Pricing

(Previously posted as a comment on ArtMarketBlog.com)

I have long struggled with pricing.

I am also a freelance writer. When a client and I work together, we agree on how much I will be paid before I begin the job. There is an established price range for a certain type of work, and I do not delude myself into thinking that I am the only one with the necessary skills required.

My paintings are different. I do them as part of a personal need, a spiritual journey. Before I started painting, I was starved for silence.How do you charge for that? I was very grateful for the services of dealers when I was living in Los Angeles. Now I live in a small Colorado city.I am much happier and a much better painter, but there are no appropriate dealers nearby.

I decided to raise the prices for my originals substantially because, if I sold a picture for a few hundred dollars, it would take some of my writing time to stretch it and take it to the shipper. I would have shipping costs. Then, I would not have an irreplaceable part of my life anymore. What is that worth?

Well, I asked myself, which would be worse, to sell the picture for too little or not to sell it at all. I decided that, for now, it would be better not to sell it at all. That’s what value is, really. Would my pictures be worth what I am charging to others?

Art is such a matter of personal taste. What one person adores, another sees as kitch. I think that the real value of a piece of art lies in what it says to you. When I first started painting, I sold an acrylic of an ice cream shop on Stearn’s Wharf in Santa Barbara to a woman I met in a group. She paid me a $100, but, for her, that was a fortune. I asked her why she wanted it. She said she was diabetic and could not eat ice cream.

Another one of my early paintings was a gift to a friend, the wife of a director. It is one of the reasons I paint. The picture showed two women on the beach. One was lying in the sand and the other had been, but was starting to stand up. I did it from a little sketch. She was dying of cancer. She told me that, as she looked at that picture, she saw a person rising and stepping away.

A good friend of mine put it this way, "We make art to, first, heal ourselves, and then to heal others."