Bet you didn’t think you’d see me here again so soon.  I’m sure my Facebook friends will all end up blocking me because I’m posting so much.

But it is summer and I am in full-on art marketing mode!

The Natur-Tyme show has only been up for a week. No sales yet.  My thought is it is something for customers and the area to need to warm up to.  Art seems to be not in the forefront of the average Syracusan’s mindset these days.

Since they are small (18″ x 18″) and they are paintings of cats, and they are ten years old, I decided to go the way of the SPCA and other animal rescue shelters and price them the way they would an older cat who needs adopting.

This morning I changed my prices to reflect that.  Each painting is only $75!  A steal by any standards.  It’s dangerous to price paintings so low.  In the eyes of anyone, it may appear that I don’t believe in myself or that I may think my art is not of high quality and therefore not valuable.

The opposite is true.  You must know that about me by now.  But making a living off my art is a dream, not necessarily the only reason I do it.  It’s really about sharing myself – sharing my hopes and dreams, and all that emotional stuff with an audience.  Artists are formalists and create their own versions of the world with detail but above all else, we are emotional creatures filled with this unquenchable desire to be loved in some way.  Our personalities, our quirks, our talent.  We are pretty  needy people.

And so, I am trying to compromise.  I want people to enjoy my paintings.  I want them to take them home at a price point that makes them feel like they didn’t overspend – I certainly don’t want anyone to experience cognitive dissonance after purchasing a final sale item.

The Echolalia series is a piece of me.  At its core, it’s really about how the past shaped me into who I am.  I cannot run away from it.  I can only move on from the dark stuff, own up to it and say – wow, you have really come a long way.

You assume these frolicking cats are about happy thoughts and in reality they were created out of despair.  They are all about me looking for ways to find happiness in a time when nothing at all was going my way.  Now things are so different and I see how I found and still find solace in these works.  How now, they represent a lifeline to the future world I’ve found myself in and everything is okay.

Is that too heavy?  Sorry – for me, as you know, art is about exposing myself.   But in a way that works, like the game board in Concentration.  It’s not spelled out for you but sometimes you can still decipher it.

The goal is to sell all of the Echolalia paintings so that I can start moving this massive inventory of work.  Either that or start looking for a bigger house.  I will put both out into the universe and see what sticks.

Here is the link to Maria Rizzo’s article about the venue.