gajumaru

So here's the thing. Ember and I love doing painting together. It's enriching for them and fun for me. They're still at an age where they try to eat paper, so we're using baby safe acrylics on canvas.

We've got no more space on our walls to hang art. We've already given paintings to all the grandparents. And I'm about to run out of canvasses.

So we are offering:
🎨 Original acrylic on canvas artworks
🎨 Fingerpainted in bright colours by Ember and me
🎨 Cheerful abstract paintings to brighten your lockdown domicile
🎨 Just let me know what colours you want and we'll make it happen
🎨 EXTREMELY affordable art!
🎨 £20 per painting, which we'll use to buy a replacement canvas and pay to post you your artwork, any surplus will be donated to a food bank
🎨 If you're broke and want a painting anyway, you can have one for free, just ask
🎨 Help us do more art together!


A square abstract painting with many colours of the rainbow. Colours are smeared into each other with what are clearly finger prints. It's well artistic innit.

Who wants one?

A thing that has recently occupied my mind when I wake up at 6am and try to get back to sleep:

Our house contains a lot of art I've done. It's not my best art, for the most part. A couple of the pieces are Not For Sale, and kept intentionally; some have transitioned from For Sale I Guess, to Okay I'm Definitely Keeping This after they didn't sell long enough for me to fall in love with them. But most of the paintings are only in the house because I didn't sell them, back when I was actively trying to sell paintings (which petered out around seven years ago). Some of them are on the walls, because at least they're cheerful and colourful even if they don't have any significant personal meaning, and a lot of them are in stacks in my office, and in the nook at the top of the stairs. Some of the stacks are unfinished canvases, which is fine up to a point. (Although I am considering instituting a one-in-one-out policy on those, so that I have to either finish them, or accept I never will and paint over them). But the stacks of finished paintings that aren't on the walls really does feel like a waste.

In the spirit of trying to reduce our Burden of Stuff, which is what we're currently doing at Leo's folks' place, I guess these unwanted paintings have been weighing on me, and I'm trying to figure out what to do about them. I could try to sell them. But how much are they worth? I used to sell paintings for far too little - affordable prices, not enough to pay me minimum wage for the time it took to do them. Now, I'm more aware of the value of my time. But if the aim is just to rehome them, maybe it doesn't matter.

I'm loathe to take on a new entrepreneurial project. Taking photos, writing descriptions, listing them on Etsy (and Ebay? Maybe Facebook? Where else can one sell original paintings?) is a lot of admin, and Etsy and Ebay usually charge listing fees too, which means if they don't sell I'm out of pocket as well as having wasted my time. And once I start opening the "art as a business" box in my head, I become uncomfortably aware that my art website is terribly out of date, and I haven't added any new works to it for years and years, and I dislike the design - but I have other projects which are far higher value. And rebuilding a website seems like a very inefficient way to clear some space in my house.

Perhaps it would be easier to give them away, rather than getting hung up on their monetary value. This is definitely my policy for getting rid of things like clothes, because selling things on Ebay is a faff and after you factor in time taken, really not worth the few quid you end up earning.

What it comes down to is that I'm reluctant to devalue my work - these paintings took time and skill and that's worth something - but shifting them as Stock, rather than as Stuff, involves a lot more time and effort, as well as engaging the business part of my brain which frankly has far more important things to be doing. What to do?