Thursday, August 31, 2006
Updates: Painting Class, Business
I have been encouraged to see my students finish up their first paintings, above is a landscape color study by George. This turned out to be a great exercise in color mixing and matching. While these students will ultimately be computer based artists, I feel strongly that physical painting is an important learning experience. It slows down the hand, and allows the mind to measure little things (which have a huge effect). Many of these students are being sensitized to color for the first time. I love my job.
On another topic, my start up online business - I have run into my first problem, market research. While I am trying to start with nothing, ultimately I will need an infusion of investment. And investors want numbers, verifyable numbers, cold hard numbers - they don’t even seem to care about the idea often.
Price x Volume = Revenue.
So the first question is “what is the volume of your market?” There’s the rub. The art market is impossible to quantify. It is not a regulated industry, nor very well defined. We know that millions of artists inhabit the world, and tens of thousands of galleries, foundations, and universities. Some of these quantities can be found, but mostly this information is ungathered because no one can really define “artist.” How many artists are practicing in America? This is not just those listed in the 2006 Art in America Guide, but every serious hobbiest, digital animator, etc. This makes gathering relevant data dubious. And that, in turn, makes raising money tough, especially from non-artworld people. I can’t exactly say, “trust me, there is ALOT.” They will show me the way out.
This leaves me with a big decision: Wait for money to do it right … OR … get started by myself for cheap? The closing window of opportunity is also a factor here, which is torture, because I tend to be impatient anyway. Breath Christopher, breath …
posted by cjagers at 08:24am
4 Comments Add your own
1. Grant | August 31st, 2006 at 8:38 am
You are dealing with a quantifiable group. You are not selling a blanket service to artists in general. You are dealing with a business that deals with a particular applicant, which is not only quantifiable, but is quantified by the institutions to which they apply as well as a number of other institutions whose job it is to keep track of numbers like those. Your numbers are out there, you just have to find a data firm that will sell them to you, or spend a good deal of time hunting them down yourself. You are not the first or only person to need these exact numbers to deal with your business, they are out there for a number of purposes, so go get them and then the investors will line up for you.
See you on Saturday.
2. chris | August 31st, 2006 at 8:48 am
Well, I haven’t been able to find a data firm that can answer my question yet either: How many people per year apply to anything that requires a portfolio? This cuts across many unrelated fields (music, dance, architecture, gamer, everything!). I would pay good money for this information, even just to be pointed to it! But I’m pretty sure it doesn’t exist. No matter, I will just start my business the other way, with a partner - and bootstrap, yeehaw!
See you Saturday.
3. Peter Ligon | September 3rd, 2006 at 12:56 pm
This looks like a great project. I’m most interested in how the students all keep there colors in separte shapes without blending, even where two shapes shared the same grid. My guess is they were prohibited from painting in the grid lines and that helped solidify the individual shapes of color concept.
4. chris | September 3rd, 2006 at 3:16 pm
yeah, they drew a simple line drawing of the still life first. Then they overlayed the diagonal grid with pencil. They were not allowed to cross these lines for the duration of the entire painting - nor add more detail. Every shape gets one color. This drives them insane, but really focuses attention on the role and effect of color.
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