The spring has sprung and for me as a sculptor, that means the beginning of art, garden, and sculpture shows.

“If you have to sell the art, it can’t be that good!  Art, if it’s good, will sell itself.”  Yes, I believe there is some truth to that.  I have had clients come and see a sculpture of mine and fall in love with it and buy it. 
 
Fifteen years later, I’ll see them around town and they can’t stop talking about  how much they enjoy it daily.  That’s a great feeling!  But the more I do shows,  the more I see that people sometimes need a good prompting to encourage them to  spend money on art.  I’m getting braver about this, too, because I realize I  don’t have much to lose.  As I talk to people, I’ve discovered that far more people suffer from ‘not buying regret’ rather  than ‘buyer’s regret.’

I’ve had people almost in tears pleading with me to squeeze one more out of an edition after they have found out that it has sold out and the sculpture is no longer available.  I, too, suffer from this same scenario.  It was while I was on my honeymoon with my young bride on one of the Gulf Islands.  On one of our day trips, we visited a local gallery in Ganges.  I fell completely in love with this stone sculpture of two stylized tumbling ravens.  It was great-it had so many under cuts and cut throughs and perspectively it was perfect from every side.  I was overwhelmed with the artist’s technical ability and the captured sense of motion and beauty.  The only thing that kept me back was the price.  At  that time of my young career as an artist, $5800 was a lot of money!  I didn’t  think it was quite the right moment to put that hefty expenditure on my bride!   Now, looking back, I sure wish I had.  I should have asked about a lay away plan  or scraped up every dollar I could have found.  I still to this day think back  on that piece and know if I had bought it, I would not have regretted it an  ounce.  Sure there would have been sacrifice, but it was well worth it.  So I  sit here with regret.

Note from ‘the young bride’:  As I sit here typing this up for my husband, trying to make sense of his scrawled words and correct his grammar, I have to add my two bits to clarify!  It was the dream honeymoon on a ‘small island in the Pacific.’  Well that small island was SALTSPRING which happens to be just a ferry ride away!  It was all we could afford!  I didn’t resent getting engaged before he could afford a ring, sewing my own wedding dress for a total of $100, going for the American-style luncheon instead of formal dinner, or even the week  on Saltspring instead of some exotic location because true love is worth all  that and more.  There are sacrifices involved with marrying an artist who has a  grand total of three sculptures in his collection!  $5800 was pretty well his  entire year’s income back then!  Buyer’s regret or no, had he shelled it out,  there would have been more than ‘buyer’s regret!’

If, however, he had been able to work out a deal where he could have traded sculpture, we would have both been happy.  My advice: a little balance is a good  thing!  Yes, art is important-it brings beauty and pleasure to us every
day, and  if you find a piece you love and buying it doesn’t mean deciding between the  piece of art or eating and paying your mortgage, by all means, go ahead.  If you  can cut in another area of pleasure to afford it, I say, ‘what’s taking you so  long?’  If you really can’t afford it but you love it, my advice is to talk to  the artist.  What is your business? What can you offer?  Find out if the artist  is willing to trade.  Artists love art.  They also don’t tend to have a lot of  cash for extra perks.   Be creative.  If a house painter offered to paint my  house on the weekends in trade, or a dentist offered dental work,
or someone had  nice furniture they were about to upgrade, or a person had air miles and a  week’s timeshare-I’d sure consider these!  All I’m saying is ‘be creative.’ Artists are creative by nature!  Just don’t be offensive.  We work so hard and  sacrifice so much in order to produce art.  Nathan has traded art for a week’s  vacation with our family complete with tours in the client’s private airplane,  several paintings and other sculptures, a new septic field, and most recently, a  hand-made electric guitar that he tells me is a work of art in itself even if he  can’t play a lick!  A fair trade makes everyone happy.

Back to Nathan:

Now back to my shows.  I see several people a year who see a piece of mine and are moved by it but walk away because of the price-or they think they’ll wait until next year.  I’ve started to wise up and realize that it’s not that people can’t afford it-they just have never spent this kind of money on art before.  They’d easily spend the same money on a vacation or on a home renovation, but they aren’t used to giving themselves the same pleasure through art.  I must point out however, that long after your vacation memories fade and your home renovation becomes obsolete, a good quality bronze sculpture continues  to bring pleasure to you every time you look at it.  After all, it does come  with a 10,000 year warranty!  It becomes an heirloom in your family for  generations. 

It also helps people to realize why a sculpture is so expensive.  Buying a hand-crafted bronze sculpture is an extensive process and the material costs are  a large part of it.  I can’t tell you how many people have taken a tour through  my foundry and seen the process we go through to create a sculpture, that come  out saying, “I had no idea there was so much involved to creating a sculpture!”

So when a perspective client is waffling, such as the two I had at a show last year, I ask them if they would regret it later if they walked away.  They both agreed that they would and took the risky step of buying a quality piece of  art for the first time in their lives.  Each walked away exceedingly pleased with their purchase.  They will enjoy it every time they see it.  If you love a piece of art, you will never regret the pleasure that it brings you.  In my experience, the more I wrestled with it and sacrificed to have it because I just  loved it, the more I enjoy it. 

A question I get asked quite often is “How much would it cost to have my child/ grandchild cast in bronze?”  In other words, they are asking how much a private commission of their child would cost-and this is great, because this is what I do!  It’s a large part of my sculpting business and I love to create something that is special and unique to that person or family. 




The problem is, they usually ask this question just after looking at my limited edition line of children.  ( a limited edition means that I sculpt one sculpture, make a mold of  it and sell a limited amount of the same sculpture-usually 10 if it’s in
bronze  or 25 if it’s in cold cast bronze)  The prospective client has seen the price of  a limited edition sculpture and they think it would cost about the same to have  their own child or grandchild made into a sculpture.  People are often shocked  at the price difference between a limited edition and commission work.  I quite  often feel a bit awkward as now I have to justify the price difference. 

When it comes to pricing a private commission, all of the costs of sculpting, mold making, casting, and installation have to be absorbed into the one sculpture instead of being spread out among all the pieces in an edition.  With a limited edition sculpture, if a mold costs one thousand dollars to make and I will be making ten sculptures in the edition, the price is divided over those ten pieces, so these cost of the mold making are now only $100 per casting.  The  sculpting fees are also deferred. 

Sometimes people ask me if I would use their child as the model and make it into a limited edition.  It depends on if I think the idea is marketable as a limited edition.  Sometimes it’s a great sculpture, but the child is specifically designed for a particular rock it is to be sitting on or some other  feature of its placement.  Sometimes there is just a very limited
clientele that  would be interested in purchasing a sculpture of a potential client’s specific  idea.  The large Yorkshire pig I sculpted last year has a pretty limited  clientele!  Not all pig farmers want a life-size bronze pig in their front  yard-though I think they should!  I also recall a four headed cobra that I cast  for a guy-where did that go and what are they using it for?

When I come up with an idea for a limited edition sculpture, I usually sculpt it on spec.  I think of an idea for a sculpture and how marketable I think it would be- if I don’t think enough people will  open their wallets to pay for it,  I can’t afford to sculpt it.  I always keep in the back of my mind that I have a  large family to support, mortgage and employees to pay! 

When I am hired by a client to sculpt their private commission, I become their employee for the duration of the time I am working on their sculpture.  Of  course there are many perks to getting your own design in a sculpture-but
the  client assume the responsibility of paying for all of my costs.  On the other  hand, with a limited edition, many people will ultimately share the cost of  being my provider!

I should note that there has been a time or two that somebody has approached me with a private commission and I have split them a great deal on the basis that I can make more than one because I see the possibility of selling more than  one.  For example, a client approached me with an idea of a landing eagle. I  thought that was a great idea, so instead of charging him for the whole cost of  one, I made him a deal which was quite a bit less.  It paid for my sculpting and  mold making.  I’ll sell about five or more eagles.  Another reason for wanting  to do an edition of this eagle is that if I was about to go to all the work of  sculpting all those wretched feathers, I might as well make a good buck at it!