On Ethics and Elephants

Elephant in the Room? What? Where? Oh, that Elephant

In the interest of full disclosure, I must point out that I never thought about marketing in terms of the ethics involved. When I think about marketing my books to an unsuspecting public, the thing that leaps to the front of my mind is the “ick factor.”

Writing and cartooning are recent additions to my creative work. I’ve been painting more years than I care to remember, and it’s been my “day job” for the last 25 years. Almost seven years ago, pandas knocked on the door, demanded entry, put their feet up on the coffee table, and insisted that I write stories, draw cartoons, and perpetrate blasphemous adaptations of Sargent and Whistler paintings, all starring pandas.

They were really most insistent.

Arrangement in Black, White, and Gray //Anne Belov //all rights reserved

Selling paintings is mostly, although not entirely, different than selling books.  I’d have to sell  hundreds, if not thousands of books to equal the sale of one decent painting. And so marketing raises it’s (often) not so lovely head.

A recent post by Jane Steen got me thinking about the ethics of self publishing in general and about marketing my work in particular. I am, to say the very least, a reluctant marketer. By following a number of blogs about both the art and the business side of writing, it led me to realize that I was going to have to make peace with marketing, like it or not.

My cartoons appeared on my blog, The Panda Chronicles for almost four years before I published The Panda Chronicles Book 1: Your Brain on Pandas. My method for getting the word out was intuitive and organic. When I started my blog, I finally dove in to Facebook, and sought out panda fans, to see if they thought my panda-centric humor was funny, or whether they would chase me through town with pitchforks and burning torches, tar and feathers at the ready. (They liked them! Huzzah!)

I shared my cartoons freely and my fan base grew. I got an unanticipated bonus by reaching out to people on an individual basis because fans became connections and some friendships (real ones) have grown as a result of this, with meetings and gatherings of panda fans in real life.

The panda Faithful at San Diego Zoo in 2013

To be honest, this is a rather time consuming way of selling books. But I am a glutton for connections, maybe because I spend so much of my day holed up in my studio painting and drawing. When I look at the alternatives: auto tweets, constant buy my book/services links, guest posts which are barely disguised infomercials, I realize that the ick-factor detector is a pretty good ethical guide.

I think we must continually ask ourselves how we respond to marketing appeals by others as we try to figure out how to sell our work. Everyone has different threshold levels of what is offensive or annoying, but if it offends me, why would I do it? I’m still trying to figure it all out, and if I listen to my gut and avoid doing things that make me uncomfortable in the marketing of others, I think I am on the right track.

The sands that publishing is built on are shifting. As more people publish their work independently, we have to figure out how to be ethical, not only in the actual writing, but in how we tell the world about it. We are all on our own, trying to figure out just how we going to continue paying the mortgage, but we are also in it together.

My practice of making connections has served me well, in personal satisfaction and real bridges built, if not yet in monetary terms.  My followers number in the hundreds, rather than the tens of thousands, but they are real names, some even come with faces attached. I have decided to trust that what feels like the right path both artistically and ethically.

What do you think?

hey! Buy my book!

You can see more pandas (for free!) at The Panda Chronicles. You can also…um…find out where to buy my books there.

Ordinary Illuminated and Tim’s Vermeer

I’m in a show that starts this Saturday in Seattle, called Ordinary Illuminated.  When June Sekaguchi, the curator suggested the theme, I was just about beside myself.  Painter of Stuff is how I sometimes refer to myself.  I love taking something ho hum, like blue painters tape, and putting it in a really realistic still life with a bunch of other blue objects. It’s the play between objects, their shapes, their colors, the way light falls on them that makes them fascinating to me, not just what they are.

40 Shades of Blue// Oil on Panel//Anne Belov //all rights reserved

So, when I was listening to the radio the other day, I heard an interview on Studio 360, about how Tim Jenison re-created Vermeer‘s painting, The Music Room.  Now, he didn’t do what most painters do, which would be to get as good a reproduction as they can find, and then to copy the drawing via a grid and then while looking at the reproduction, figure out as best they could as to just how Vermeer did it.

Oh, no.

He built a whole frigging room with the light coming in from the same direction, ground his own paint, ground the optical lenses that he used to look at the scene he re-created, and went about it very scientifically.  Then he made a movie about it. Or someone else did, and it opens later this month. I plan to see it, even though I have very mixed feelings about the whole project.

It’s not that I have any qualms about doing master copies.  I’ve done quite a few of them, including a couple of Vermeers.  John Singer Sargent is my particular specialty. I learn a lot about putting paint on a canvas every time I do one.  In the interview with Mr. Jenison, he complains about how hard it was, how long it took him to paint the patterned turkish carpet.

Well, Duh.  It is hard to paint stuff so that it looks real, really real, or mostly real. It took me over 40 years to get good at it. I feel your pain. (sort of.)

Arrangement in Black, White, and Gray //Anne Belov //all rights reserved Okay, so this is SLIGHTLY different than the original…

On the whole, I’m looking forward to the movie, no matter how mixed my feelings are about it. I think that anything that gives non-painters an appreciation for how hard painting really is, is a very good thing.  If the movie becomes popular, there is always the possibility that there will be a new wave of appreciation for realism in fine art circles again. I’m all for that!

In the meantime, I hope you’ll check out my show if you’re in Seattle, or go to the Metropolitan Museum if you’re in New York. They have five Vermeers. Yeehaw! The National Gallery in Washington DC has four.

Anne Belov and Jennifer Frohwerk at the Ida Culver House Ravenna

date and location…

More Studying from the Masters!

I’ve talked before about how much I learn from painters that I admire, both from the past and in the present.  I would gladly give up everything I owned if I had painted every one of John Singer Sargent’s paintings, or perhaps Mary Cassatt’s as well.

Last year I spent some time learning the ancient medium of egg tempera from Fred Wessel, who is an out and out master of the medium, and a nice guy to boot. I recently finished this egg tempera painting back home in my studio, and I gotta say, that I almost wrenched my shoulder patting myself on the back.  I’m pretty sure it’s good, because yesterday evening some friends came by and one of them made a beeline for the painting and was almost speechless with admiration.  I love that.

Botticelli’s Daughter //Egg tempera on panel //Anne Belov // all rights reserved

But for me, there is more than one genre of masters from whom I study, and that is, of course, the greats of cartooning.  Many of you who know me, know that recently I started drawing and writing cartoons in a serious way.  Well, the cartoons aren’t serious, (what fun is that?) but I am quite serious and committed to series, The Panda Chronicles, appearing both on my blog, as well as now two books in print.  I’ve written before about some of my cartooning idols: Garry Trudeau, Lynda Barry, Bill Watterson, and Darby Conley.  I recently discovered another cartoonist, whose books I am devouring like red velvet cuppycakes.  I quit reading the newspaper more than a decade ago (oh, their decline is all my fault!) so I wasn’t aware of Pearls Before Swine, other than to occasionally notice it when I picked up a random paper.  I really didn’t get it, and in fact, thought it was pretty badly drawn.  Like many cartoons with recurring characters, you have to read a number of strips till you get with the program and fall in love with the characters. Stephan Pastis, the creator of Pearls, recently wrote an illustrated middle grade novel called Timmy Failure, about a rather incompetent boy detective and his polar bear assistant. It has  a bear?  Well, I just had to read it and it was hilarious, and so then I had to read all of his cartoon collections. OK, I’m still not in love with his drawings, but they are perfect for his irreverent, snarky humor, which I am completely in love with.  Huzzah! Studying from the masters is so much fun!

Well, off to do some more “studying”

A riff inspired by one of the greatest.

That looks familiar, but there is something different about it…

Arrangement in Black, White, and Gray //Anne Belov //all rights reserved

 

One of my skills that I developed a bit in art school, and have since honed my skills further, both by  “copying” my own work, and then copying paintings by some of my favorite (long dead) painters.  The first one I did was kind of on a dare from a friend, after seeing the John Singer Sargent show that was at the Seattle Art Museum about 12 years ago.  Looking at A Street Scene in Venice, I said, Damn, I wish I’d painted that!  And my friend said, Why don’t you?  So I did and made him buy it.  We had just been in Amsterdam for a few weeks, and he had bought a painting that seemed to be a genuine forgery (if that’s not a contradiction in terms) of a Dutch painter that is well represented in the Rijksmuseum.  That painting was the beginning of a small, but growing, collection of forgeries painted by several of our other artist friends.  I have painted at least 4 Sargent’s, several Vermeer’s, a Whistler, and now a parody of a Whistler, Arrangement in Black, White, and Gray.  This is what I hope will be a series of panda parody paintings that is a study of unknown paintings by well known painters, which will be collected in a tongue and cheek art history picture book.

Don’t Miss the 98th Anniversary Exhibition of the 1913 New York Armory Show

This painting by Cezanne will not be in the show, but other well done copies of paintings that were in the infamous 1913 show will be.  If you are on Whidbey Island this weekend, this is a do not miss experience.  See fabulous forgeries! Beautiful Gardens! Meet the artists! See you there.  The fabulous Froggwell Garden is at 5508 Double Bluff road in Freeland, WA, on Whidbey Island. Be there or be square. (do people still say that?)

 

I thought I was at the Tate Museum in London, but….

I was walking through the Musee` D’Orsey and then…no wait…maybe I’m at the Tate in London, or no, maybe I’m at the National Gallery …oh now I see! I’m at the Freeland Library!  Yes those are “real” paintings, They’re just not done by the painters that you thought did them!  The Froggwell Cultural Institute (Freeland’s most well kept secret) has loaned it’s collection of “forgeries” of some of the great paintings of western culture to the Freeland library, in beautiful downtown Freeland Washington.  Many of the paintings were done by local artists, although we did reel in a few artists from across the country to join in the fun.

The first Forgeries at Froggwell show, in 2009, was a bit of a free-for-all, in that you could copy any painting you wanted, as long the original artist was not just merely dead, but sincerely dead.  This summer, international art forgery returns to Froggwell Garden as we re-create the 1913 New York Armory Show.  This exhibition so inflamed the New York Art World of the early 20th century that there were pickets and political cartoons protesting the show. Will we get protesters in Freeland this summer? I guess we’ll see!

Till next time,

Anne B.

Art Forgery for Fun and Profit!!!!

My "forgery"of an Edgar Degas painting I saw in London

You know, nothing beats originality in our creative processes, but then again, what’s a little petty larceny amongst friends?  About 10 years ago, I and a friend were traveling in Amsterdam, and in a gallery, the owner was repairing a wonderful painting that turned out to be a forgery that was most likely painted in the 1930’s.  My friend bought the painting, both because it was a really good painting, but also for the story that the gallery owner told. Was it true?  Could be, but even if it’s not, it makes a great story to tell people who come to the house and ask about it.  We returned to Seattle in time to see a John Singer Sargent show at the Seattle Art Museum. Actually we saw the show 4 times, but who’s counting?  Anyway, Sargent’s painting, A Street Scene in Venice was there, and I said, “Damn I wish I’d painted that!”  My friend said, “Well, why don’t you?”  So I did and made him buy it.

Artists can learn a lot from copying works by their favorite artists from the past (and really, they should be WAY from the past!) and as long as you don’t try to sell it as the real thing, you most likely won’t get into trouble.  So far I have copied 4 Sargents, 1 Whistler, 2 Vermeers, and a George Inness.

Till next time,

Keep painting.

Anne B