Art Prints and the Business of Art

Over the last two days I have been selecting and loading digital images of a few of my paintings, collages and photographs to the website Imagekind. I have been noticing a number of artists with their own sites and with gallery representation directing possible customers to this site to purchase art prints.

From the site: Imagekind (www.imagekind.com) is the world's fastest-growing art site offering over 750,000 high-quality fine art images for sale. Imagekind gives consumers limitless options to purchase museum-quality framed and poster art from over 50,000 domestic and international emerging and established artists.

Serving as a community for professional artists to create and sell their work, Imagekind's goal is to develop a new online art experience that provides both consumers and artists with a new outlet for sharing, creating and buying art from digital files.

Night Flow
acrylic on canvas
virtually matted and framed

One thing that is fun with Imagekind is the ability to see all your work as matted and framed prints in different sizes and with a huge variety of different framing options. Images are also available printed on canvas, as a nice quality card (if the artist approves that option) or just as a simple print with no framing. It has been interesting for me to play around with all the options for my images in my Imagekind gallery.

This seems like a valuable service for artists who may not have large format printers and archival inks and do not have to spend the time away from their art to print and ship, and for buyers who would like a piece of an artist's work, but are not ready to invest in an original.

There are a number of online resources these days to help artists negotiate the business end of their field, prompt them to promote their art and instruct them that they must be business people as well as artists. I am not much of a business person and am definitely a little allergic to financial concerns and anything too much like math. (I also often feel like promoting feels a little bit pushy and full of myself.) But I do read a couple of blogs like Alyson Stanfield's Art Biz Blog. She also has a book about artists self-promoting with a great title, I'd Rather Be in the Studio.

One small piece of advice I picked up from her is to use your name for your art business, and I used that advice a few weeks ago when I opened up my etsy shop for fine art. Yesterday I decided to set up a business email. So, with Edward's help...um, okay, Edward did it all, I just decided on the address name...I now have AnitaBarnard@13moonsgrove.com, just for art matters.