Wittig Report

Looking Forward, Looking Back - 2004

30/Dec/2004 - 07:01 - Chicago

It's time for me to close out another year, write a plan for the upcoming year, and project a little into the years to come... where I will be heading with my work.

I will begin, by looking back...

As I mentioned in last year's 'Looking Forward/Back' article, numbers cannot tell the whole story, but they are worth looking at.

2000 - 40 pieces
2001 - 60 pieces
2002 - 119 pieces
2003 - 403 pieces
2004 - 143 pieces

The huge spike in 2003 was due to my parcticing 'speed painting'... an exercise which, while valuable as an exercise, is probably not the way I would want to paint for the rest of my life. I will probably revisit the exercise from time to time, because I do find it valuable, but at the same time, I also find it valuable to paint just a teensy bit slower, so I can gradually get a feel for my own 'optimum speed'... neither too fast, or too slow.

In 2004, I took a fairly large amount of time off... most of the summer... in order to build my own computer from scratch... my first complete build... and to play catch-up on many years of neglected home maintenance. I think that if I had painted the full year without a break, at my current, less frantic (than last year's) pace, I would probably have finished around 200 pieces.

Looking forward, I think that between 200 and 300 pieces per year will probably be 'normal' output, for the next several years. This figure is loosely tied to the size of the paintings I do, which is loosely tied to the amount of time and materials I devote to each piece, and also to the amount of money that I can sell each painting for. As the amount of money I can expect to receive per piece gradually increases, I can afford to increase the amount of time and materials put into each piece, which will probably also affect the physical size of my work... permitting me to execute and sell larger, more in-depth projects, without a financial penalty.

I still have a lot to learn... about painting, and running 'the business of painting'... selling my work. My skills at easel are at least 4 years ahead of my selling and business skills. I think this is a good thing, because I want 'quality of work' to be my major selling advantage, as opposed to having my selling skills leading the pack.

Some assorted points of interest, past and future...

One interesting thing that I just noticed, is that on my eBay account, my Feedback Rating is currently 687 positive, zero negative, and the number of people who left positive feedback for me is 1045. Each unique buyer can only increase a seller's feedback rating by 1... so if a client buys three paintings from me on eBay, and leaves positive feedback 3 times, one time will increase both my Feedback Rating and the number of people who left positive feedback by 1, and the other two times will only increase the number of people who left positive feedback. The difference between the two numbers tells me that I have a lot of repeat buyers. In my opinion, repeat buyers are good... very, very good.
Of the 143 paintings that I executed in 2004, 19 remain unsold at end of year. This does not mean that they will never sell... some have only been on-line for a few weeks. What it does mean, is that at end of year, about 87% of the stuff actually painted in the year, also sold in the same year. This looks pretty encouraging.
The average selling price for my paintings is still quite low... not enough to support myself 100%... but right off the top of my head, I think that my average selling price has about doubled, in the past year. This looks encouraging, too. Thing are not progressing as quickly as I would like to see them progress... but things are moving slowly and steadily in the right direction.
As far as seeking gallery representation is concerned, this is still a back-burner issue for me, for the next few years. I still believe that the only good time to seek gallery representation, is after I am earning enough to support myself without gallery representation. Otherwise, I have no decent position, from which to negotiate. I'm not going to spend a lot of time planning detailed strategies for this venture, until I am close enough to making the move, so the strategies will not have a chance to become stale, due to the rush of current events.
Writing and self-publishing my first e-book was a fairly good move, too. It was a simple compilation of my first eight years painting and four years writing... a cleaned-up version of my website, but surprisingly... to me at least... it has actually turned a profit. I did everything myself, which kept the cost of producing it under $100.00, so this wasn't very hard to do. The most significant part of the project, was that it set me up for beginning e-book number two, which will certainly be a better organised venture, as the first one was unplanned, until about two months before I went to work on it. E-Book number one, was most importantly, a catalyst for future, better planned projects. Getting started, is usually the hardest part, in any venture.
Producing my own Giclee prints was another project I got off the ground in 2004, but it stalled temporarily... probably because I got back into painting again, full bore, in September. Looking forward, this is something I plan to expand and refine in 2005.
I noticed, somewhere along the way in 2004, that I was developing a noticeable 'style'... a way of painting that seems identifiably 'wittig'. This is not something that I was trying to accomplish, and in fact, I don't know whether I like the idea or not... I just started seeing it in my work, after about eight years of steady painting.

I will have finally reached... according to my own reckoning... the end of my eight-plus-one year apprenticeship as a painter, on December 31, 2004... about 12 hours from now, and will henceforth consider myself a Journeyman painter.

...what a long, strange trip it’s been. -Grateful Dead

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