Art quotation

The way to push painting to a different deeper level is abstraction.  The abstraction is not an alternative to --but a path towards, reality's core......author unkown
Love this quote!

New Painting, "Red Red Poppies"

As much as I love creating abstract work I love painting colorful Poppies too.
This is a canvas 51x76cms in size and created with the use of a palette knife and thick primary colors straight out of the tube!

Tool #4 - Apply the 5 P’s of basic marketing principals

Product – Price – Place – Promotion – PeopleThat is to say that you have the right product at the right price in the right place with the right type of promotion (advertising) and sell it to the right people. This is also known as the marketing mix.
So if you get the right mix of the 5 P’s you should succeed in selling your product. Getting the mix right is the hardest part.

1. The product is the artwork that people would like to buy.
This can be determined through market research and by asking galleries what their customers are looking for, what is selling the most, etc. Landscapes, floral or figures it does not mean that you are painting to please the public it means you paint in order to sell more paintings. You are not compromising your art because you still paint in your own style and your own subjects with your own color palette but more of what is easily sellable! Figures are now the in thing, all artists love painting the figure, I don’t think anyone here does not like to paint figures, even if we are not very good at it, we will try many times over to get it right. We all paint landscapes, we all paint flowers and still life artworks. The only subject that not all artist can paint is…wild-life. Very few artist can get it right. I truly hate it when artists paint lions that are looking like pussycats. It is my opinion that wild life should be painted as wild and dangerous! We can debate this another time.
2. The price
When a client call you to come and see your new paintings and you say sorry, I don’t have anything at the moment, forget it his going elsewhere.We will get back to pricing in a second.
3. The place
You must be prepared to spend a lot of time on your computer investigating your options and what is best for you. Another point to keep in mind for Internet sales is you have to be active and check your inbox regularly, not the next day – not every two days but all the time. People who use the Internet to buy art will not wait for you to make up your mind to check if there is anything happening, they want action there and then. I have lost sales in the past, when I was on dial up connection (I don’t think they still exist) and was checking my inbox 3 times a day, buyers moved on to other artists. Now with ADSL been cheaper the computer is on from 7am to mid-night. Trust me it gets very busy after 11pm. The best sales happen late at night! It is a bit stressful when you deal with different time zones, you have to apologize and explain to the client the time difference in almost every e-mail! It is easier now with the ‘smart phones’ your e-mails come through to your phone wherever you are and if it is urgent you can take action, if not you can do something about it when you get to your home computer. Life is getting very demanding, it’s called progress….we are on duty 24/7!
4. The promotion -
You can advertise in your local newspaper or in an Art magazine, if you have the budget for it. You should advertise your name (every chance you get) more than your art so that people get familiar with you. If they recognize your name they assume you are a well-known artist and pay more attention to your work when they see it.
5. And the last P is the People
, This would be your target market, which you need to segment in order to better understand the type of collectors they are, also this will help you to identify the most effective way to reach these collectors.If you use the wrong promotion, nobody knows about your product or where to find it. If you place your art in the wrong places how can art lovers or collectors find it? You have to choose promotion carefully. Print some nice brochures and give out as many as you can in exhibitions and big events. Also your business card, give them out freely. You can do an e-mail to all your contacts every six months, promoting your new paintings. Try and get gallery e-mail addresses and add them to your e-mailing list.is the Galleries, the Internet and Art Fairs and organized Art exhibitions. The more on line Galleries you enter your work the better your chances to get more exposure to your name and your Art. There are countless on-line Galleries some are free others you subscribe others you pay a fee when you sell an art-work. The more the better all you have to do is ‘Google’ the country you would like to enter your work and take it from there.needs a lot of thinking and planning. If you set your price too high there will be lower demand so you could be left with lots of unsold paintings. If you set it too low there will be lots of demand and you will be left with no paintings (assuming that you are selling at a profit). In this case you could leave customers disappointed because you have nothing to show, so they will go elsewhere and you lose the customer.

For example, if you feel one segment of your target market (your clients) is wealthy executives, you could advertise in the Financial Mail or another business publication. If one segment of your clients like abstract art work don’t send them e-mails about your new landscape paintings and the same goes for the clients who like traditional or paintings that they can identify the subject, don’t sent them pictures of your abstract work.
You can see, getting the right mix is very important for increasing your sales and profits. Again, may I remind you we are talking about the prolific painter who needs to make a living out of his/her art.
Getting back to the pricing of your work
Pricing your art -work is the difficult one! A good starting point is, to know exactly what the total cost of a painting is: the materials you used, the time it took you to paint it and any other expenses that you will have, like packaging, shipping etc.
Once you have the total cost, you can add an acceptable profit and this can be your initial price.
The next step is to see what the other artists are selling their work for. If another artist with similar style (that he is not more or less famous than you) is selling much higher or lower than you, you can decide if you need to adjust your price accordingly. It is always easier to adjust your price higher if you feel you can achieve this, but be careful not to overdo it as the artist you use as a benchmark may not be selling anything.
The best you can do is to look for many others that you can compare with and take the average price as a base for your own prices.
Be reasonably consistent in your pricing. By this I mean you don’t want to sell a painting to one person for R500 and another similar one to someone else for R5000. People buy art for pleasure but it also has the element of investment. The person paying the higher price will want to know his painting will remain or increase in value so if he sees another one going for much less he will assume you are opportunistic and never buy form you again. Always try and exhibit your best work, the rest should be destroyed or reworked until they are good to sell.
If you need to get rid of overstock paintings that just accumulate in your studio you can do a big ‘studio’ sale of 50% off on everything once every couple of years for the duration of a month. Advertise the sale by e-mail to all your clients and this is where you need to have a comprehensive list of clients,
categorized by town or state/province and invite them to view all the art on sale.
You can include a few images of the discounted paintings for the benefit of the clients that are from further away. Also make sure refreshments will be available, the longer they linger in your studio the better the chance they will buy a painting or two.
Especially your clients that will do a bit of traveling will not go back empty handed.
It is very acceptable now days for artists to do this. A lot of collectors wait for an opportunity to buy at a discounted price once in a while.
Everybody loves a good bargain!
There are a lot of things you can do to encourage more sales.
There are many books for marketing in general. The principles are the same for every product..