You don’t have to be wealthy to be a patron

17 March 2009 by pcNielsen 4 Comments

Yesterday I watched a video over at Diary of an Arts Pastor. In the spot, David Taylor talks specifically about his vision for artistic renewal in Austin, Texas. I’m not exactly sure what I think of the video, but it did convey some worthwhile ideas. One idea that I latched onto is one I’d already been thinking about this year:

“You don’t have to be wealthy to be a patron.”

This is probably coming out of my burgeoning desire to be a catalyst (a desire that’s been burgeoning, as it were, for the past ten years). It was helped along by the ceramic art my wife gave me for Christmas.

I haven’t fleshed this idea out yet, that you don’t have to be rich to be a patron of the arts, but there seem to be some basic places a person could start. Add new art to your budget, for instance. Give art as gifts, as my wife did. Befriend artists and become part of their street team; word-of-mouth is the best marketing.

If you don’t think you have money in your budget to buy art you haven’t visited the right venues lately. Look at Etsy (yes, there are imaginative and well-crafted plastic arts on this website amidst the ubiquitous jewelry and handbag collections) or other online galleries. Seek out aspiring artists who don’t charge as much for their pieces, which is the best kind of artistic investment anyway. Barter works as well. Maybe you’re a web programmer; trade website design for a painting or sculpture.

Any other ideas?

David Taylor video

Filed under Art, Business of art, Creative catalyst, Etsy

Interview with Etsy founder

2 February 2009 by pcNielsen Leave a Comment

Michael Arrington, founder of TechCrunch, and tech blogger Robert Scoble interview Etsy founder Robert Kalin.

Some interesting tidbits from the interview, 97% of Etsy’s user base is female, thus the largest segment of sales comes from jewelery. Etsy did almost $100 million in sales in 2009. An average sale on the site includes two items and totals $15.

See these new shops for some nice works:

Megan Chaney Studios for ceramic sculpture.

Old World Swine for still lifes and landscapes.

Filed under Business of art, Ceramics, Craft, Etsy, Handmade, Painting, Realism, Sculpture

Christmas pots

8 January 2009 by pcNielsen 6 Comments

I was thrilled to receive as Christmas gifts from my wife two pots which she purchased from Etsy sellers. Both are porcelain works by female artists whose work I’ve been admiring for a couple of years now.

dsc_0011

This first one is a sweet pea pot by Kim Westad. It measures about 3.5 inches across. Westad works from her studio in the Bronx. “My goal is to design and produce unique, quality pieces that people will be happy to use and have in their homes,” she states on her website. Interestingly, she started as a graphic design major, but that plan was derailed with the first pottery class she took after graduating with a BFA from the University of Connecticut. Her shop here.

dsc_0012

This second piece, a bud vase, is the work of Stepanka Horalkova. Horalkova was born in the Czech Republic and immigrated to the United States in 1995. She’s a self-taught artist and also works out of New York City. I like that she hand builds with porcelain, something that I don’t see very often. The vase is about 3.5″ x 3″. Her shop here.

Filed under Art, Ceramics, Etsy, Handmade

Etsy in trouble?

5 December 2008 by pcNielsen Leave a Comment

Yesterday my wife pointed out a change that Etsy made to how their search listings are displayed, and apparently it’s made some people mad. Marissa Lee Swinghammer, a Boston printmaker who’s been pretty successful selling her work with the service, is giving up on Etsy until they get their act together.

Etsy is a great idea but has terrible management. The company seems to be bent on purist policies that snub their own users, without which they would cease to exist. I’ve always been convinced that the website is a very inexpensive way to maintain a nice looking store, but you have to market it yourself. You can’t remotely rely on the website’s own traffic for sales.

Marissa is switching to Art Fire for the time being, which she’s already used some and likes pretty well. The following is one of her mixed media prints listed on Art Fire, titled Dream World.

dream-world

On a similar note, my friend Joel Armstrong just called me to say that Art Bistro‘s terms and conditions include (in number eight) a clause that gives the Bistro all rights to work you post or list with that website. I’ve registered for Art Bistro but have yet to figure out what the website is actually for. Joel was right to point that out though; among artists, a statement like that won’t be popular. Since I personally work almost exclusively in three-dimensions, it applies less to me than painters and illustrators whose work can much more easily reproduced. For sculptors like me, if the Bistro wants to use images I upload of my own work I’d probably be thrilled at the free marketing!

Update: Etsy has reversed the change mentioned above according to my wife, after a mere week of outcry from users.

Filed under Art, Business of art, Etsy, Mixed media, Printmaking

Gifting: Handmade on Etsy

10 November 2008 by pcNielsen Leave a Comment

Etsy specializes in offering handmade wares including everything from clothing to pottery to painting. It’s a great place to find thoughtful, one-of-a-kind gifts. My wife and I both keep a store there; hers is the Elegant Scarf. A link to mine can be found in the sidebar. Following are a few of my favorite sellers and one of my favorite items from their store. Click on the images to get to their store.

Kim Westad : Ceramist
Sweet pea in orange :: $35

sweet-pea-pot

mLee fine art (woodcuts)
African queen :: $45

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Stepanka (porcelain sculpture)
Small porcelain bud vase :: $35

vase

newbyart (encaustic)
The great awakening :: $120

encaustic

Filed under Art, Business of art, Ceramics, Christmas list, Craft, Etsy, Handmade, Painting, Printmaking, Woodcut

Entitlement, affluenza and we’re spoiled brats!

6 November 2008 by pcNielsen 3 Comments

Christmas is coming! My friend Amy, on her blog Growing Like Trees, talked yesterday about gift giving. Or, in her case, not gift giving. Her post inspired the following.

I really love the Christmas season, but I’m terrible at receiving gifts. I only realized this a few years ago. If I get something that doesn’t pique my interest, or that I wasn’t expecting, I’m not very good at hiding my disinterest — or feigning interest. No one’s ever told me that I was being a jerk, I just happened to realize it after looking back at how I’ve handled Christmas gifts in the past ten years.

“Jerk” might be a strong self-accusation, I hope. I’m not the kind of person that gets giddy about things very often (to my wife’s chagrin). Even when I’ve received something I really like, I fear my thoughtful countenance risks appearing ungrateful after I tear through the tape and wrapping paper.

Then again, maybe my countenance doesn’t look anything like I’m imagining it. Thankfully, no one in the family owns a video camera. Regardless, I know that my heart has been ungrateful when it should have been giving thanks.

xmas-gifts

I am one of a very spoiled generation. Many of our parents and grandparents live comfortably, have expendable income for luxuries — luxuries that didn’t exist even 25 years ago — take vacations at will etc. etc. Little do we realize as youth that a lot of these people lived very modestly when they were our age. By our age I mean in their 20s and 30s.

In a culture super-saturated with objects to be bought, in a culture ubiquitously and unapologetically inundated with advertising, in a culture where we are referred to (and might even refer to ourselves) as “consumers,” we expect to have what we want now. Credit makes that possible.

And then causes the economy to collapse (when misused).

Frankly, I could go without any gifts at Christmas. The food, family, [good] decorations, mystery and so on are enough. Further, I tend to buy things I want, if I can afford them (i.e., not on credit), when I want. My father-in-law is the same way. It makes it difficult, I’m told, for others to buy gifts for us around this time of year.

On the flipside, I very much enjoy giving thoughtful gifts. Thoughtful gifts are generally not iPods and laptops. Sure, the tweens in the house will think these are great when wrapped, under a tree and tagged with their name. But thoughtful gifts are usually not LCD televisions and barbie dolls or Tickle Me Elmo.

Thoughtful gifts are one-of-a-kind, unique and tailored to an individual. An original painting is a great example, and yes you can afford one, especially if you’re already thinking of spending $300 on an iPod Touch or $900 on a Sony flat screen TV. You just have to know where to look. Handmade scarves or teapots are other examples, which you can find a plethora of on Etsy.

I’m just learning that I like to find or create thoughtful gifts, just like I’ve just learned that I’m a jerk about receiving gifts. One of the better examples of a thoughtful gift was an advertisement I framed for my brother. Three years ago my home group — cell group, life group, Bible study, call it whatever you want — spent a day helping a diabetic woman clean out her garage. The garage was full of a amazing stuff, a lot of which was moldy and falling apart and went to the dump. The rest went into a garage sale.

There were all kinds of decorative things she used years ago in a shop she owned in California. There were enormous boxes of outdated clothing. She kept saying there was probably a bong out there too. The friend orchestrating the cleanup wanted to find it and take it home, which I thought was hilarious since he was an elder in our church.

We didn’t find the bong.

Being a dumpster diver and prone to salvaging anything I find interesting enough, I kept a keen eye on the stuff headed for the dump. A large stack of catalogs, of all the things to keep around for 25 years, ended up being the golden ticket.

I took home a 1979/1980 retailer’s catalog. It was full of things like VCRs and Camcorders listed for ungodly amounts of money, and the back cover proudly presented an Atari 2600 console. I had one of these growing up that grandpa found at a garage sale. My brother was and is an avid gamer. The page displaying the game console was in great condition. I held onto it for months before the holidays rolled around when I cut the page out, framed it and gave it to Daniel for Christmas.

Opportunities like that have to be made, sought out, and even when you’re looking out for them they don’t always show up. It also helps to know a person well. Finding or devising the perfect gift for that second cousin you met ten years ago at a reunion will probably be exponentially more difficult than for your nuclear family members.

Two things in conclusion. First of all, to any friends or family who may have felt slighted by my spoiled brat reaction to a gift you gave me in the past, I’m sincerely sorry. I pray I’m a more gracious person in the future, starting this year. Secondly, this post introduces a two month series where I will recommend ideas to readers for unique and one-of-a-kind gifts.

The series will be titled Gifting, and will be published whenever I come across a good idea up until Christmas.

Filed under Affluenza, Art, Christianity, Christmas list, Entitlement, Etsy, Handmade, Intentional observation, Modern culture, Salvage

New Work: Storms over a wooden prairie

17 July 2008 by pcNielsen 2 Comments

I’m quite pleased with these two pieces, particularly the green one on the walnut “prairie.” They are a mid-fire buff clay that was given to me by a friend, and the terra sig and smoke took to it beautifully. The idea to put a cloud form made of clay over a laminated piece of wood as the horizon is something I first worked on back in 2001. I still have some of the abstract forms, but only one ever made it onto a prairie, and none of them were as refined as these.

The texture on the sides of the wood was an exploration of ways to approach the material other than the traditional sanding to a smooth surface. This was inspired in part, to be honest, by my occasional impatience and by observing the handmade details on our 100 year old upright piano. I made the texture using a brace (hand drill), hammer and nutpick or nail set, chisels and a strange shoemaker’s tool I salvaged from the Creekview Flats. The texturing turned out better over the walnut. The soft maple feathered more than I wanted, and the color just doesn’t show the marks off as well as the darker wood (though you can’t tell this from the photographs). The prairies are finished with beeswax.

Both of the clay forms reference pileus clouds. I like these works, along with another very similar form not pictured here, well enough to hold them back from the Etsy store at this point in hopes of getting them into a gallery show in the near future.

Now I just need to find said gallery show to submit them too!

Filed under Art, Ceramics, Etsy, Handmade, Mixed media

A store is reborn

12 July 2008 by pcNielsen 1 Comment

The banner needs some work, but The Aesthetic Elevator Etsy store has reopened, again. Visit it via this link, or click on the screenshot below.

Pricing, as Tim Jones pointed out a week ago, isn’t much fun. I noted in the comments of that post my ceramics professor’s own philosophy. He said he’d rather price one of his platters at $10,000 and have nine to give away as opposed to selling all ten for $1,000. I like that philosophy, but it might not flush itself out in every circumstance. I haven’t used it in my Etsy shop at this point in time, to be sure. However, marking things too low shows a lack of confidence and personal valuation. Pricing too high comes across as pretentious. All things considered, the small sculptures I listed today are probably a good deal, in my opinion anyway, for starting out in earnest.

Tell your friends, or purchase a piece or to as a small meditative addition to your desk or bookshelf. You can find a few different works of mine at MissionaryArts as well, via this link.

Here’s a piece I started this afternoon from the sketch in the background. The banding wheel is new, a very nice tool.

This approach is something I’ve been wanting to attempt for a while now, larger in scale and with more realism than a lot of my recent works. I’m eager to see where it goes. I recently came across a glaze I’d like to try out for this work, after a cloud formation I observed and photographed a month or so ago.

Filed under Art, Business of art, Ceramics, Etsy, In the studio

Day-job artist and his frustration

7 July 2008 by pcNielsen 3 Comments

This is very similar to a post from last week, but I was struck again with a sense of time-related frustration which led to this post.

I spent a significant amount of time this weekend glazing and firing. I mixed up the glaze from my line blends that looked most promising, but it didn’t come out like the test at all. This is a bit frustrating in my present situation, mainly because I don’t feel like I have time to experiment at length — much as I might like to.

Mammatus platter 3 with a cobalt glaze.

And I still haven’t begun to market my works, the finished ones that I like. The Local Flair gallery won’t be opening until this Fall (she had hoped to open this past Spring), I haven’t begun to look into local shows and still don’t like any options I’ve found for an online venue. I’d like to have my own website — I know what I want it to look like — but I don’t have the time to learn how to do it myself and don’t have the money to pay someone else. Thus, I’ll probably land on Etsy for the time being. It’s aesthetics and price are good, even if the management isn’t.

In May I interviewed friends who are on a 12 year journey preparing to work in missions aviation. They said some good things about being flexible in times of discouragement, keeping your goals while altering your course. I will keep plugging away. But let it be known that this aspiring, day-job artist is not of the most patient kind.

Filed under Art, Business of art, Ceramics, Etsy, Personal reflection

Handbuilt porcelain & marketing

11 June 2008 by pcNielsen Leave a Comment

I’ve spent a lot of the evening nosing around the internet looking for good ways to market the small sculptures I’ve been finishing in the last month. Without much success, I might add. I don’t need much in a website, but the top results in Google for the search terms that seem best to me are terrible. Maybe I’ll enlist the help of a friend and devise something simple. I’m not in a great hurry, but I need to start thinking about it.

During this search tonight I landed on Etsy, which I’ve known about and actually used in a very cursory manner. Looking for other ceramic artists, I found an Etsy user called Stepanka. This New York City artist handbuilds with porcelain, which is something I don’t come across very often. Her small works, most of which she refers to as “wall pillows,” are soda fired. I really like the end result. If I ever get the chance again I’ll be using porcelain in salt or soda firings in this way.

Something about these hold my attention. I like the contrast, the finish and the delicate yet lighthearted line work.

That’s about all I know of her. The one sentence in her Etsy profile doesn’t say much, and there are no outside links I can find either. Thought I’d share one of her works though. The above work is titled “Standing by the lake” and measures 3.75 x 2.75 x 1.5 inches.

Filed under Art, Artist profile, Business of art, Ceramics, Etsy

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