Category: business of art

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Toxic relationships in the art world

Bad business partners are everywhere, but you don’t have to work with them. That’s your secret weapon.

Packing Oakum (Isaac H. Evans), Carol L. Douglas

I was talking to a fellow artist recently about an arts administrator who only seems to know my friend when he needs something, and who isn’t reliable. “You can’t afford to alienate him, and you need to work with him,” I said, “so keep nodding and smiling and remember that his word is worthless.” (No, you don’t know them; they’re not from here.)

I haven’t had what your granny might call a “real job” since I was in my twenties, but I’m married to a salaryman. Our kids are all gainfully employed. I’ve listened to their tales of woe, and to equivalent tales of woe from the art world. They’re no different. Machiavellianism—the idea that any means to an end is acceptable—is not limited to the corporate workplace. It’s alive and well anywhere people work together.

Setting Blocks (Heritage and American Eagle), Carol L. Douglas

How do you know you’ve met a Machiavellianist? He will:

  • Lie and cheat on his contracts;
  • Spread rumors;
  • Find ways to make you feel bad;
  • Not meet his obligations;
  • Blame you for failure.
The Machiavellianist sees himself as more sophisticated than the rest of us, but to observers, he’s like an overgrown toddler having a hissy fit to get his own way.
“You can just refuse to work with these people,” my husband objects. He’s right; that’s the artist’s prerogative, and it’s an invaluable one. You may think the sun rises and sets on the ‘best’ gallery in your town, but there are thousands of galleries across America, with revenues in the billions.

Coast Guard Inspection (American Eagle), Carol L. Douglas

There’s no value in a bad relationship, anyway. That toxicity to you spills over to others, and won’t result in sales of your work.

However, there are situations in which you just can’t avoid a toxic personality. Perhaps you work in a gallery with an unethical owner, or you are tied to an event with a toxic chairman. Often Machiavellianism takes the form of male gallerists condescending to women artists.
Recognize that you will be miserable for a time, until you can straighten the problem out. But know also the limits to which you will be pushed. That alone often stops the abuser, who usually has an incredible sniffer for weakness. Just as deep calls to deep, the weak call out to abusers and vice-versa.

Striping (Heritage), Carol L. Douglas
Can you head off the problem by recognizing a toxic personality before you engage in business? I doubt it, because there’s no real correlation between pleasant manners and fundamental goodness.

I’ve learned the hard way that the time for a lawyer is when you sign a contract, not when problems appear. But if you forgot that step (and we all do), consult an attorney when things start to go bad, before you make them any stickier.

And when you’re pushed beyond your tolerance, stick by your guns. There’s nothing quite so powerful as intractable resistance. Then make a plan and get outta there. Bad business partners, in the end, always cost you more than you will ever gain.
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Monday Morning Art School: Pricing your work

For some artists, the hardest thing in painting isn’t drawing or color-mixing but how to price their work. Charge by the square inch, of course.
Keuka Lake Vineyard, 30X40 by Carol L. Douglas, is available through Kelpie Gallery

A proper price is the meeting point between how much you can produce of the product and how much demand there is for it. If you can’t keep your paintings stocked, you’re charging too little. If your studio is full of unsold work, you’re either charging too much or not putting enough effort into marketing. Your job is to find that sweet spot.

Art sales are regional. If you live in a community with an aging population and a prestigious art school, you’re going to have low demand and high supply. If you live in a booming new city, you will have more demand and prices will be higher.
Art is not strictly a commodity, however. A painting’s value depends on the artist’s prominence. Most artists are terrible judges of their own work, seesawing between believing they’re geniuses and thinking they’re hopeless. Such subjective judgments hinder their ability to price their work.
Art festivals are a good way to establish a price history. I don’t miss them, however.
Don’t assume that because you labored for a long time over a piece, it is more valuable. Your challenges are not the buyers’ problem.
You can simplify the problem by setting aside your emotions and basing your selling price on the size of the piece and your selling history. How do you do that if you’ve never sold anything before? Survey other artists with the same level of experience and set your first prices in line with theirs. Visit galleries, plein air events and art fairs. If you see a person whose work seems similar to yours, find his resume online and check his experience. Know enough to be able to rank events. Painting in Plein Air Easton is not the same as painting your local Paint the Town.
Charitable auctions are a good way to leverage your talent to help others. They provide a sales history to new artists. (But they aren’t tax deductible contributions.)
Striping (Heritage) 6X8, by Carol L. Douglas, is available through Camden Falls Gallery.
Let’s say you gave an 8X10 watercolor of the Old Red Mill to your local historical society, which turned around and sold it for $100. Great! You have a sales history (albeit a limited and imperfect one) from which to calculate prices. Just figure out the value per square inch and calculate from there.
Square inch is the height times the width. That means your 8X10 painting is 80 square inches. Dividing the $100 selling price by 80 gives you a value of $1.25/square inch.
To use this to calculate other sizes, you would end up with:
6X8 is 48 square inches. 48 X $1.25 = $60
9X12: $135
11X14: $240
12X16: $315
In practice, my price/sq. inch gets lower the larger I go. This reflects my working and marketing costs, some of which are fixed. If you started with my example, above, a 3X4” painting would more reasonably sell for $3 a square inch or $36, and a 48X48” painting for $.75 a square inch, or $1700. But that sweet spot between 6X8 and 16X20 are a fixed cost/inch, rounded off for convenience.
My price list is on Google Drive and I can access it wherever there’s phone service.
Charity sales are known for seriously underpricing work, but it’s better to start low and work your way higher. Periodically review your prices, and make sure you have a copy with you at all times, because people will ask you about paintings at the strangest times. I keep mine on a Google sheet I can refer to from computer or phone.
Once you have a price guide, it should be absolute. I adjust it slightly for family members (or more likely just give them the painting), but I use the same price structure in events and galleries.
You should continuously update your prices based on your average sale prices for the prior year or two. The goal of every artist ought to be to sell at constantly rising prices. When you find yourself “painting on a treadmill” to have enough work for your next show, it’s definitely time to charge more. Each time you show, your work will be better known, and over time your prices will rise.
The marketplace favors fair, consistent pricing. I charge the same amount everywhere I sell. I don’t want to undercut my galleries.
And I don’t explain my prices, for the most part. Does anyone ever tell Christian Louboutin that $995 is a bit much for a pair of platform suede pumps? No; they either understand Louboutin’s market or they don’t buy designer shoes.

This post originally appeared on December 18, 2017. How quickly a vacation rolls past! Have a happy New Year, and I’ll see you again on Wednesday.

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What not to say at an opening

Yesterday I taught you words that will make you sound arty. Here are phrases you should avoid if you don’t want to sound like a rube.
Best Buds, by Carol L. Douglas

You can use the phrase, “that piece,” but only if it’s in the context of choosing between two or three items in the show. Never direct it at the gallerist, who is a human being with feelings, and also the person who bought the wine you’re swilling.

Piece is a loaded word; use it with care. “I’m looking for a piece of art” is about as discriminating as being on the hunt for a piece of a–.
“How much time did that take?” marks you as an art rube. Jonas Kaufmann doesn’t get paid by the note and artists don’t get paid by the brushstroke. That piece is the culmination of a lifetime’s practice. It may have taken six hours or six years. It’s not a negotiating point, sorry.
Dawn, by Carol L. Douglas, courtesy the Kelpie Gallery.
“That looks just like a photograph” grieves me terribly, since I wanted it to look like a painting. When you’re at a loss for something nice to say, go with “I love the use of color!” Everyone believes they’re a colorist.
“What is it?” With modern painting, less is more. If you have to ask, you can’t afford it.
“That’s a nice frame.” Actually, artists say this a lot to each other. It is always followed by, “Where’d you get it?” and “How much?” But the rest of you are supposed to be interested in the art.
Bracken Fern, by Carol L. Douglas
“What’s your absolute bottom line price?” Well, it’s on this little tag right here. The gallerist might do a little something for you if you buy several pieces, but you have to take it up with him or her. And it’s usually on the order of 5-10%.
“Don’t give up the day job!” That’s not even funny, since this is my day job.
“You’ve given it your best shot.” That was from my mother after a bad show twenty years ago. If she could see me now…
“In my day, we didn’t have time for self-actualizing.” Another bon mot from my mother. Believe it or not, she was worried I’d starve to death. If she could see me now, dieting through Christmas…
Beach, by Carol L. Douglas
“Is that tie-dye?” This is something Shibori artists hear a lot. I suppose in its broadest definition it’s true—if tie-dye was done with threads and stitching and compression and incredible skill. “Tell me about your process” is going to elicit the same information and not make you look silly.
“I have a really nice painting at home, by this guy named Thomas Kinkade.” De mortuis nihil nisi bonum and all that, but that’s not a marker of good taste.
“The wine is terrible but at least it’s free.” Can’t help you there.
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The nuts and bolts of social media: getting readers

You’ve written an amazing post with catchy copy and valuable tips. Now, how do you get discovered?

Best Buds, by Carol L. Douglas

Before you start blogging, make sure you have a Facebook business page, separate from your personal page. There are many differences, but the most important is that your business page is always public. It is meant to be a web listing. Spend a little time making sure it’s complete.

This should remain business-like. Keep your political opinions and agit-prop off your business page, unless your art or posts are overtly political. Invite your FB friends to ‘like’ this page; they’re the core of your following.
Also, make sure your email list is up-to-date.

Cut and paste this to each repost site.

Once your blog post is published, you’ll want to fashion a new ‘hook’, different from the tagline below the headline. You’ll use this and the link every time you repost, as in the illustration above.
Reading, by Carol L. Douglas, private collection.

I repost in this order:

  1. Share photos to Pinterest. This has the longest half-life of any social media site, it’s extremely easy to post to, and it has high viewership.
  2. Google+. Why add a social media platform that nobody reads? Because what you post on Google+ is indexed on Google.
  3. Twitter. Remember to manually add a photo to your text and link here.
  4. LinkedIn
  5. Facebook business page. From there, share back to your own personal page, as well as to any user groups in which you’re a member and who might be interested.

There are three other marketing channels for related, but not duplicate, material:
  1. Google My Business, if you have a brick-and-mortar location.
  2. Newsletter—I use it only to announce upcoming workshops, 2-6 times a year, but you should definitely use it to introduce your blog to your fans. Ask them to subscribe.
  3. Instagram—related content, 1-2 times daily.
Tom Sawyer’s Fence, by Carol L. Douglas
Why hashtags? Those words are indexed by the social network and are searchable by other readers. If you click on a hashtag, you’ll be brought to a page that aggregates all posts with that tag.
All blog platforms have stats built into them. These tell you how many people are looking at your posts, which posts are the most popular, where your readers come from, and how they’re looking at your blog. Make a habit of looking at it regularly.
Regular readers of this blog know it ran under a newspaper’s aegis for about 18 months. My readership dropped during that time, so I consulted Bob Bahrof Outdoor Painter. He told me that, everything else being equal, it’s always better to work under your own brand rather than someone else’s. My own experience showed that to be true.
This is the last of a three-part series on art blogging. Part one is here, and part two is here.

UPDATE: On October 8, Google announced it is discontinuing Google+ because of a massive data breach.
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How to make money as an artist… and another thing!

Great ideas don’t pay the rent. You need a practical plan.
Autumn farm, pastel, Carol L. Douglas
First this: my pal Jennifer tells me, quite reasonably, that if I don’t tell anyone I’m teaching a class in October, they’re unlikely to come. Apparently the same principle applies to parties. Who knew?
If you are interested in improving your painting, or taking up painting for the first time, and you’ll be in mid-coast Maine for its most beautiful season—Autumn—then by all means put me on your schedule.
This is a six-week plein air class, starting October 2 and ending November 6. We’ll meet from 10 AM to 1 PM every Tuesday. If the weather permits, we’ll go out to a location. If not, we’ll be in my studio at 394 Commercial Street in Rockport. Oils, watercolor, pastel and acrylic painters are all welcome. And I don’t care if you’re a beginner or have an MFA. I spend my time one-on-one, not pontificating in front of an easel. The fee is $200.
Have I ever mentioned that I love teaching plein air painting?
Now, to the meat of this post. I’m presenting at Maine International Conference on the Arts (MICA) this Friday, September 28. This is a two-day conference for Maine artists, arts educators, and arts organizations. It addresses the questions of art making, arts education, capacity-building strategies and skills, and more.
I don’t know a single artist who doesn’t want to make money doing his or her art. In fact, money is part of the communication between the artist and his clients. Your clients are saying “I like your work enough to want to share my space with it,” each time they make a purchase. A purchase is an important form of validation.
Public market, by Carol L. Douglas. 
Many artists are singularly inept at business. Some cover that up with lofty sentiments about being above mere money. But great ideas don’t pay the rent. If you’re confused about how to monetize your art, this conference is a good place to start.
“I’m just not good at business” is as dumb an excuse as, “I can’t draw a straight line” is for drawing. I’m pretty fuzzy on practical matters myself. But I’ve learned to present myself and my work, make strategic plans, and use the internet to promote my work. If I can do it, you can too.
The Dugs, by Carol L. Douglas
I’m talking about a narrow topic—how to write a successful art blog—but I’m one tiny cog in this vast conference. There are twenty break-out sessions altogether. I’ve put together a short presentation that’s practical and narrow. I assume my fellow presenters have been similarly economical and to the point.
That means you’ll have good information to take home and mull over through the off season. If a better business model is your goal, MICA is a great place to start.
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A common footman in the army of art

Plein air painting isn’t highbrow, but it speaks to my soul.
La casa de los abuelitos, by Carol L. Douglas
“You’re lucky to love to do something that people love,” Clif Travers told me soon after we’d met. He meant that sincerely. It’s easier to sell landscape paintings than the large-scale installation piece he’s working on.
The earliest known “pure landscapes” (with no human figures) are Minoanmurals dating from around 1500 BC. Landscape flowered in Rome, Egypt and China. It died out in western art and was rediscovered in the Renaissance.
Rocky, by Carol L. Douglas
In China, the mountain-water ink painting was traditionally the most valued form of picture. Here in the west, landscape occupied a low position in the accepted hierarchy of genres, which went:
  1. History, including all that allegorical stuff;
  2. Portrait;
  3. Genre painting, or scenes of everyday life;
  4. Landscape;
  5. Animals;
  6. Still life.
This hierarchy was established in 16th century Italy. It elevated those things which rendered the universal essence of things (imitare) over the mere mechanical copying of appearances (ritrarre). While the Impressionists did much to knock this on its head, there’s still a decided whiff of lowbrow to landscape painting, particularly the plein air variety. I think it’s because people actually like it.
Some days it rains, by Carol L. Douglas
The 17th century Dutch Golden Agepainters were among the first artists with middle-class customers, so it’s no surprise that they painted lots of landscape. But they were conflicted about it. Samuel Dirksz van Hoogstraten was the century’s most important art critic. He called landscape paintings “the common footmen in the army of art.” But he also recognized that landscape “provides scope for artistic freedom, for coloristic virtuosity and for chance: for a dialogue between Mother Nature and the artist’s own innate ability.”
It’s surprisingly difficult to find data on what genres of art sell the best, but I did find this top-ten list from Art Business Today. It’s for the UK art market, but ours isn’t much different:
  1. Traditional landscapes
  2. Local views
  3. Modern or semi-abstract landscapes
  4. Abstracts
  5. Dogs
  6. Figure studies (excluding nudes)
  7. Seascapes, harbor, and beach scenes
  8. Wildlife
  9. Impressionistic landscapes
  10. Nudes

Beach Grass (Goosefare Brook) by Carol L. Douglas
Obviously, none of us invented landscape painting, but each of us invents ourselves as landscape painters. When we start out, there’s absolutely no market for our work. We create that market through dialogue. We produce our first paintings, gauge the audience’s reaction (through sales and critiques), and then refine our message and reenter the fray with new work. That’s an ongoing process throughout our careers. It’s no different from many other lines of work.
There are artists working out there in splendid isolation, not caring what the audience thinks, but they’re very rare. For most of us, painting is a dialogue, and the other half of the dialogue is the buying public.
Bracken Fern, by Carol L. Douglas
Most artists don’t shape their work because a certain kind of landscape painting will sell better (although we are influenced by our peers and gallerists). But the best feedback we get is often in the form of a purchase.
I don’t paint en plein air because I think it’s somehow higher on a hierarchy of landscape. I do it because it appeals to me on a soul level. My friend Brad Marshall once said, “My clients don’t care if I did it in the studio or out. They only care about the quality of the work itself.” Plein air is not, in itself, a virtue. It’s only when it helps the painting become transcendent that it matters.
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Do you dread writing an artist’s statement?

The artist’s statement is, unfortunately, not optional.
The float, by Carol L. Douglas. This is my first work out the gate at Joseph A. Fiore Art Center. I struggled with the aspect ratio. Is it done? Beats me.

Last week I wrote about getting into galleries. The artist who prompted that post responded, “I would much rather discuss how I feel my work communicates the essence of wilderness and why it’s important to preserve wild places, than trying to convince them that I’m an accomplished painter and would be an asset to their gallery. I’d be much more comfortable discussing the importance of making sure people develop an appreciation for the wild places left on our planet, than the merits of my paintings.”

She’s hit on a topic that most artists (including me) approach with dread: the artist’s statement. I’ve been mulling that over this week, because a residency can be about figuring out where you’re going as much as it is about producing new work.
My Mabef easel may nominally hold a 24×36 canvas, but in practice it’s too heavy. So it’s back to the Gloucester easel for oils.
An artist’s statement can be dull as dishwater or it can hit you between the eyes. My correspondent above is clearly passionate about wilderness; I’d be interested in her work just from the few sentences above.
We want our work to transmit our ideas non-verbally. Still, we are expected to write these statements. Our gallerists and collectors need a starting point for discussion.
Today I move over to Yupo and watercolor paper.
An artist statement generally contains:
  • An overview of one’s ideas;
  • An explanation of materials and process;
  • A personal statement of beliefs/philosophy;
  • A closing statement.

As a plein airpainter, there’s not much I can say about my materials; however, I can talk about my strong preference for painting from life instead of photos.
The first and last sections are great opportunities for pomposity, clichés, sophomoric writing and irrelevant anecdotes. As experienced as I am at writing, I’ve fallen into those traps. I look back on some of my artist’s statements and cringe.
What questions could you address?
  • What compels you in your current work?
  • Why did you make this specific body of work?
  • What are the spiritual, moral, or experiential underpinnings of your work?
  • What do you want your audience to take away from it?
  • How does this work relate to work you’ve done before?
  • Who or what are your inspirations?
  • Is there something unique about your technique?
  • What is your place in art history? How are you building on what’s been done before?
  • Is your painting tied to a specific place, a specific history, or a group of people?
I was so taken by Yupo last month that I ordered twenty full sheets of it. Here’s hoping it works as well in that size.
What points should you avoid?

  • Talking about how much you love art. Everyone does.
  • Quoting famous artists and/or poetry.
  • A minute description of your process, especially when it’s the same as everyone else’s process.
  • Your personal experience, unless it ties in with a greater theme.
  • “My work is interesting because…”
  • Comparing yourself to a famous artist.

Be spare in your prose, direct, and honest. Refer to yourself in the first person, not as ‘the artist.’ And expect to work on it for a while. If you really and truly can’t write, hire someone to help you; the artist’s statement is, unfortunately, not optional.
In practice, I’ve found that I need several different versions of artist statement (which are of course strewn all over my hard drive). There’s the short one for show applications, the longer one for gallerists, and the painfully long one that gets incorporated into press releases.
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The car cures itself

Summer for a professional plein air painter can involve as much driving as painting.

Cape Blomiden makes its own cloud, by Carol L. Douglas, was painted during a rainstorm in the first annual Parrsboro International Plein Air Festival.
One of my students missed last weekend’s workshop due to a painful flareup of plantar fasciitis. Another student, himself a doctor, told me about taking the disease into his own hands. He simply stretched the offending tissue until it audibly tore. “The relief was instantaneous,” he told me as I stared at him aghast.
My little Prius has done something similar. It has, over the last year, developed a loud scream at high speeds. Turning up the radio was useless. I had the tires rotated to see if that helped. No luck. A front wheel bearing was replaced in March; I replaced its mate two weeks ago. The right rear brake locked up while my car was in Logan Airport long-term parking in April. That wasn’t the root of the noise either. Meanwhile, every month I’ve been spending more money on this car than the payment on a Ford F-150.

I appreciate AAA’s tow service, but I’ve seen too much of it recently.
But even the money hasn’t been the real problem. “It’s no longer reliable,” I lamented to my husband. Next week I drive alone to Parrsboro, NS, where I’m painting in the second annual Parrsboro International Plein Air Festival. There are some lonely stretches up that way, and I don’t like the idea of getting stranded. I’ve started car shopping, but I don’t have the time to do proper research.
Meanwhile, I’ve had a busy spring. On the night of my daughter’s wedding rehearsal, I stopped for a light at a busy intersection. I woke up seconds later to find that I’d rolled right into the line of oncoming cars.
I have more than a million miles of accident-free driving under my belt and I’d like to keep it that way.  Yesterday when I found myself blinking away sleep on the New York State Thruway, I did something I never do: I relinquished the wheel to my co-pilot. Thus, it was he, not me, who was driving when a tire burst on the interstate.
Two Islands in the Rain, Carol L. Douglas, also from Parrsboro International Plein Air Festival
In the end, this turned out to be the Prius healing itself. A few hours later, we were back on the road. The sound that’s been plaguing me for months was gone. It was a defective tire after all.
We rolled into Rockport around the time that the fishermen are up rubbing the sleep from their eyes and checking the weather. The thermostat in my car read 43° F. and it was foggy and pouring.
I have a short tight week here in Maine. I leave to teach watercolor on the schooner American Eagle on Sunday evening. After we dock, I leave directly for Parrsboro, NS.
Teaching watercolor aboard American Eagle mercifully involves no driving. The dock is just minutes from my home.
I’ll be missing the opening reception for the latter, but Poppy Balser kindly stopped by on her way to Paint Annapolisto collect my boards for me. She’ll get them stamped so I don’t have to spend half of my first day there trying to find someone to stamp them for me. I’ll just have to find Poppy.
And the eco-warrior is back on the road, all healed.
This is nothing unusual; it’s the life of many of my friends each summer. We sort events into boxes. Sometimes we can stop at home, swap the boxes, and do our laundry. But often we stack our calendars up in the back of our vehicles: frames and supports for the different events share trunk space. If we’re crossing the border, we take a deep breath as we approach Customs. We’re not breaking the law, but a search of our cars will result in an awful mishmash of our supplies.
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Dealing with GDPR

If it stops our data from being sold, that is a good thing. For now, GDPR is just one more compliance task, and I don’t even live in the EU.

Beach toys, by Carol L. Douglas
I read with mild amusement that galleries may be faced with “onerous new requirements” to prove they are not selling undocumented antiquities, laundering money, or any of the other things covered under the Bank Secrecy Act. I don’t think this is necessarily a bad idea. “The art market is an ideal playing ground for money laundering,” said Thomas Christ, of the Basel Institute on Governance, a Swiss nonprofit that studied the issue.
Most galleries in the US, aren’t dealing with foreign princes and Monet-style pricing. Instead, they’re dealing with compliance of a different sort. On May 25, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) went into effect in the European Union. Living and selling art in a coastal town, even my relatively small list contains names from the EU. There is no exemption from compliance for sole proprietors or small businesses, and the penalties are stiff.
Sea and sand, by Carol L. Douglas
This is why you’ve suddenly been getting emails from vendors asking if you want to remain on their mailing lists. They’re hustling to remain in compliance.
Can I document why I have every name on my list? No way. Some were collected long ago, when I was schlepping a tent from town to town selling paintings on village greens. I will proceed on the assumption that those people would have cleared off my mailing list long ago, had they wanted to.
If you hold and work with data collected from clients, then you need to have a contract with the client stating how that data is to be held and managed. There are two principles involved. The first is that you must have appropriate legal grounds for processing the data and that you do it in a transparent manner. The second is that you must only collect data for a specific purpose and use it only for that purpose.
Off the Marginal Way, by Carol L. Douglas
For the gallerist or artist, this generally comes down to clearly informing your subscribers about how you plan to use their information. It also means that you can’t take the list you got from the church lawn fête and use it for your own business.
You’re also supposed to recite the subscribers’ rights and how they can lodge a complaint. Frankly, that’s more than I can deal with. Luckily, I use Blogger and Mailchimp, and they handle the jargon for me.
I added this note to my blog: “Subscribe here and receive every post by email. Never used for anything else; never passed along.” Had I enough room, I would have added, “because I have no idea how to even collect the darn things from Google, or any plan to sell the names once I collect them. I’m just not that smart.”

Surf, by Carol L. Douglas

It’s one more way that blogs and emails are being pushed into the hands of big operations like Google, but I don’t see any option. Who among us has the expertise to navigate these legal shoals or the resources to lawyer up? Certainly not me.
There is one part of the GDPR that tickles my fancy. That’s “the right to be forgotten.” Say I took photos of you in a drunken brawl at one of my openings and for some reason decided to post them on Instagram. Twenty years later, older and possibly wiser, you objected. You could ask me to delete the photo and I’d have to justify why I shouldn’t. It will be interesting to see how that meshes with American free speech rights.
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Where do the dogs go?

Failed paintings are less common than you think. You just have to look at them the right way.
This is an example of an unfinished painting that pointed the way forward. It took years for me to understand where I was going with it.
Last week, as I dithered about which paintings to submit to Santa Fe Plein Air Fiesta, a reader wrote, “Can you write a post sometime about what you do with the second-tier paintings you make? Do you just scrape them? Give away to unsuspecting strangers? Donate, unsigned, to charity thrift shops? Let them accumulate and breed in a dark basement?”
First of all, let me be clear that I don’t think any of last week’s five (or the one I didn’t finish on Friday) are ‘second tier’ paintings. I’m happy with them all, and I think they’re sellable. They’re not sellable in either of the galleries that represent me on the Maine coast, however. I have two options: I will market them through my own studio, or sell them online through Chrissy Pahucki’s pleinair.store.
Spring, by Carol L. Douglas. I hated this when I painted it. Now I’ve almost caught up with it.
I’ve done plein airevents where I’ve sold exactly nothing, and other events where I’ve sold everything. It’s unpredictable. At the end of the summer, I usually have more work left over than I’ve sold. Usually these works end up selling in future years. Occasionally, they end up donated to fundraisers, but only for organizations I care about, who can get a fair-market price for their work.
But let’s talk about paintings that aren’t good enough to sell. It happens, although the artist in his or her post-creative exhaustion is the usually the last person to be a good judge of whether a painting has merit or not. Some artists are quick to scrape out everything they don’t like. After all, professional-grade painting panels are expensive.
Hollyhocks, by Carol L. Douglas. Sometimes you have to paint something a number of times to realize you aren’t interested in the subject. I thought I should be, since I’d planted this garden.
I don’t think scraping out is a good idea. It means new and difficult ideas are stillborn. How do you find a path forward without contemplating each tangled byway to see if this is the way forward?
These paintings—the edgy, difficult ones that don’t seem to have much value—go on racks to dry, and then into into bins in my studio, where they’re available at a reduced price. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve looked through those bins and suddenly seen something wonderful that I’ve never noticed before. My brain likes the status quo. Often it takes a few years for it to catch up with the intelligence of my hands. Those bins are part of the process of dragging it forward.
59th Street Bridge Approach, by Carol L. Douglas. There are subjects I used to love, but love no more.
I have a few customers who love the bins, and they root through them every time they visit. They can definitely get a good bargain there, because the binned paintings are available for a fraction of the cost of framed paintings.
Sometimes, these binned paintings live on as reference for larger works—I’d much rather scale up a field sketch in the studio than a photograph. Sometimes, I revise and finish in the studio. For example, the seasonal lag between New Mexico and Rockport, ME, means that I can comfortably find an apple tree here to use to finish Friday’s painting.
But, yes, sometimes I paint total dogs that aren’t useful for reference, for overpainting, or for any purpose known to mankind. These I destroy. Although that doesn’t happen very often, I reserve the right to edit my own legacy.