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| Ginger, the Cat, doesn't pay much attention to my paintings |
Well, I couldn’t stand it any longer,
so I just signed on with Etsy to become a virtual artist with a virtual gallery
and a virtually unlimited worldwide viewing audience for my paintings. The idea of Etsy is very intriguing. Trying to get into a real gallery in New York
City, or anyplace else, for that matter, is almost impossible, given the incredible
number of “emerging” artists prowling around these days with their digital
portfolios full of images of pretty darn good paintings. The art world is full of what Noel Coward
said about the stage, “implacable ambition.”
And I know that at my advanced age I
will never acquire an idyllic storefront gallery in some quaint tourist town
where I can sit all day and wait for the occasional unsuspecting tourist to
drop in to admire my paintings and walk out without buying a single one of them.
I think I would really love that kind of
life. I had paintings for a long time in
a Soho gallery that was operated along those lines. If people bought the paintings the owner liked
well enough to display, that was fine.
If they didn’t buy them, that was fine also.
Etsy makes it very easy for any
artist to set up a virtual storefront gallery with the potential for unlimited
virtual tourists to drop in unannounced.
Maybe they won’t buy anything either, and I have some concern that not
all visitors to the online marketing sites are square shooters. But at least my paintings will most likely be
seen by someone other than me and Ginger, the cat, who doesn’t pay much
attention to them, unless she can scratch her chin against the edge of the
canvas. And who knows, maybe I actually will
do a little shipping and handling in the real world because of Etsy. That would be very nice. I need to make room for all the new paintings
I plan to keep making, the Good Lord willing and the Creek don’t rise, as they
used to say when the world was a kinder, gentler place, at least if you didn’t
think too hard about anything, the fish were biting and you always rooted for
the home team.
I really don’t have much to say at
this time about my new adventure. I’ve
always hated to talk about my paintings with all the people who know me, in the
non-biblical sense of knowing, of course.
But in the vast world of the Internet, somehow it doesn’t seem such a
hard thing to do – talk about my paintings, that is. I’ve often longed to tell people about how I
acquired a particular object to put in a still life, and all the struggles I
went through to get a reasonable facsimile of the things I was painting. I can see myself blathering on interminably about
the most mundane of my paintings. Dealing with strangers is always more
satisfying than dealing with people you know.
When I worked at the Information Desk at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
my young colleagues would time me out at around 20 minutes as I talked about
the museum’s glories with polite visitors whose main interest was finding the
nearest bathroom ASAP.
I’m mildly excited about this new
venue for showing my paintings, and invite anybody who might have read down
this far to take a look at my Etsy site.
Here’s the link: https://www.etsy.com/shop/RobertHoldenFineArt. I’ll
try to write something less self-serving in my next post – maybe something
about “hearing voices” when I paint.
Nothing strange about that for an artist.
