Over a Pepsi light

[Mike McCarty]

Yesterday I had occasion to talk to a friend of mine over a Pepsi light. Bill would love to have a portrait of either his wife or his kid or both but is astounded at what I charge (a comparative pittance). And so I prod and I cajole and try to educate as to the value of my product.

As we approach the bottom of our second Pepsi light we are joined by Bill's brother Bob. As it turns out, Bob is a connoisseur of art. Bob offers that he has several art pieces by Thomas Kinkade which he acquired at the mall. Bob goes on to say that he could get four times what he paid for each of his

[Michael Georges]

Mike,

I completely agree with you! I saw a special on Kinkade, which featured a couple who had purchased over $100,000 of his "prints". They are really worth nothing! Beanie Babies and Thomas Kinkade - two sides of the same coin. IMO, it is the largest scam perpetrated on the public since modern art.

It's a sham, it's a scam, and it's a real shame that it's hurting real artists.

[Khaimraj Seepersad]

Mike,

The proportion of art purchasers remains constant at all levels, be it traditional, plein aire or other. Don't worry about it. Instead get yourself a broader system for being advertised.

[Patt Legg]

I too applaud you, Mike, for bringing up this subject. I am not by far a nationally known artist (sometimes hardly known within the family) but I work really hard at what I do and particularly at marketing as I haven't an agent. I see exactly what you are talking about and do not claim to know too much about all of it but I certainly can relate to your delimma regardless of how small.

I also have trouble within some areas (geographic) in convincing others of the difference in what I do and explaining why I do not complete an oil within the half hour "just like Bob Ross".

Please, I am not bad mouthing Ross at all, but that is not what I am about. I have been told I am wasting my time even trying to convince others at times, but part of who I am and what I do is attemping to educate to the best of my ability. I choose to live in a small rural community and realize that some things never change. Please out there give me some quick advice or comment, something I can come back with to at least touch on what we do.

Sometimes discouraged,
Patt

[Renee Price]

I live in a small town, too. I can spot a Bob Ross landscape from 100 yards! I walk into the local art supply store and look at the paintings displayed, I say nothing, but smile as I walk out with my supplies. I smile because I have chosen to try to establish myself in the closest large town.

It is sad though that the general public believes they are buying original art when they purchase the Thomas Kinkade prints. Those "collectors items" will go down in history beside the paintings of "poker playing dogs."

Maybe we can alter the make-up of the West Nile virus to include an appreciation of fine art along with the general flu like symptoms. Work on that for us will you Mike !

Renee Price

[Denise Hall]

Hi Mike and all,

I'm trying my best to educate my little corner of the elementary universe (all 950 of them that I see once a week).

Yes, along with being a painter during all my "free" time (chuckle chuckle) I am a full-time elementary art teacher. One of my pet peeves is exactly what you have brought up - although I do tolerate the G.P. attitude that "prints are original works of art" a little better than I used to. Maybe age has something to do with it!

My students are taught from kindergarten the difference between a "real" oil painting and a poster and "real" art vs. "sorta real" art. I'm sure you get my drift. Some come back the next year without remembering that the picture that is always on the back door of my room isn't the "real" Mona Lisa and they must be reminded and retaught. But by the end of their 6 years with me, they know that the "real" Mona Lisa is priceless and hanging behind bulletproof (hehe) glass in the Louvre in Paris.

Like I said, I am trying!

Cheers,

[Mike McCarty]

On a recent trip to the Northeast, my daughter and I visited Rockport, MA. A quintessential, artsy village on the picturesque sea coast. Narrow pedestrian streets lined with art galleries, loaded with fine and almost fine original art. Some with artists in the windows painting away. And there in the midst of all this splendor was a just arrived, brand new, Kinkade gallery. Looking much like all that surrounded it. And in its "sameness" with the surroundings, there is the suggestion of legitimacy. There is the subtle suggestion that: we are here like they, we are all the same. Later in the trip we visited Newport RI, almost the identical circumstance.

When the chance arose I would ask a local what they thought of their new neighbor. It was more the look on their face than what they actually said. At the time it just seemed like an interesting dynamic that would surely play itself out over the millennia. I am more annoyed now having stared it straight in the eye over my fake Pepsi.

I'm even starting to annoy myself with this rant. Maybe I'll go back on the decaf.

[Chris Saper]

It is impossible for me to read this thread and not comment. Seeing Thomas K. on 60 Minutes got my ranting attention. (Cynthia, call Ted Koppel for a specialty piece!)

However, I have to say that I actually saw a plein aire painting of his, a mission in California, (maybe Carmel?), and it was just beautiful. I thought, wow, he can also really paint.

Thomas Kinkade is in the category of Martha Stewart, an incredible marketing machine. He also thinks bigger than many of us ever will. So I think that it is not sensible to consider Mr. Kinkade's work as an apple in a field of oranges.

Evaluate it in its own context, and stop thinking that somehow "we" should be the arbiters of that context.

Original portrait art is a different animal entirely from the Kinkade print market. A thousand years of conversation will not convert a Kinkade print collector to go for original traditional portraiture any more than it would convince a passionate collector of original art to buy a Kinkade print. Stop trying, because it doesn't make sense.

Do you think I would love a spot on 60 Minutes? Of course! But competing with the Kinkade art print market, on its bases, will never get me there.

[Steven Sweeney]

I'm in another not-quite-Pepsi-generation motel tonight along a somewhat tortuous way. There are slot machines in here somewhere and the reception desk bore a sign when I checked in, advising of a "loud band" (and so of course I immediately said, "Sure, okay, and where will I be able to find that band later?") - but Kinkade keeps coming up like one of those floating answers in that old "8 ball" ouija-type game ("Will I ever make it as an artist?" "Maybe, but don't quit playing blackjack.")

I don't happen to like the more commercially popular Kinkade pieces. I don't think they're bad, I just find them somewhat uninteresting, unengaging and (and I'll echo what Chris Saper just said, without trying to put words in her mouth) beneath what he's capable of doing. I've seen Kinkade's original plein air oil sketches, and I stood there slack-jawed and almost sad that someone who could do THAT was doing (as I point to the prints up in the front part of the gallery) THAT. This isn't a guy who can't do better, he's a brilliant marketeer who has discovered what sells, and now he's rich. In that same breath, I have to say that I don't regard the Kinkades of the art world to be "competition", I don't think they're taking money away from me, because the folks who want his prints probably wouldn't be interested in my style of landscape. So be it.

I worked in an extremely intensive atelier in which one of the students had to (surprise!) pay the rent back at the apartment, and he did it by being what in the Kinkade empire is known as a Master Highlighter. For those who aren't aware of the process, Kinkade giclee prints are usually "highlighted," or touched up after printing, generally at the "factory" but occasionally at special Kinkade Gallery events at which a "Master Highlighter" sits with paints ready to listen to and then execute a purchaser's request for additional highlighting of various parts of the painting. This takes place in the "lights", and so the flowers' patina or the fire's glow gets that certain something that is what makes you look twice at the Kinkades, even if you've already decided you don't like them. I found it quite fascinating, especially as I watched the expressions on the very happy purchasers' faces. I would be the very last to suggest that those folks were being conned. They were getting exactly what they wanted.

One of the best-known popular artists in Australia is a fellow named Ken Done, who does rather primitive, some might say infantile, renderings in brilliant minimal palettes of much-recognized cultural icons such as the Sydney Opera House and the like. The capital-A artists of Australia (I'm generalizing now) treat him with contempt, and in a recent compilation of the 2 or 3 thousand notable Aussie artists, he was left out. And he makes an absolute ton of dough from his work and his wife, a fashion designer, prints his stuff on blouses and skirts and tea towels and hats and she makes a ton of dough too, and everyone goes away happy, except the capital-A, black-shirted Artistes in the community. Good on Kinkade, I say, and good on Ken Done. They found a niche, they mastered it, they capitalized upon it, and what great fun they've had.

My kids are sick to death of my dragging them through art galleries, but when I took my son to a Kinkade gallery at Minneapolis's Mall of America a few years ago, he was absolutely enamored of the paintings (not the "good" ones I mentioned earlier, the "popular" ones). And you know, I was so pleasantly surprised that this then-12-year-old was actually excited about a painting and was telling ME about the way the darks and lights contrasted and that's what made that firelight setting interesting, I realized that I had my own pettiness to expiate. He only got a refrigerator magnet out of the visit, but he was most pleased with it.

I just bought a beautiful giclee Montana landscape print on canvas from a impossibly successful fellow in my hometown, and during a discussion about why he was marketing so much of his work as relatively inexpensive prints, he told me that he'd decided 25 years ago to let people have access to his paintings even if they couldn't afford the originals, and so he vowed to himself never to overprice or get too precious about his reproduction market. God bless him. I didn't show that giclee to one single person in two weeks without having to explain that it wasn't an original, yet I bought it for about 1/15 of the price of the original. A brilliant artist (Mark Ogle, see www.markogle.com) and a brillaint marketeer, and I don't begrudge him any of it. In fact, I'm keenly re-energized in my own pursuit of landscape work, by his attitude, as well as his competence.

We all have to develop our competence in the studio and then further develop our competence in sharing with the world what we've done (or what we can do for prospective clients). But I can't find any room at all in my outlook for jealousy of those who have acquired mastery in both arenas before I did. It just means I have more work to do.

Cheers to all, after (and before) a hiatus,

[Alicia Kornick]

Last year I spent the better part of the day photographing my brother-in-law's twin 8 year-old daughters. I traveled 100 miles round trip, brought props with me including a heavy antique chair and a piano bench. I shot inside and outside and did about 7 rolls of 36 pictures. I paid to have them developed and mailed him the pictures. One of the girls refused to smile and likes to make funny faces. I tried to get a good picture of her, but I have never seen a good picture of her. Well...he pays me a visit and tells me which pictures he likes and then proceeds to tell me he would like a portrait to hang over the mantle of the two of them, but Oh By The Way, he won't pay me one penny more than $300.00 for it, because he says he can get a really nice photo for about that. I very politely told him that maybe it was better to get the photo and left it at that. His wife is a partner in a very successful, prestigious law firm and they could well afford to pay triple my price, but here's the kicker, they do not know nor do they appreciate art and never will. At first I was insulted, but I got over it and no harm done.

The nurse who took my job when I left has a Thomas Kinkade scene on her computer screen, one of the cottages. It nauseates me. I had a full screen picture of Bouguereau's portrait of Gabrielle Cot that I thought was sublime. It was replaced by the Kinkade. I have seen some of Kinkade's real paintings, the impressionistic street scenes and some watercolors that I do like. He is a fine painter, he has just hit upon a market ie: my brother-in-law and the nurse, that is bringing him tons of money. I knew the owner and the manager of one of his galleries in Baton Rouge and they spoke of his work in hushed, reverent tones. He is a PR juggernaut.

I work very hard at what I do and I do not apologize for my prices (which are probably too low). I don't waste time over Diet Pepsi or Diet Coke trying to convince someone of the value of an original work and the time, love and angst that go into its creation. It will never work and they will never appreciate it. I have clients waiting and willing to pay for a portrait and just disregard the others.