supply and demand that doesn't stretch

The other day I mentioned to a friend that I was having trouble keeping paintings in stock. I know that's not a bad problem to have mind you, but it does make it harder to put a good show together. My friend suggested that I should follow supply and demand and I should raise my prices and thereby slow my sales down.

Unfortunately, I don't think this will work, even if I ignore the idea that at this stage of my career I need to get as many paintings out into the world as possible and not worry about maximizing dollars per painting. An even stronger reason that I have to be very careful about raising my prices is that you can't lower them if you go too high.

I am finding out that the business of selling art is a little different than commodities that go up and down like oil or gold. Those types of things have an elastic supply and demand type of behaviour, whereas art is inelastic.

Art is more like edging towards a cliff. Galleries and other sources have informed me that once you're established you can raise your prices, but you can't drop them.

There are apparently artists who went too high with their prices (without a commeasurate increase in quality), and what happens then is not a predictable slowing down of sales, but a complete dropping off. Basically, their careers are finished. If they drop their prices they devalue all the paintings that they've already sold, and they send a signal that they might go down again, meaning that their paintings aren't reliable investments. The other signal they send is that their existing collectors paid too much. Their only options are to quit painting or to start over again at much lower prices using a pseudonym. Yikes.

So in the end, you have to suck it up, pick a reasonable price scheme (mine goes by size) based on your average quality work, and live with the fact that you'll be selling your best pieces at less than their value. And then you gradually inch your prices up and inch towards that cliff.


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