And now for a long overdue introduction…

Well Muddo! The audience has come, and they have voiced their opinion on Part 2 of this series, and after some initial ruckus, it seems that things are settling down to some sort of consensus: Film has potential, but beware of the risk. Thanks to all of those who joined in the discussion, and of course you can still go there and have your say.

Yes, let’s talk a bit about this viability thing. Simply put, what I am talking about is how YOU can make a living off of what you love. For me, what I love is writing and painting. The usual day jobs needed to fund these pursuits are teaching and the graphic arts. I have worked for clients as a graphic artist, and I have spent portions of the last two years marking student essays, and I will tell you, this is not how I wish to spend the rest of my days. I do not want to pursue what I love as a hobby. Now, if you enjoy your day job, good for you. Keep on keeping on. However, if you are like me, and want to do this thing you love more fully, then we can get somewhere together.

See, when I ask is it ‘viable’? I am not asking ‘is it possible?’ Because, of course it’s possible. What I am really asking is this: if this is what you love, can you live off of it?

Not too long ago the lament in Nassau was that:

Bahamians who want to exercise their talents in the cultural industries are faced with the choice of pursuing their callings as hobbies at home, or of leaving home to make a living by their gifts elsewhere. And we are all the poorer for it.

Maybe you remember that time. However, the interesting thing is that people have been living off of art in the Bahamas for at least 40 years. My father, Eddie Minnis, for instance, has been making it in this country as an artist non-stop since 1971. So clearly, it is possible.

Now, see I’m not talking about getting rich, I’m not talking about creating a multi-national corporation, what I’m talking about is you, doing the thing that you love, not as a hobby, but as your career.

The other thing, that bugs me is that a lot of people will give you some platitudes, “Go follow your dream!” or “Ma buhy, you can do this!” But, it isn’t very often that there is any talk of HOW. Maybe you went to school to study art, maybe you are a bundle of natural talent, but how do you translate that skill into a practical dollars and cents living? That is what this series is about. I’m trying to take a closer look at some of those Bahamians, like an Eddie Minnis, like a Michael Pintard, who are actually doing this thing.

This series, also is just the start. I have been interviewing and emailing Bahamian artists, trying to work out these ideas, and get their thoughts. And of course, I’m taking all of your thoughts and comments to heart and in the end I hope to put it all together as a free .pdf guide / booklet.¹ Maybe to serve penance to the film people, I’ll even put some of the interviews I hope to do on Youtube.

Cause see, the way I see it, the more of us there are doing what we love, the better it will be for all of us.

Ok, now that we are, hopefully, all on the same page, back to the matter at hand…

Part 3: Postcards and Prostitutes

In the last blog post I identified plays and painting as the only two fields in which a Bahamian artist can reasonably expect to make a living. So let’s talk about the market for painting which is perhaps the most mature and vibrant of all the Bahamian arts. It is obviously a long way off from Hollywood; obviously, because it is a different medium.²

Film is a mass medium, in that it has to please large amounts of people, but a painting, in the most narrow sense, is not. To be a commercial success, a painting need only satisfy one person. The person writing the cheque.

Art exhibitions, on the other hand, are about as close as a painter gets to using a mass medium.³ They are open invitations to the public to come into a particular space and look at recent work. Invitations are sent out; a title is created for the show as a whole; and wine and cheese are usually provided. The public come, mill about, eat the food and hopefully in the end, somebody buys something.

Now when I was a regularly practicing artist, I felt that the exhibition itself was somewhat of a waste. Because of the relatively high cost of a painting, the majority of those who are interested enough in your work to come to your show, still leave empty handed. I experimented by trying to sell T-shirts with the show title and slogan at the exhibition. I still believe the idea has potential and can be pushed a lot further than I ever took it.

There is no charge to attend an art show and there is also usually no charge for the food or wine either. I realized taht the majority of Bahamians do not frequent art exhibits, because when I was promoting my own art shows, the most commonly asked question was: Do I have to pay to get in?

The exhibition is essentially a ‘loss leader‘, the artist expects to lose money on the hosting of the show, and by exposing potential buyers to the artwork she hopes that, somebody buys at least some of the individual pieces. And there are avenues available for defraying even this cost. Wine can be provided by Nassau liquor merchants who view it as an advertising cost, and the expense of designing and getting invitations printed can also be covered through external agencies.⁴

If you have your exhibition in a gallery like the Central Bank of the Bahamas, all proceeds go to you, the artist. However, if you hold your show in a commercial gallery, a percentage of each sale goes to the gallery. The exhibition arrangement has generally worked out well for Bahamian artists. Gail Saunders and Michael Craton report that Antonius Roberts 1994 show “Splash, Scrape, and Scrabble” had sales approaching $200,000. If you recall, that is heading into “Election 2002″ territory. Of course, this is not to say that your show will earn this much, but it is nice to know what is possible.⁵

The above analysis does not take into account the 6 months or more that are required to put together enough work to fill an art gallery, or the rolls of canvas required, or the cost of paint and of getting your pieces framed, etc. The ‘overhead’ if you will. Additionally there is an unspoken rule in the Bahamian art world that young artists must start off cheap and move their prices up slowly. While an established Bahamian name can get over $10,000 for one painting, an artist in her first show is tempting fate to price any piece above $500. But even with this consideration, the exhibition has proven a reliable way for artists in this country to make a living.

Visual artists also have other avenues to make ends meet. They can sell a painting at anytime and anywhere and often they do. The art exhibition serves a double purpose in this regard because it gets your name out there and it is entirely possible that if people like your work, you can get a few commissions out of it.

Additionally, if you stumble on a particularly fetching composition, you can also reproduce the image and sell lithographs, either in limited or unlimited editions, thus creating an additional revenue stream. You sign and number the limited series, selling them at a slight premium, while the unnumbered images generally sell for a lesser price. This does not even touch on the recent innovation of giclées, which are higher quality reproductions that come closest to looking like the actual painting. These limited edition runs generally sell for a higher price than the limited prints.

This is all straightforward enough, so I don’t think I am blazing any new trails here.

The Continuum…

What is relatively new however, is the relative controversy in the Bahamian art world *against* those who produce work that has the highest potential for sale in the Bahamian market, or those who follow the first principle of the Pintard system. This type of work has been given the pejorative label of “postcard art.”

In this series of articles, if you have not already noticed, I am not much interested in the question of what qualifies as ‘art’ or what doesn’t. I will leave this alone for the moment, although I might dip a toe into that discussion later on. What I am mainly concerned about is the ‘viability’ of the thing, how are you going to make some kind of a living wage in this country off of your artistic endeavors and cultural production.

It is very easy, perhaps too easy, in the face of this controversy, to split the Bahamian art world into two opposing camps. Perhaps placing the postcard painters on one side and avant gardes on the other.⁶

Let us not walk down this road, but instead, let us problematize this thing and put all Bahamian painting on a continuum of ‘viability’. What I am trying to do is avoid easy value judgments about what is ‘good’ art or not. I will leave such judgements to you.

We start on the left of this continuum with work that has the highest chance for sale in the Bahamian market and move to work that has the least potential on the right. If we did this we would also find that we also have an overlapping continuum of “pretty”; so, on the far left we would have vintage “postcard” art: which I believe to be the most commercially viable type of art in the Bahamas. In the middle we would find some abstract, modernist pieces. At the extreme right end of the scale we would probably have some social commentary, conceptual art, perhaps a piece that like the one that made the cover of the National Exhibition (NE 3) Booklet, Clive Stuart’s “Work Permit: This Lawn will die without Care.”

Stop you say. How can I describe abstractish / modernist / surreal work as “pretty”? Is it not art for serious expression (if I may borrow the last two letters of B-CAUSE).

Now I will remind you that ‘serious expression’ and ‘pretty’ are not mutually exclusive, and whatever type of expression it may be, modernist abstract painting has given rise to a Junkanoo inspired “Bahamian aesthetic of flat, brilliant colors and simple yet dynamic forms”⁷ and it is quite difficult to say that Junkanoo is not in some ways ‘pretty’. This Bahamian aesthetic, although different from the “postcard” style, still sells very well in the Bahamian marketplace. Therefore, as we move further right on the continuum we encounter work that asks more out of the viewer, work that is more difficult for the average Bahamian viewer to comprehend and thus, I would argue, more difficult to sell.

Now on the far right side of the continuum we find work that presents the most difficulty for the Bahamian viewer, work like Clive Stuart’s lawnmower and perhaps John Cox’s “Love Series.” This type of work is generally designed to make some sort of statement and selling the work is perhaps not even considered.

The exhibition that my friend, Jace McKinney, and I mounted in 2004, The Famous Faces of Nassau, definitely fit in this latter category. We knew going in that we weren’t going to come out very well financially.

Now making a living as a painter is not easy regardless of the type of work you produce, but it would appear that if the majority of your artistic output falls on the right hand side of the continuum you are going to need some kind of subsidy, either via government funds or charitable donations or from your own day job; this type of work generally does not pay its own way, not in the Bahamian market anyway.

In defense of prettiness…

The first principle of the Pintard system is to know your market. You can choose to ignore this, but you do so at your own peril. The second principle takes this a step further, it is simply: Know what it is that you are doing. Let us think about this in the Bahamian context of painting for a moment.

Many of our artists have been trained in foreign Colleges and Universities, and it is easy to forget that in the classroom, you have paid dearly to be exempted from the vagaries of the marketplace so that you could concentrate on art in its purest form. This is all well and good.

However, when you return home to the Bahamas and try to live as an artist, you are now placing yourself at the mercy of the very market that you scrupulously ignored for four years or more. You cannot continue to ignore the market and then expect for it to suddenly reward you.

This is not Rhode Island and neither is it Savannah; the art that is ‘viable’ there is not necessarily viable here.

The tendency is to look down on the work that fits on the left of the continuum, the ‘pretty’ so-called ‘postcard’ art, and to dismiss it as not being serious. I know, I have been there.⁸ I have called them “artists” in quotations. And I know that I am not alone in this.

But honestly, I now have a renewed respect for these artists. The fact of the matter is that they are making it in a hostile environment. They are doing the thing that they love as a career and not a hobby. What is so terrible about that?

Now, some may call this prostitution. But if the Pintard System is telling us anything it is that being an artist is not simply about creating art, unless you have substantial private wealth, or have the support of a wealthy patron; it’s about being a business person too. In the real world, you have to pay enough of your own way to continue to be an artist or you are going to starve. This means you have to make some kind of concession to the market that you find yourself competing in if you want to survive and if this means making something further to the left of the continuum, then why not.

All that might be required is some additional thought. Take for example a wonderful piece that falls on the far right side of the viability continuum, John Cox’s “This is how much I love you” installation. The piece itself may not even have been made to sell, and the version that appeared in the NE3 most certainly couldn’t be. But the piece is essentially an idea. Couldn’t it also be turned into some kind of T-shirt, or mug, or something that could perhaps develop a revenue stream?⁹

Now, these are my thoughts on this, and I will stress to you that I am not telling you what you should paint or create. This is not the point. What subject to paint is a very very difficult question for any artist. Answers to that question should come out of your own personal philosophy.

So I asked my Dad, what his personal philosophy was about his art and he said this:

Don’t be concerned about the money and sale of the art work when creating it. Instead focus on the quality of the work and put your best into every piece. Don’t think in terms of what the public would like or accept but on what you truly like and feel. In this way you are more likely to please a client. (Unless it is a commissioned piece, of course.)

After you create the work it’s important to change hats [because then you have to] become a businessman.

He said that he borrowed a personal motto from the Zenith corporation: “Quality goes in before the name goes on.” Not bad advice to live by.

So is it prostitution to move some your work to the left of the continuum? Or to think of ways to make a living off of your creative work? I don’t think so. In the stock market they call it “diversifying your portfolio.” In folk sayings, “don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” In the Pintard System, it’s “Know what you are doing.”

*****

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT —>The point® is this:

• Being an artist is not just about making art; it also means that you have to know how to make a living off of your work when you are done. So you have to be a business person too.
• The second principle of the Pintard System is to Know what you are doing.

Stay tuned for part 4 coming your way next Wednesday when I finally take the Pintard system into its natural habitat: the theatre.

1. When this will come out in final form is far too early to say. [↩]
2. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves and start talking about visual artists using video… [↩]
3. Unless you decide to paint a mural. [↩]
4. I found though, that the company that did the subsidizing, in my case Credit Suisse, penalized initiative. [↩]
5. This is from their Islanders in the Stream Vol 2. And it probably is in Election 2002 territory when we take inflation into account. [↩]
6. In fact, this is exactly what I did in an earlier draft of this post. [↩]
7. This is from page 109 of Veerle Poupeye’s “Caribbean Art“. [↩]
8. And, since this is new for me, I still slip back into that space from time to time. [↩]
9. Maybe he has already done this… [↩]

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 26th, 2009 at 12:45 pm and is filed under Art, Musings, Reviews, writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.