Marketing my paintings is drastically different today from when I began my professional painting career 59 years ago. At that time the gallery I was with sent a black and white mailer to announce shows and collectors had to actually visit the gallery to see the work.
Several changes were made over the years – colored mailers, then many years later the printed mailers ended and announcements of shows started being sent by e-mail. My own learning how to photograph my paintings, crop them, resize them and send the images to my galleries and enter competitions took a few years to evolve, but now I’m feeling fairly competent to do it all.
I have a very large and up-to-date website, kept current by my wonderful Webmaster Elise, which links to my galleries. I’ve had several sales from collectors who viewed it, but recently it has served some surprises as well. In January I was contacted by the Pomegranate Communications publisher who selected four of my paintings from my website for a boxed set of note cards. This will be the first time I’ve had my oil and metal leaf paintings printed, so it is an exciting time for me. They are scheduled to be distributed in June.
Then, a couple of weeks ago I received an e-mail from the editor of the Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary faculty journal requesting permission to reproduce my painting “Abundant Harvest” on the cover of their spring/summer edition. The editor typed in “abundant” and “oil painting” on Google and my painting popped up. The cover is shown above and the journal will be mailed to 10,000 subscribers next month.
