Mosaic Canyon Rockfall and some related products.

I have had my own art website since 1997.  Soon after that, I started to receive offers from various start-ups and dot.coms.  It was the late 1990’s and everyone was trying to sell everything online, including art.  I dabbled with a few sites that didn’t cost anything.  I ignored many of the other offers.  Most of the early websites were poorly designed and looked awful.  They usually had business models where artists were supposed to pay for various levels of membership, etc.  Having my own website, I did not see the need to pay additional fees to show my art online.  

When I did join a few of these sites, I was able to track how often they sent traffic to my own website.  It was only a handful of visitors per year.  None of these early, art selling websites generated sales for me.  Mostly they lead to other sites contacting me with sales pitches.  They also put my name on the list for countless schemes like the ones asking me to pay hundreds or even thousands of Euros to be listed in artist directories.  Directories no one will ever see.  My junk mail box still gets a few of those offers a week. 

Since the very beginning, my website has always generated a few sales every year. I have always seen my site as more of an online portfolio.  When people ask what type of at I do, nothing is more effective than handing someone an interesting looking card with your web address on it.

By 2001, as the dot.com boom was spinning out of control in San Francisco, I had written off selling art online.  If it happened, I saw it more as something by chance.  It was an era when there were so many outlandish ventures trying to sell everything online. 

A Decade Later

Recently I’ve noticed a real increase in online sales of my work.  I realize it might be time to revisit selling art online.  Quite a few things have changed since the early days of ecommerce. 

Many technological advances have changed the rules for artists.  The improved quality and affordability of digital cameras and scanners has made it easier for artists to get images of their work online.  The idea of submitting slides to galleries is all but obsolete.  Nowadays, nearly all submission guidelines call for digital images.  The improvement in browsing speed and the quality of monitors has had a major impact. The quality and accuracy of images is crucial to selling art online.  An excellent digital image is now possible and it can give potential art buyers more confidence than ever before. 

Printing technology has also changed the art market.  The quality of on demand printing gets better as the prices keep falling.  Most of the online art sites now offer prints and other printed products (i.e. note cards, laptop cases, etc.).  The artist actually receives little for these printed products.  Personally, I still see them as a good deal for artists.  An artist should not expect on demand art prints will earn significant money for them.  But, on demand products give art sites a source of revenue and the good ones no longer charge artists for other costs (i.e., memberships, listing fees, etc.).  It’s become a commission-driven business.  From an artist’s perspective, I see offering my work for on demand prints as free advertising.  It gets my work out there and may potentially lead to more serious sales.  The better sites allow for artists to have profiles which can link to the individual artist’s website.  

Consumer attitudes to online shopping have changed.  We all tend to buy things online we would never have considered buying online ten years ago.  In many cases it is out of necessity.  As small, specialized business tend to disappear, I find myself looking online for things I used to get at local shops.  In San Francisco it is even becoming difficult to find a bookstore. 

Art galleries are being squeezed out of communities.  As rents and other costs increase, galleries disappear.  The only galleries that tend to remain are the extremely commercial venues and the very high-end galleries.  Galleries with moderately priced art, the galleries that truly partner up with emerging artists, these are the ones that have mostly vanished in cities like San Francisco.  The art buyer with a modest budget has fewer places to find art.  I believe this is what is helping to increase online, art sales.

Where is the best place for artists to sell work online?

Each artist needs to review a lot of sites and determine which ones will work for them.  

Some artists have done well with eBay.  The relatively low costs can seem appealing.  The problem is you’re selling fine art in an online flea market.  There you are next to the guy with the piles of tubes socks.  Now, maybe if you paint pictures of tube socks…  

And then there is Etsy.  I had a little success with Etsy.  There is a lot of good work on the site.  It is best for small, very affordable work.  The problem is it just disappears among the thousands of things on the site (good and bad).  Most artists, who do well with Etsy, do so by driving buyers to their own Etsy page.  It is particularly frustrating that Etsy does not allow artists to add their own website to their profiles.

Recently I’ve joined two art selling websites.  Society6 and Saatchi Online.  They’re a couple of well-designed sites, ­no financial risk to artists and relatively easy to use.  Saatchi Online is set up for selling both original art and on demand print products.

I think that no single site is going to do it for an artist.  It’s better to find a combination of sites.  Ideally, that will include your own site.  Now that PayPal has become so well established, I find art buyers are even more confident purchasing from artists directly online. 

When it came to selling at online, I might have said never ten years ago, but that was before I started making all these trips to the post office to ship art.

I have visited ruins all over Europe and throughout the Southwest U.S.  But there is something different about ghost towns.  Rhyolite (near Death Valley just over the Nevada State Line) and Bodie (on the edge of California north of Mono Lake) are my two favorites. I first visited Rhyolite over 10 years ago and have been going back every time I am nearby.   I was just back in Rhyolite a month ago.  I look and keep telling myself there is less and less of the old Cook Bank every time I go.  The ruin is even fenced off for safety now.  When I returned home, I compared old photos I took a few years ago and was able to confirm the ongoing decay.

The history surrounding ghost towns is something I find compelling.  I attribute it to their stories of rapid expansion and near sudden demise.  How so much could happen in a place and draw so many people in.  How a town grew with a sense of permanency only to be abandoned a decade or so later.  Perhaps it is because I live in one of those towns that started as a boom town.  San Francisco has also survived its series of ups and downs and calamities.  But our setting,on a beautiful, and conveniently located, bay has made us always stick around and, when necessary, rebuild. 

Now I see another road trip to Bodie in my future.

It feels as if black and white photography has gone full circle and returned to the realm of artists.  Digital photography has eliminated the color snapshot.  The black and white snapshot all but disappeared during the 1970’s.  There was a brief period when it was still less expensive to have black and white film developed, but by the 1980’s the average consumer started paying more for film and development of black and white. 

I have an old photo album of my grandmothers that spans about 20 years from the 1930’s to 1950’s.  It starts with a period of teenage photos and ends when my own mother was about 10 years old.  The album acts as a great timepiece of popular fashion and car culture.  It also spans about 20 years in consumer photography.  Every few years a new camera was purchased with a new type of film and a new style of printing.  Ironically these old black and white photos have held up remarkably well.  Their condition is great.  The color snapshots and polaroids of my own childhood have faded and discolored.

I used to experiment with 35mm black and white photography but never even came close to learning what I was doing.   I never took that class and developed my own film.   This morning I found these ten year old photos from my first trip to Death Valley and mixed them in with one my grandmother took in 1937 (so the date says).  Now I have to sort through the hundreds of digital images taken last week in the desert.

I can’t be within 100 miles of Rhyolite without making a visit to one of my favorite ghost towns.  One of the highlights is Tom Kelly’s Bottle House.  Built in 1906 with mortar and bottles, mostly beer bottles, instead of bricks.  I am pleased that some effort is really being put in to preserving the structure.   It really encompasses so many things I love in my own art – repurposing and recycling and loosely structured grid-like patterns with circles.  And it sparkles out there in the desert.

 Sadly, the old caretaker passed away about a year ago.  He was right out of central casting as the gold miner with the big bushy beard.  You’d barely be out of your car and he’d appear out of nowhere and begin to tell you the history of the house, etc. 

This piece is more or less a study for some upcoming bottle house paintings.

Mosaic Canyon is a calming place.   The crowd was particular small today.  Mosaic Canyon is rarely what one would call “crowded.”  The canyon has been washed and scoured by millennia of flash floods.  There are places where veins of marble along the canyon wall have been polished into smooth waves.  As one hikes, you make a few turns up into the canyon and it becomes quiet and still.  Today was a cool winter day and the rock walls were cold in the shadows until you reached a higher point where the sun was still warming the canyon late in the afternoon. 

Over the years I have found some unique spots in the desert.   The energy is different and special in these magical places.  Mosaic Canyon is one of those places.   Don’t ask me to explain why, it’s just one of those things you know.

Today’s experiment - Can I make art below sea level?   Yes I did.  At 282 feet below sea level, salt encrusted, at Badwater in Death Valley.  On the road and it’s time to enjoy the desert.  I can write when I get home in San Francisco.

When we go look at art and galleries we sometimes have to control our impulses to touch the work.  It’s not always easy, and we’ve all probably seen someone break the rules and touch the art.  While I wouldn’t want people just pawing my work either, I do sympathize.  I like finishing my map pieces with a thick coat of acrylic varnish, which gives them a good deal of protection. I also like to make some pieces that are just meant to be touched.  One medium I haven’t used in a while is sandpaper.  Not sandpaper as a tool, which I use at times, but sandpaper as part of the work.

This cold, gloomy winter weather is making me think about a winter trip to Death Valley.  I usually go every year.  The rocks, the layers, the canyons all inspire my work.  I am ready for the big ride and a few days of taking photos to paint from.