How to sell your paintings - online and offline

Not everyone wishes to sell their work, certainly not the first 'masterpieces', and perhaps not even the paintings of later years that were achieved after so much pain and effort. They hang in the studio as touchstones, a guarantee of what the painter can or could do. Nonetheless, professionals have little choice in the matter, and serious amateurs enjoy the recognition and the supplementary income. How do you about about selling your paintings?


The first point to make is that art and commerce are not easy bedfellows. Artists strain every emotional sinew to ensure that each work is the very best they can achieve, but commerce works quite differently.
So, for artists who will always find this difficult to appreciate, selling your paintings is a business. It is a risky business, and calls for considerable flair in spotting what will sell, how it should be presented, and to which groups of likely purchasers.

No one would be in the fine art business at all without strong nerves, a deep love of paintings, and an understanding bank manager.
Here are the options:

GALLERIES
Gallery owners do their sums. They have a notion of how an artist might sell, and what types of work will do best, but the acid test is always the exhibition, and what can be achieved in private deals afterwards. They go cautiously. Prospects look distinctly brighter with a CV that lists an education at recognized art colleges followed by significant exhibitions and commissions — not only because it backs their own judgment, but because this information is what prospective purchasers will look for in the catalogue.
You may walk into a major gallery without an appointment, clutching some homemade slides of your work, and a battered folder of drawings, but it is most unlikely you'll get beyond the charming girl at the desk. Nor should you. Galleries are professional institutions, and expect a courteous letter of inquiry with a brief record of accomplishment.

LOCAL SHOWS
Representation at a London or New York gallery is the dream of many artists, but one rarely achieved, and perhaps never in one step. Most artists start by exhibiting locally, with colleagues in the local painting club or at the art college's annual show.

And those exhibitions are not simply one step on the long journey to recognition, something for the eventual CV, but serve two vital purposes. In the first place they get your pieces hung with other work, which is essential if you're to see them objectively and learn from the experience. And in the second place, they extend your contacts with fellow artists.

INTERNET
The Internet has greatly extended the artist's ability to put his work before the public, and to do so more cheaply. The search engines will show the immense range of work that is now offered, some rather amateurish but other work that has flair and conviction. The leading 'bricks and mortar' galleries in particular show excellent work in a very professional manner.

• selling through an Internet Gallery
• selling through your Own Website
• using Online Auctions

Source: www.oil-painting-techniques.com

Tonal Harmony: Old Master Approaches

To an extent difficult to understand today, the traditional oil painting techniques aimed to achieve a harmony in tones, i.e. a pleasing pattern in the balance between light and dark. Yellowing varnish has spoilt many of these effects, and we now prefer livelier colors anyway, but tonal value remains an essential element in most pictures.

GENERAL PRINCIPLES
Leaving aside the strong chiaroscuro effects of Velazquez, Rembrandt and other 17th century masters, traditional paintings cannot escape implying a light source and showing how objects appear under that source. Depictions have to make sense, and be convincing. And, once tonal elements appear in a painting, they assume an aesthetic dimension of their own, which means that tone is inescapable element of composition.

Contemporary work is often in a high key, of course, but unless abstract or a colored drawing, its pale shadows still need to form a pattern and to say something meaningful. Most traditional paintings display a greater tonal range, and the common advice (certainly in direct painting, to which most the suggestions below apply) is to quickly set the range by laying in the lightest and darkest of tones at the very outset of painting.

Beyond that — pleasing patterns, variety, maintenance of mood, good balance — it is difficult to lay down principles. A sense for tonal harmony comes with experience, and by looking at masterworks. The notes below are more in the nature of practical hints in traditional oil painting techniques.

Source: www.oil-painting-techniques.com