You are a hunter. You didn’t know it, but you are. As an artist you are hunting elusive and rare game called the ‘Art Collector’. Mostly solitary creatures, roaming the plains of the art gallery establishment they need very tasty bait if you want them to come out of hiding, cheque books in hand.

If you manage to snag enough of these collectors with your tasty wares then there is the potential for more of them to head your way, demanding all the  morsels you can feed them. But, as an artist, do you have enough fresh carcasses in the cupboard?

Okay, enough already with the safari adventure. Lets leave the Land Rover and gun behind and check out of the Treetops African resort to examine what it is that art collectors really want from an artist and their artwork.

Most people who buy art are not art collectors. They are just people who like to decorate their homes with nice things. If you and your art have a good name and that certain je ne sais quois then these home decorators will buy your art, maybe even lots of it. There is money to be made there.

Real Art Collectors on the other hand (of the serious variety) are also ‘art investors’ to varying degrees, and when I say ‘investor’ that can mean not just in terms of money. Art Collectors want much much more than a pretty picture when they are considering buying your art.

My own art has been mostly been bought by home decorators; the people who just love it because its a beautiful thing to behold, and it makes them happy when they see it in their homes. I have though on occasion had my art purchased by the real deal collectors that artists dream about having on their exhibition mailing lists. I once delivered one of my paintings to a client who had a collection in his multi-squillion dollar home that almost made me weep with joy at seeing it (after all it’s not everyday you see a Gauguin hanging in someone’s living room.)  I wish I had more clients like that, but he is the exception rather than the rule in my customer Rolodex.

So what do they want from us artists, these elusive collectors?

First of all they do not want cheap art. They like expensive art. Very expensive art, and very rarely do they descend to the sub $3000 level (or thereabouts). Sub $3000 for a real collector is bargain basement art made by a bunch of unknowns, and there is bucket loads of competition in the ‘unknown artist’ marketplace.  Sure, they might pick up a few trinkets under that level for fun very occasionally but mostly they themselves are hunters of next big thing and big name artists.

Why is the art they buy expensive? Well, it tends to have a track record. We’re not just talking here about a few first prize rosettes at the local show; we’re talking major recognition for an artists achievements by the tastemakers and tastebreakers of the art industry, possibly over an extended period, so that the prices for works by that artist have been well established and are preferably heading upwards. Art collectors who like to live on the art investing side of town do not like to gamble; they like to really invest in beautiful things, for some kind of gain later (whether that be through status of ownership, preservation of ‘culture’ or financial gain).

Most  serious artists who the real collectors chase do a major amount of work to get to where they are. Often they study, travel, sometimes choose to live in extreme circumstances, they mix with other about to be famous artists in ‘a school’ and they pull off major exhibitions in serious galleries of both the commercial and culturally important kind.  They don’t tend to paint nice landscapes on a Sunday for delivery to the local gallery on Monday. They live  full and colourful  lives. They are interesting, intriguing and their legend grows as their dealers, friends and hanger-onners spread the word of their artistic exploits throughout the land.

Real art collectors love a good story. They love a track record. They love an established price that has been set in sales in both the primary market (Galleries) and the secondary market (auction houses). They love to hob-nob with the best Art Gallery Directors who give them the priority inside track on what’s really going down in the art world, and they like their artists to be elusive in a manner which befits their superstar artist status (even though they might aspire to actually meet them one day).

This can be frustrating for the sub $3000 artists. We actually want to engage with our clients, we are willing to meet with them, we want them to love us and we want them to love our art. Surely art collectors will buy our art if only we can reach out to them, won’t they?

No.

What they will do if they are really interested in you is watch and wait. They will keep an eye out for you in the galleries and the magazines, they will quietly pop by to see how your exhibitions are doing. They will hold you on mental file until such time that you prove you and your art are a worthy investment either culturally or financially, and then as your star begins to ascend into the stratosphere they will begin to pick up some of your work.

By this time of course you are on the way to being a successful artist and are starting to be a little bit elusive yourself (in the manner of the real superstar artists), not because of some tendency towards being a hermit, but because you are in actual fact so busy painting to supply the demand for your work. Short supply sends the prices on a skyward trajectory. The collectors like that too.

So what do collectors really want? They want you to be a serious career artist making serious art. Are you?

Year ago when I first took the plunge into the professional art world I started out creating screen prints in runs of up to 100 at a time with home-made equipment in my Garage.

I figured it would make sense to be able to distribute my wonderful works as widely as possible, and what better way than producing a ton of copies and then selling them to eager buyers.

At the time I was inspired by some local artists who seemed to have their work in every framing shop and exhibition that I saw around town. I figured that these guys were making it big, as their work seemed so popular. They were themselves creating prints, both regular four colour process and handmade screen prints. Since the cost of a run of 1000 4 colour process (poster style) prints was many thousands of dollar and ‘Giclee’ colour inkjet printing was a mere twinkle in technology’s eye at the time, I opted for the home-brew screen printing approach.

Well, after a short while one of the local artists that I’d admired so much spotted my work in a shop and gave me a call. I was excited!  He wanted to represent me himself and use his connections to get my prints into the outlets that he had access to. This made me even more excited. He only wanted the very reasonable sum of 30% of the wholesale price as commission, and since my prints at that time retailed for the absolutely enormous sum of $100 each (Framing Shops like to make a 100% markup) that meant that I would receive the princely sum of $35 for each print, and therefore $3500 for a complete sell out of a print run. I was almost salivating at the thought. It actually seemed like a lot of money to me at the time.

I was feeling pretty cocky. After precisely 6 weeks in the business I had an art agent (of sorts) with connections. Gee, I thought. My art must be pretty good, obviously I’m a genius. With the benefit of hindsight I now realise that youth also comes parcelled with a delusional state of mind. I guess we’re designed that way by nature so that we strike out into the wilderness into adulthood without a thought as to the fact that we actually have the life experience related decision making capacity of a small rodent who has lived all his life running on a wheel in a hamster habitat. I digress.

Anyway, a week or so later I received another call. My new agent no longer want to be my agent, as his own agent now wanted to be my agent instead. Agents with agents? This could get confusing. It was revealed to me that my current opportunist artist agent in fact owed his own agent a big money type favour, and, in order to pay some of the debt I had been placed on the transfer list and been parcelled up as part of a deal.

I was even more excited. Now agents were trading me, and haggling to secure my services. In my mind I was a legend in my own lunchtime.

So, off I trundled to meet my new, and slightly bigger time agent, prints in hand and really without any clue whatsoever about how anything, including the art world, actually worked, or the reality that it entails.

The same deal was struck. 30% of the wholesale. I asked for some kind of contract agreement. Blank look. I asked again. You see I had read all about the art world in various ‘how things are officially done in the artworld books’ and knew this was the proper way to go about it. I expected to come away with a typed contract detailing who would do what and pay whom when. I actually left the agents abode with a note scribbled on a piece common-or-garden  spiral bound jotting pad paper stating “I will take 30% commission and pay you within 30 days, signed, Ms Agent”. Fair enough.

Over the next few months  I waited patiently for my agent to do her stuff, dreaming of the river of dollars potentially flowing my way. All that nasty selling stuff was being taken care of by ‘my agent’ (oh how I loved the ring of saying that phrase  in idle party conversation, because everyone knows that if an artist has an agent then that artist ‘must be’ absolutely brilliant.)

Time came, time went. There were meetings, strategising and plans. I was going to be huge. The agent told me so. My work was going to sell like hot cakes. My Agent told me so. She actually sold precisely 5 prints. The agent reluctantly told me so, and then handed me a cheque and the remaining prints and wished me luck. I was relieved.

I was relieved because all of the time I was with the agent, the spoken agreement was that I would not try and sell prints myself, and by this time I was eager to actually get a return on my long sweaty hours spent in the garage. Undeterred I went out the next day and sold five prints directly to the local framing shops and small gallery’s. The shop owners gave me cheques directly in the hand. I liked that even better than the agent giving me a cheque. There was something very satisfying and direct about it. I made these things and people were willing to give me money right then and there.  I still like that feeling today.

So, after all this, did I learn anything?  Do I think art agents are good or evil for early career artists like myself as I once was?

My agent wasn’t evil. She had the best intentions. She just couldn’t sell my work to her clients. End of story. One of her other artists (the one who originally wanted to be my agent) was doing extraordinarily well with her, and making a handsome living out of it. My art just wasn’t right for her outlets.

If you can find yourself an agent who actually does have the skill and capacity to sell your stuff then this is good.  It does have the advantage of allowing you more time to actually create your artwork, but, remember, your agent is going to have to sell a whole lot in order keep you in the manner to which you would like to become accustomed, and you can’t get go out there and sell your artwork directly by yourself when things get a bit slow, because that would be undermining what your agent is supposed to be doing for you.

If your agent is  handling your original work as well as your prints, and representing you into proper art galleries, then remember, after gallery commission and agents commission, you might only be left with 35% of the retail value, so your art had better command a very respectable price, in order that you might make a decent profit.

I also learned that you can read all the ‘how things are done in the artworld properly’ books you like, but, at the end of the day if you can’t trust the person you are dealing with (ie they are evil) then a contract is not going to count for much anyway.  Are you really going to sue a person if they don’t do what they said they would? Probably not,  at least not early on in your career when the money is small. Life is too short. Move on.

Upon reflection I think I went with an art agent too early, before any kind of demand had been established for my work. If I’d done more direct selling for myself at the time I would have known fairly quickly whether there was enough interest to keep both myself and and agent well fed and watered. If the prints were actually flying out the door as fast as I could make them, and there was no time for me to process the sales then an agent would have been a wise move. As it was, my prints sold quietly and steadily over a number years as most print runs do (which was good).

So, if you are just starting out, maybe you should relax and be your own agent for a while. You’ll directly enjoy the thrill of people putting money in your hands for the things you make and you’ll experience the artworld first hand at the coal face. When you get so busy successfully selling your work that you don’t have enough time to make it, then, and only then it might be worth taking on an agent to do all that messy sales stuff for you.

Now you need to put down your brushes and read some stuff on how to close a sale.

You’ve created a brilliant artwork.

All your friends want it but of course they don’t want to part with the vast sums of money required to prise this gleaming jewel of paint and canvas from your hot little hands.

They ask “is there a print available?”

The trouble is that making large high quality prints can a very expensive process, and full colour gloss inkjet prints from your MegaCorp Mutlifunction Centre can go through your printer cartridges quicker than a Hummer sucks a Gas Station dry. You need a cheap attractive alternative.

Have you thought about making  Mini Art Prints?

What is a Mini Art Print?

In my case, the mini art prints I made were little full colour prints of my own artworks, no bigger than a business card, which I matted up, framed and subsequently sold to passing tourists at the markets. I personally signed and titled the mat of each print and popped them into neat little cellophane packages which looked irresistibly collectible. Since I had a series of artworks along a similar theme (Queenslander style  houses in fact) this just added to the collectibility factor. You can make you prints bigger of course if you want to, but they are most economical if you keep them to around the size of a regular photograph or smaller.

Photography or scanning

In order to turn your artwork into a mini print you are first going to have to convert it into a digital picture of some kind, either through scanning for smaller works or photography for larger works. It’s important to know that the better the quality of the digital image of your artwork is, then the better your end result is going to be. You can’t skimp on this step or your print will look distinctly below par. Nobody wants a fuzzy, off-centre, strange coloured print no matter how astounding your original is. A photo taken with your common-or-garden domestic mid priced digital camera will be fine for creating  mini prints, especially if you are a dab hand with Photoshop so you can crop it to size and give the colours a bit of a boost where needed to make the image really pop and sing.

Okay, so you’ve got yourself a digital image of  your artwork. How do we print this thing?

Here’s the secret. Did you know that your local mega-electrical store or photo processing shop is a great source of high quality printing? Yes, really it is!  New fangled digital photo printing kiosks are popping up in these establishments like mushrooms. Just pop your USB flash drive in and go.  These machines  do produce nice clear prints on real photographic paper and the quality  is plenty good enough for reproducing art (in a mini way). Not only that, there’s often the bonus of choosing either a matt or gloss paper in a range of different size, at a price that’s very hard to beat.

Yes of course you could print your mini prints on your own high quality ink jet printer, but the cost per unit is way lower at a digital photo printing kiosk, and much faster if you are producing your mini prints in bulk quantities. You only have to contend with the strange looks from the Shop assistants who wonder why on earth you would print 100 photographs of the same thing.

“Archival Quality”

Now, before you scoff at the thought of creating an art print on photographic paper that you would actually sell to people, just think about it a bit. These machines can produce prints that will last potentially a very long time. In my local electrical superstore the Fuji paper that they use in their digital photo printer kiosk has a spec that is designed to last for around 70 years. I was  downright cynical about these claims so I decided to do a little test for myself and took a sample  photographic print and stuck it in the front window of my studio. It was exposed to the full on heat of the Australian sun for three weeks. Afterwards I examined the results and was surprised to find that fading was almost negligible, when compared to a ‘non exposed equivalent’.

Off to market we go

Feeling confident of the product I then had some little frames specially made up in which to mount my mini prints and set off to the local tourist market to sell my wares. I  did quite well with them for a while. I enjoyed those art market days, though all that lugging about of tables nearly did my back in on a number of occasions. You can’t beat it though for direct customer sales experience though.

To Frame or not to Frame…that is the question

You don’t have to go the full hog and mount your mini prints in frames. I’ve seen other artists do similar things and just mount them on a single mat with a backing,  wrapped in cellophane to complete the package. It makes for a  quite attractive as a little gift item. Custom sized mini mats and backings can be purchased quite cheaply in bulk from a picture framing shop, but make sure you go to a framer with an automated mat cutting machine.

Things to watch out for

Some older style digital photo printing kiosks produce prints that look a bit washed out and green. Avoid. Go to a shop with the latest technology installed if you can.

Also, remember that these machines are calibrated mainly to make happy snaps of people look good. Reds may look richer,  blues may look bluer, greens might glow more. This is all designed to give people the illusion that the beach  holiday they’ve just returned from was more of a paradise than they remembered when they photographed it. Do a test first before submitting a large print run.