100 Bucks For an Original Oil Painting! Can I Get a Hellz Yeah?

So it’s been a little over a year since I started to sell my work on Instagram and Facebook and it’s gone fairly well. As is my MO, I haven’t kept great records of everything, so when I do my taxes I’ll find out exactly how well I’ve done. But as well as it’s gone, I know there are people doing substantially better than me. In fairness, part of the reason for that is that their work may not be as, well, weird as mine. But I digress…

Anyway, last year on CBC radio they interviewed an artist from Vancouver who apparently does four paintings a day and sells them for 100 dollars each. And she sells all of them. In fact they often sell minutes after they’re posted. Now, I have to say that in general, I’m not willing to sell my paintings for 100 dollars each. My prices are definitely not as high as I would like, and I don’t do four of these paintings a day! I mean, good for her, but that’s not how I’ve been working. 

Having said all of this, most Fridays I do an experimental painting. Most of the time it’s been an imagined face painted in the style of my Pop Culture based, cubist inspired works that have become the focus of my practice. But lately I’ve been messing around with paintings of animals. I’ve mentioned before that I don’t generally do studies, but more and more, I’m thinking of these ones as studies for larger paintings that I’ll do at a later date. So these ones give me an idea of what those compositions might look like, what colors I’ll need–that kind of thing. 

So as a possible means of supplementing my income a little I’ve been thinking that maybe I should offer these paintings for the low low price of 100 dollars. Basically, they are painted in an afternoon, so selling them for substantially less than my regular price doesn’t seem too out of line. I’ve been doing them on unstretched canvas so they could be shipped in a tube and framed. I’ve even been doing them in standard frame sizes, so if you purchased one you wouldn’t have to spend a lot of money to frame it, although you could if you wanted to. 

So here’s the thing, my prices are already low. I don’t mention prices in my posts and maybe I should? That could be a topic for another post, but I’ll share the formula here. I sell my paintings by linear inch times twelve dollars. So my 11” x 14” paintings are $300.00 (I usually tell people 295). So a 10.5” x 13” painting of a raccoon, by that formula, should be $282.00. So here’s the question? Am I cheapening my brand offering this special price on these paintings? What do you think? And guess what? You can finally leave a comment right here in this blog! Yay! It’s about bloody time…