ArtSwarm filming today. The editing, uploading etc. took all morning, which is usual.
Then I decided to revise my painting prices. I've always priced my work based on the time and materials; it seems the most logical way. I also add a quality factor because some paintings are simply 'hits', and some worth less than the work put into them. Until today I also had a separate factor for prizes, so that paintings that have won awards or commendations are more highly priced. This can make sense because these paintings must be deemed 'better' by a consensus, but it can be a bit unfair because many perfectly good paintings simply never get entered into competitions. Also, the whole judgement process is very arbitrary and hit and miss; there are so many factors in art shows that using this stochastic process to affect the pricing doesn't make much sense, so I've removed this factor today.
One problem with pricing art by time taken is that over the years we get faster at painting higher quality work, partly due to the time consuming nature of experimentation as we are learning. Some of my early paintings took an inordinate amount of time. I'm organised enough to keep a strict diary for all of my 1099 works to date and it amazes me how long some of them took, such as the 37, 8-hour days it took to compose and paint Genesis of Terror, including 12 days just to underpaint it. To account for this, and occasional technical leaps in quality, I divide my paintings into 'generations' so that every few years new paintings go up in value.
Now for some rest. I feel unusually weak, perhaps due to the long painting days. The energy of thought and concentration is very different from the energy of motion. I expect that thinking makes brain cells leap and dance up and down, performing neural jumping-jacks, hence headaches, the muscle aches of the thought workers.
