A busy and joyous two days!
First, work on restoring a work from 2010 with a little 2021 magic. Yesterday I started work on the main figure to the triangular work The Starcrossed Escape Of The Psychological Cosmonaut:
This is the first flesh layer, at least 3 will be needed for this one. I hope to have the work ready in a refurbished frame for the Cheshire Art Fair in September.
Today I've worked all day on a small painting called Covidopolis, a rather abstract design of monoliths over a sad green landscape. Figures, which are something like sick roses, stand in a strange and alien wind of dust and red flakes.
The red and green are colours of sadness and illness. I have a strange relationship with these colours which are rarely combined, except in flowers. My happiest childhood memories come from my Dragon 32 computer and it had an unusual colour scheme. By default it was dark green text on a light green background, and it had only 8 other colours, and only then visible in two sets of 4, and the strong primary red, a sort of maroon on the television, on the light-yellow-green background particularly stuck in my mind's eye, colouring my attitude to this colour combination.
I've found time this evening to work on my art prices. I have over 1000 works of art, and almost 800 are on my website. Pricing each one individually would be nightmarishly difficult, or impossible in practice. I price all of my artworks by time taken, and materials used for expensive frames or special items like gold, but generally, only on time taken. This has pros and cons. Generally I've got faster at painting. The older works might have taken me 8 or 10 8-hour days for what would now take just 2 days. In these cases, the result is essentially not being paid for the older work.
However, my point is that I store all of the hours I've worked on each painting, and always have, since 2004 and my first painting, so I can use this to calculate the prices automatically. So, I've created a spreadsheet with these numbers and added some SQL to auto-calculate the code to update my website instantly. So, as of tonight, all of the works should be priced correctly and online now. The huge spreadsheet (1000 lines, with times, sizes, media etc.) itself takes a lot of management, but this allows me to be transparent and consistent about my prices. Things are never perfect; sometimes galleries or venues might charge extraordinary commission fees, so the prices in shops or exhibitions might sometimes be different, but these accurately represent the online price and, as time and success march on, can be instantly adjusted across my entire ouvre.
