SANDY GARNETT ART BLOG

I made this retro poster for one of my best friend’s parties.  This sort of work was my beginning when in college.  Now I very rarely play this way, but it’s fun once in a blue moon.  The centerpiece is from a painting I sold to a good friend and collector in New Orleans.

I’m carving this Fingerprint Self-Portrait in styrofoam in tandem with a new Twister painting that I am trying to relief by carving styrofoam so the girls are raised an inch off the surface like the face on a coin.

I had a productive week.  I picked up a Fingerprint Portrait commission, I landed a portrait, my intern came in, we carved styrofoam fingerprints, I am working on carving some large Twister relief pieces, I finished the water studio computer area, I did a couple gravestone etchings, and next week I do six etchings on a monument for a fallen soldier in Iraq.  I’m trying to find a hard coat on styrofoam…

Resilience is the key to survival as a professional artist.  When it rains it pours and when the rain stops there are desert walks in search of an oasis.  It is easiest to survive these periods with the proper training, mental set, tools and an easy way of looking at life.  These are the times when one appreciates one’s way of life the most, when hard pressed.  The intelligent artist is frugal and budgets for these natural episodes.  I have a habit of pouring my money back into the business quickly, which is good for building but can pinch when collectors scatter.  Discussing one’s weakness may repel, but this is the cycle of my business.  I have built a refined art making machine by taking chances when I felt there was room to do so.  These maneuvers are surprisingly modest in the grand scheme yet critical with an artist on a limited budget.  I do well for myself, but when I press hard, as with the past winter, when I spent all my time and money renovating my second property, there can be a slack period where I must focus intensely to regain my footing.  I reach out and wait for the collectors to return while reflecting on the rising beat of my career, I keep the faith and plow ahead with the many projects in my studio, half of which are labor monsters and expensive only in this way.

I etched this gravestone portrait (with lettering) during the week, finished a portrait painting and started another Twister painting.  I’m the only etcher I know.  It’s an unusual business and I got into it in order to facilitate my Fingerprint Totems, now ten years old.  I’ve done hundreds of etchings that sit in many New York and Connecticut cemetaries.  I might do an etching every three weeks on average.  I barter for stone, sandblasting, stone setting, and sculpture wisdom.  It’s a good barter and in the meantime I am exploring what has become a series of works in an unusual light that would make for a nice contemporary show in New York City.

I’m taking a hard look at managedartwork.com, the best online gallery software I have seen for the price.  This is not a cheap product but it is very attractive and robust in features.  I have grown to enjoy the format of a site being hosted and designed by a service.  Although my posts are choppy lately on the blog the service makes perfect sense and is a pleasure to use, squarespace.com that is.  I recently signed on for a year with foliolink.net, which is another such gallery product, although much more limited than managedartwork.com.  I go to their site, I upload my work, selecting templates along the way, and the experience has been pleasant and excellent.  By contrast designing my own website is labor intensive, requires me learning programs and updating software, managing data on my hard drive which is such a pain, and hiring web design at an average of 150 month to do stuff I don’t want to do.

managedartwork.com handles all of this and more.  They do contact management, inventory for originals and editions, ecommerce, web tracking, email, bulk email like constant contact, favorites pages for returning clients, logins and guest registers, invoicing, automatically generated reports, labeling for shows, authentication papers for sales, a framing module for your collectors, and so on.

 My system as mentioned in a post recently uses Office, Filemaker, macmail, Maxprog bulk emailer, Quicken, Word, Quark, to run the admin of my business.  None of this data, these programs and layouts, talk to each other, so I’m always doing redundant data entry.  And none of these programs help me sell; on the contrary, I’ve got to reassert my personal sales force (me) on a weekly basis, which requires considerable effort which could be assisted tremendously by the product I am leaning towards.

There is one major competitor, the industry standard Artsystems.  I don’t like their interface as much and they seem top heavy.  Managedartwork.com started in Portland 2001 and now works with 95 galleries around the world.  None of their clients have ever left.  The program is built for a gallery, and I function namely as a wholesale gallery, my various genres could replace different artists in a gallery site.  I run my own business so I often think about business solutions.  My major concern is security and how this company intends to grow.  They say they are at the beginning of a long road, every client owns his own data that noone can access save the owner of the data (like banking security), one’s data can be downloaded daily for backup in standard data formats and so on.  

 I think that this system may well save me time, money, by consolidating with one system.  They are not cheap, 150 - 300 month, but this includes hosting and all the a la carte services you care to have on top of this.  I would venture to estimate that my web hosting, foliolink with ecommerce, a bulk email program like constant contact (30-50 monthly) might cost 100. and web design might be another 100 month.  There is a setup fee as well, which covers the implementation of your website into their system (they do most of this in the setup fee) and data transfer.

In the end it’s the change which requires the energy but in the long run managedartwork.com is built well for galleries or professional artists who have a large breadth of work and a strong collector base. 

Two Twister paintings are in a group show opening Friday, 18 May 6 - 9pm, 737 Canal Street, Stamford, CT - at the Loft Artists Gallery.  Healing Barsanti Design has included 3 of my paintings and my Field of Figures in the new Greenwich Designer Showhouse at 200 Stanwich Rd. in Greenwich, CT.  This show is open to the public daily 10-4pm and tickets at the door are $30 to benefit Greenwich Hospital.