Tidelines

[This is the fourth in a series of five installments by Seabrooker Barbara Burgess. Earlier installments included “Getting to Know the Artists”, “Developing a Theme”, and “Training Your Eye.”—Ed.]

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Part 4: Consider Your Pocketbook

Having loads of cash helps with just about any endeavor, but it is not essential to being a collector. There are many people who set a limit on what they will spend on any piece of art, say $500 to $1000. This forces the collector to spot artists when they are just developing and their pieces are still affordable. What collectors are doing at this point is helping to enhance the artist’s reputation.

When collectors set a price limit on what they buy, that adds to the fun of the chase. There are many web sites that offer very affordable art, some already framed. For example, I found www.redpianotoo.com online, simply by seeing the art work others were collecting and realizing how well Red Piano’s offerings fit my collection.

Buying more affordable art would include finding fine art prints, water colors and drawings on paper. The price point of this kind of art is lower, simply because you are not dealing with originals. This art is more affordable because much of it has already been reproduced.

If you want to buy the artist at a low price point and you want to grow the value of the artist’ s worth, it helps if you assist the artist in this process. This may involve putting their paintings in a museum show, which has a huge impact on the value of their art, or actually selling the artist’s pieces to other collectors, friends or acquaintances. Getting the artist’s work to be shown in a gallery can help immensely. I was personally involved with one artist whose work I helped place in a gallery which went on to sell twenty-one pieces of his art to one buyer.

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In the final installment of this series, we will consider how to Gift or Sell Your Collection.

—Barbara Burgess

 

[This is Part 3 of a five-part series by Seabrooker Barbara Burgess. The first two were “Getting to Know the Artists” and “Developing a Theme”.–Ed.]

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Part 3: Train Your Eye

Training your eye is the most subtle part of becoming a collector, yet it is the most critical. Julia Norell, the Washington D.C. collector who influenced me, can walk into a room of paintings and her eye will automatically pick out the best ones in the room. This is because she has spent her life looking at art. Even after selling 1,000 pieces of art to the Morris Museum, she went on to collect 1,000 more pieces many of which are in traveling shows today. She has been looking at art since she was 16 years old, and she is 78 today.

Training the eye is only done through years of exposure to art. Getting to the stage where you are described as someone who “has a good eye” takes time, a lot of study of the work of many artists, many conversations with dealers, collectors, and even curators, all to be able to tell a good piece from a mediocre one. It takes time to develop the ability to spot distractions in a painting that limit its effectiveness in telling a story. You will always be subject to the different tastes of many people who will disagree with your assessment of a painting. What looks good to one person, may not to another. The only person whose taste you have to please is your own. You will develop this confidence in your own taste as you advance further along the path of being a collector.

If you spend considerable periods of time studying art as well as your surroundings, you will find a subtle change takes place. First, you start to see the big picture of what the artist is trying to put forward, like an old church that needs a new roof; but the smaller details of how the artist shows the love the congregation has for this church creep up on you in more emotional ways.

Training your eye is about becoming aware of the visceral reactions you have to a painting. It’s a combination of a reaction that goes from the eye to the heart. You know when you’ve been touched by this painting because your body tells you so.

Would-be collectors worry that their taste is not ”good enough” to be at the collector level. The good news is you can train your eye to discern good art just as you can train other parts of your brain to different tasks. It takes a good amount of study, but it also requires that you become aware of the world around you. What does the beach look like to you when it is crammed with people enjoying the delights of the sun? What does the beach look like when Autumn colors are playing over the now empty sands?

Developing an eye for art is learning to discern the emotional reactions you are having to a given piece of art. It can be a very satisfying feeling indeed.

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In the next part of this series, I’ll discuss the fourth guideline on how to become an art collector; namely, Considering Your Pocketbook.

—Barbara Burgess

 

[This is the second of a five-part series by Seabrooker Barbara Burgess. The first installment was “Getting to Know the Artists”–Ed.]

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Part 2: Develop a Theme

Becoming a resident of the South naturally led to the works of Southern artists where I found the light, lively objects I wanted to display in my home. My collection quite naturally became one of Southern Art as my overall theme. The artists I collected shared common themes, such as love of the land, powerful colors, old run-down buildings, old cars, music, hats, baptisms, as well as a myriad of activities related to a church.

I feel having an over-arching theme for a collection makes everything that follows much easier, from displaying the art to telling its stories. There is debate on this point. It is not to say that disparate pieces of art telling mostly different tales cannot make a striking presentation, but it is much harder to do so. If your art is a jumble of art worlds by artists of uniquely different backgrounds, with vastly different messages, you run the risk of totally confusing your viewing audience, no matter where that audience is, either in your home or in a museum.

Continue reading “How to Become an Art Collector: It’s Easier than You Think!–Part 2”

[This is the first of a five-part series by Seabrooker Barbara Burgess.–Ed.]

Introduction: An Unexpected Journey

Imagine my delight when I learned that the prestigious Franklin G. Burroughs and Simon B. Chapin Art Museum in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina wanted to add my collection of art to their permanent body of works. I had no background in art, but over a period of 10 years, I had assembled a collection of 53 pieces of art–all by Southern artists. I had not thought that my first purchase, “The Escorting of Ruth” by the artist Jonathan Green
would lead to 52 additional purchases, 21 of them by Green. Suddenly my museum-bound collection had qualified me as an art collector, but what I also realized was that being a collector was not as difficult as I had imagined it might be.

Continue reading “How to Become an Art Collector: It’s Easier Than You Think!–Part 1”