The Changing Art Market

Sunlight in the Valley
SOLD print 1/20

I quit being a project control engineer for a major international construction firm and returned to New Mexico with no solid plan on how I was going to support myself beyond an advantageous marriage. I did manage a fairly decent income with freelance writing, and then stumbled into a mask making business because of my association with the costumer for a dance company in the state.

Lunacy Limited was quite successful until I literally fell on my head after being hit by a skier. Up to that point I had broken into all the better fairs, several good galleries around the country and a wholesale market which came too close to feeling like a slave shop. Recovery from the CBT took longer than I wanted and threw me out of step with my "business plan."

Fortunately two therapies I had picked for myself, photography and watercolor painting, opened new opportunities just about the time the economy crashed,  galleries began going belly up, and art fairs became more entertainment that vendor opportunities. By then I had my studio which was open to the public and easily was accepted in just enough fairs to cover costs with my sales.

Now the art market has returned to begging for space on restaurant walls. If you are lucky they ask you. One of my venues is the Enchanted Circle Brewery in Angel Fire, New Mexico. The owner wanted me to hang my photography, which to that point was winning awards in exhibits but I thought second to my painting, which had a higher price point because of where the market had crashed. I resisted doing giclee prints of my original work but photography was different. I fell in love with giclee prints on canvas of select photographs. No broken glass or scratch frames and if the print is damaged just reprint. And if print one of 20 is sold print number two.

The economy seems to be picking up a bit and happily so are sales of giclee prints from the Brewery. Sometimes you just get lucky. At a younger age I might have wanted to be Ansel Adams or Georgia O'Keeffe. Now I am just happy to have local recognition and a market. And to sell a painting now and then because I love to paint.

Big Blue 1
SOLD print 2/20

Clouds' Illusions
For Sale Now

What is Being Printed

Ghost Elk of Santa Clara

Between the blog just before this about my choices of what images to have printed, and decision time I took more photographs on a great trip over the high plains. It is always nice to get off the deck and out with my camera. And being with another photographer always makes me pause and look at the options closer or linger longer. There is always the obvious and the elusive.

Main Street Gone

With Ana McCracken we discovered a surprising past in Wagon Mound and a wonderful old crumbling building in Miami. The array of opportunities was inspiring. And I was once  again amazed at how differently two photographers can record the same reality. We decided to do it again only this time over the Johnson Mesa and into Folsom and the grasslands of New Mexico.

Here, There, and Beyond

As I have mentioned before in this space photography began as a way for me to record my life much like a visual journal. Than it became a tool for me to capture images to translate into paintings in my studio. It is only in the last few years I have become to appreciate photography as an art within itself. And within the last couple of years it has become a profit center.

When I am out and about taking pictures it is the first two purposes which govern. I seldom, if ever, think this is a money shot. The elk on the wall in an abandoned hardware store in old Santa Clara and the window in a crumbling old building in Miami were because I felt driven to record for me. The photograph of the clouds below were for paintings. And because it just seemed such a wow moment in clouds building over the distant mountains.

Clouds Illusions

And the tree below was so wonderful in shape and form it had to be recorded as a possible inspiration for a painting or just an element in a future painting. I was surprised when I posted it on my Back Country Photography  page how popular it was.

A Tree Grows Beside It

And then there are the subjects I just love to record - old trucks. I just love old trucks. And this spring I was down in Ojo with another photographer Terry Atkin Rowe who also loves old trucks. And we were able to take pictures of our two favorite trucks. I also love playing around on photo editing with trucks. I have come to see them as a canvas for pixils. I also turn them into mixed media paintings. But they are the closest to a money shot as I have in my portfolio.  My giclee canvas prints of my old trucks sell. That is why they get selected to be printed but not why they are captured on my camera.  The problem was of all the photos of these two trucks which would I print first.

Big Red Chevy

Big Blue Profile

And, of course no run of giclee prints on canvas is complete without at least one pure landscape of the land I love.

Old Mike from Spyglass

The above will soon be displayed on the walls of Enchanted Circle Brewing. I am grateful for the opportunity to show my images there. I have picked sizes based on what fits. But all these can be printed in the size you want. Or any of the images that did not get picked in this round of what I can afford to have transferred from my camera to my computer to canvas.

What to Print - Choices

Wilted Beauty

 Not every photograph is a winner. But the beauty of photography is it serves so many different levels like memories, internet posts, inspiration for paintings, and some actually get printed and hung on walls. And there is even a level on that last. I do print and hang some of my photography on my own walls because they speak to me.

My photography is showcased in a couple local businesses. Lately Enchanted Circle Brewing as sold several of my photographs off their walls. Which means I have to replace what is sold. Ergo I need to select photos to have printed. And the third annual Angel Fire Studio Tour is in the future; September 29 and 30. My studio walls need new photographs.

Mountain View

The tourists love landscapes of the area they are visiting so what I print has to include a few of those. But all my landscapes are not necessary views of Angel Fire and Black Lake areas. But most are New Mexico. And a few could be any country road inviting you to walk in the quiet.

Country Road

Or hear the distant thunder and smell the rain.

Summer Rain

But always popular are the old trucks.

Blue Chevy

Smile

Big Red

But some decisions on what to print are done based on spaces to fill on my studio walls, the brewery or the walls of the possible owner. I am always looking for an engaging vertical composition.

Tres Amigos

Black Jack's

And in the process of doing this blog I know I have to look for more verticals.

What doesn't get printed large on canvas may become a part of my art note cards. Flowers rival trucks for note card sales.

Dancing Poppy

Night of the Snow Blind Moon Take Two

Night of the Snow Blind Moon
24 x 30 Mixed Media on Artists Canvas
$1650

I have often wondered if Michelangelo ever walked back into the Sistine Chapel and wanted to change anything about the Last Judgement? Or did in pointedly avoid the Chapel after his work was finished? Creative people are often doubters in their own skills and also in their work. Insecure.

So Night of the Snow Blind Moon was declared done by signing it and writing a progress blog. And yet it sat on my easel. Actually two easels because I traded up to another in that expanse of time. So it was deliberately moved from one to the next when the logical thing would be to install the hanging hardware and find a place on my studio walls for it. But it remained on the easel for me to stare at daily. And visitors to my studio, rather more than normal, would walk by it and ask if it was done.

"Yes," I would replay sensing a doubt in my own declaration.

The doubt was the foreground. I wanted simplicity there because I did not want to over-power the elk. And my other paintings in the On the Edge series don't have foregrounds really. I can still defend my previous assumption it was done as shown below.

Night of the Snow Blind Moon before

It is not as if I have not changed other works of art. The digital age makes it really easy to do another take on a photograph of merit. And during college I used to travel home with art supplies to "fix" paintings I have given my folks. They loved them as is but I was embarrassed at perceived flaws.

And since the painting was still on the easel I must have my doubts. And so I got out the oil sticks. It had to be oil sticks. I had already coated the finish so watercolor would not work easily. I have begun to use oil sticks more and more in the foreground of my paintings. And the thought of a total work in oil lingers but it would require big bucks for new brushes. Besides you cannot pour oil paints.

So I think I am now done with this work. If not I will just begin a new on another canvas.

Night of the Snow Blind Moon - Creative Process Blog

Night of the Snow Blind Moon
24 x 30 Mixed Media on Artists Canvas
$1650

One of the wonderful things about not being on the art fair circuit any more is I can paint what I want to paint when I want to paint it.  Or not paint. This winter seemed to be most about not painting. I was knitting. Something you can do wrapped in an afghan in front of the fire. And before that it was little paintings. And note cards and things suitable for a Christmas market.

Rain on the Mesa broke the spell. I was back to my canyons. And it would follow I was back to thinking of a theme for my on-the-edge series. I begin with a drawing. And as I stretch my own canvas the drawing determines size and proportions.

Minimalist sketch for elk of the snow blind moon - working title

Sky and moon floated and elk masked off in preparation of painting the canyon walls

I pour my skies, float my moons and suns. I do it first as it helps determine what colors I use in the rest of the composition. I had an idea of what colors I was going to use but I seldom do a color sketch. And I had no idea how I was going to paint the elk other than they would not be realistic. I was aiming for a petroglyph appearance.

Working from the back to the front

Next layer forward. Masking removed from the elk in front of painted canyons

At this point viewers started seeing a cat jumping over the moon

The canyons were also poured and the foreground. On the lower right you can even see some drips. It is at this stage I start refining the pours, and defining outlines. Still haven't a clue on what color the elk. Painting totally original pieces, not another church, leaves more questions as to where a painting is going. That can be the really fun part because the painting begins to call the shots.

Cat jumping over the moon gone and first layer of color on elk

Tweaking begins. Refined the sky and got rid of the cat.

Time to play around with the details

The on-the-edge series plays around with the mystical. All my canyon paintings do to some extent with spirals around stars in night skies and ravens in the sky in day skies.  This painting uses heart lines on the elk and spirals on their antlers.  And for days I debated the ravens. It was a night painting. When a flight of ravens is in the sky there is always somewhere a raven all alone and away. That detail was inspired by the missing man formations of airplanes. I debated just the lone raven but in the end put a distant flight across the sky.

Adjusting for Changes

Things change. And art is no different. There have been huge changes in just mediums available. And platforms. When I was majoring in Fine Art at the University of New Mexico watercolors were always done on paper. Canvas was for oil. And we stretched our own as well as learned to prepare the surface with rabbit skin glue and gesso. Acrylics were very new toward the end of my studies.

Little did I imagine I would one day be using intensely colored watercolors on canvas platforms prepared specifically for the medium. I can get the colors once only available in acrylics. And I can float those colors across the canvas. It was an amazing change for me from the pale colors of watercolor carefully applied on hot or cold press paper. And it was a change for the art buyer.

As I educated myself I found myself also having to educate my public. This is especially true on social media like my Facebook page, Binford-Bell Studio.  And as galleries began to fail and fairs no longer attract buyers like they once did, social media became more of the market place for artists and clients to interface. Art buyers want to know the artist. And so I began posting progress photos which ultimately became Creative Process blogs here.

But then things changed again. I blame the iPhone. And the tablet. So quick and easy but if I take a progress photo with my tablet and you see it on your iPhone it is not a true representation of the work. And viewers began to see cats and dragons in the skies. It belittles the work. And it puzzles me because I will look at the painting and not see it. Something fails in the translation. So no more progress photos taken with my tablet. I do after all have a great DSLR camera.

And I will post less progress photos. I will still take them to put into a Creative Process blog, and to judge the status of my own work for me. Some aspects of this new mixed media I work in is very fast because it is poured. But progress slows down as I edit that; refine the accident as it were. And lately I have added another medium to the equation; oil sticks. I joke at exhibits that I will use whatever it takes to achieve what I want.

I just don't want to confuse the viewer with what may be just a transitory dragon created by and iphone and a ipad.

Creative Process - Rain on the Mesa

Rain on the Mesa
20 x 28 Mixed Media on Artists Canvas
$1350

Been a while since I have painted a canyon scene. My first love was canyons. I returned from a trip to Utah and found all my photographs, while good, just missing something. Photography had until recently been a tool to provide inspiration on paintings. Plein Aire was always too much of a slug.

Lately I have been into painting scenes closer to home: snow capped mountains, Aspens in the fall, antelope on the fat grass, etc. I have missed my more colorful palette.

Sky poured on canvas

 I always begin with the sky. Since I generally pour them to avoid all indications of a brush being involved it is easier to mask off the main part of the painting and pour the sky. The colors and mood which results sets the tone for the rest of the painting.

Then I lay in the colors of the foreground

Tackling the middle

Canvas covered/major color blocks laid out

There is a moment after the canvas is all covered when I am not entirely sure what to tackle next. I had begun this painting with an image of the foreground where I was going to use oil stick to provide texture.

Is it done stage

At last happy with the foreground I become critical of the sky again. In this case I did not like the sky around the sun all that much. And having committed to calling it Rain on the Mesa the rain needed to be punched up a bit.  Watercolor is fast and quickly drying. Oil stick takes longer to dry and I end up with more time to fuss with the painting before applying UV varnish. With painting I used qtips to lift some color around the sun and especially the dark at the point of the mesa. As well as detail work with watercolor pens and pencils.