My serigraphs used to retail at $1800-$3000, but we haven’t marketed them for at least 20 years — what are today’s prices? No idea, but we’re going to find out.
I intend to dig out some of those serigraphs, produced in the days before computer generated “giclee” color printing. These are from pastel originals. They are each and every one completely hand-printed, each color laid down separately, through a carefully prepared silkscreen, until all colors are present on the print.
Technically, it is “a work on paper”, and is produced in a profoundly limited run, hence it is sometimes referred to as “a multiple original” or “an original multiple”, depending on what part of the country your gallery might be standing.
I’m offering them today at ridiculously low prices, because my market has yet to be re-established in the marketplace.
Hence and therefore, the serigraph “Me & My Money” is available FRAMED to retail at $850, which means that your wholesale cost will be $350, allowing you to “keystone double”, which is standard retail practice.
Keep in mind that this piece comes framed, and that means money. If you don’t want it framed, take off $50 and we’ll ship you the serigraph flat — I don’t roll prints if I can help it — of course, large paintings on canvas are quite another matter.
There are not many of any of my earlier serigraphs left — they sold surprisingly well at the time — so if you want one of these compelling and dramatic pieces, better say so right now. Please don’t contact me months from now and expect to get one of these serigraphs.
Once they’re gone, they’re gone.
So here we are at the dawn of a new day, and I find myself preparing even MORE of our incredible “Project” merchandise to go into the gallery, as if there weren’t enough being crammed in there already.
At the moment, there are some 36 insert trays to go into the jewelry cases, each with 32 items within the insert, which makes a whalloping 1,152 items to be sold in the gallery, if we get lucky.
We’re also going to bring in some other goods, things we’ve not shown before, but that we know will generate sales. Most of them involve a display of silver, gold or platinum.
I’ve asked that we start a weekly newsletter, with all the news from the Institute and the work circle at large — here’s a bit of news along those lines:
We had a gallery meeting, to which you are all invited as you are able to attend.
The result of that meeting is that we’re ordering a big new 48″ wide triple-level glass-and-wood showcase, which will cost around $500, delivered to and installed in the gallery. This will happen in about two weeks, maybe three.
It’s hard to spend that kind of money at this time, but the new showcase is a locking type, with a great new sparkly LED lighting system which really makes gemstones look fabulous.
The new showcase will allow us to display gold, silver and antiquities, which are items that we just can’t show in the open slant-front low-line jewelry cases.
So that’s at the gallery — at the same time, we’re hit with an $800 septic drainage bill at the land — which makes sense, with the number of people who come through, but it is a whack and a whallop nevertheless, a real chunk out of our hide — something for which we could not have prepared, and we didn’t.
Fact is, we HAVE to have it done, or we’d just plain wait, but we can’t.
So if you can help with this matter, all or part, it would be profoundly appreciated — I’m running an Emergency Sale with anything I can find that isn’t nailed down.
I’ll put up some stuff from around the house, to see if I can’t raise the money to handle the septic tank invoice, but I’m not hopeful — it’s the slack season in retail, which you might already know, hence the “white sales” and other blowout merchandising in January, February, March and the first half of April, and the things I’m offering are not necessities, so the likelihood of selling them is very small.
April is a tough marketing month because people are afraid they won’t have enough to pay their taxes, and this year, they probably won’t.
My hope is to get up a number of stunningly framed, pencil-signed, VERY high-end pieces — Chagall, Miro, Matisse, Picasso, Dali, Renoir, Rembrandt and Warhol — into the gallery by the middle of February.
At the same time, I plan to introduce a definite step-by-step FORMAL rock-painting course that has a number of specific lessons, each one covering an aspect of rock painting that the other projects didn’t cover.
It seems really simple — paint a rock — but actually there are a thousand considerations and possible solutions to rock painting, and we’re making sure to get all of them across to our rock-art students.
Along with the creativity, there must also be a knowledge and grasp of the marketplace, and we’ll be helping folks to sell their art and craft projects in the shop and at fairs and other venues.
My large charcoals and ink drawings (shown in the photo above) are for sale super cheap — a mere $350 — they retail at $750-$850 and sometimes more.
You are welcome to any of the pieces in the Monster Flipper for only $350, and that includes the large works on paper by Tom X.
It’s an opportunity that won’t be around for very long.
We’re also working to establish a “Nevada City Coin Club” that works to understand the USES and applications of coins for jewelry, magic, historic contact, collection and, of course, shopping and spending.
It isn’t hard to see that within a few days of startup, there should be some sales. These things are both cute and cheap, and that’s a great combination for a large crowd moving through, but not so good if you only see a couple of people a day.
We’re still getting an average of 33 people a day through the gallery, even after Christmas, and that’s a good sign.
The bad sign is that most of the people we see these days are dreadfully poor.
Shopping is a luxury that most Americans do not feel they can afford, and if they do shop, it’s always online now, just haul the old cell phone out and start waving your fingers.
You’ll notice that the latest dance moves are variations of cell-phone manipulations. You can’t sing a song anymore without waggling your fingers, waving your hands around in an aggressive manner, and making obscene gestures and facial expressions as you go.
This is the new reality, and it takes being born into it, not adjustment from another reality. There is no way to make it work, and that’s the Great Secret of Trump World — there is no solution, and every way from here is down.
This is a good thing from a marketing standpoint — you have a better chance in this market to make something work, and something brand new is likely to get exposure.
Unfortunately, if you’ve developed a great new product, you’ll see it ship from Hong Kong within a few days of someone snapping a photo with your product in it.
You can’t protect yourself from product theft. You also can’t work your way up the chain in the marketplace, because all the places are taken, all the seats are occupied and all the outlets are sewn up by the Big Guys.
You might as well not even exist, and as a matter of fact, a mouse has a better chance of being noticed by these guys than some puny creature like yourself.
If you don’t mind being continually crushed into defeat, you might want to take a flier at the rock painting and selling.
The “and selling” part is the most important element of this particular equation, and don’t you forget it.
Selling what you produce is the test of your skills.
If you don’t test your skills, you could be off by a million miles, and never come to that realization. Get your product made, but then, get it out there onto the market.
See how people react. Can you sell enough of them to make a living? If not, what would you have to do to make that happen?
I use solid non-lead 100% copper disks to make my “spheres” in the Tree of Life, then mount the board into a 5″x7″ gold-leafed frame, wire and finish the back with FOUR power-packed CQRs mounted in acrylic capsules and affixed to the inside corners, then papered and shipped to you ready to use on any wall.
These are hand-crafted and take some time to make. The retail price of the framed piece is $375 — but if you act now, you can get it for the Special Sale Price of $275 plus shipping. At these prices, I don’t ship free.
If you want your ToL Matrix mounted for desk use, merely say so, and I’ll put a different type of frame on it, one that has a flip-out backstand.
The Matrix is GUARANTEED. You are one thousand percent — 1000% — satisfied, or your money back, absolutely guaranteed.
Once you have your Matrix installed, you will never want to take it down.
At some point, you will find yourself installing one of these in each location you want to secure and keep safe, under powerful angelic protection, immune from magical and psychic attack from any source.
In addition, they provide instant access to higher dimensions, higher powers and angelic forces, plus they open a continuous Portal that allows easy penetration of membranes and magnetic fields, to allow easy dreamwork, deep self meditation states and access to the Akashic Records.
I personally make each and every disk by hand, and each one represents a different controlling angel and a higher force under its control. The writing, which resembles “Kufic” script, is actually an angelic script used on this planet for many thousands of years, traceable to cave painting symbology, which I’ve posted elsewhere.
Let me give you the formula:
If you’re selling sachets at a dollar apiece, and they cost you fifty cents to make, how much are you making?
The answer is nothing, because it costs you far more than the remaining fifty cents just to get to the place where you can sell these things in public, and tomorrow, you’ll have to find another corner, because you’ll have burned up the territory and reached “market saturation”, at the place where you were selling to a crowd yesterday.
If you make a tarot deck for $12 and you sell it for $25, you only lose about $8, because it costs you something to put that deck in front of people, and it costs you cash money to get to the place where you can sell things, plus you carry food or buy food for lunch and snacks.
It costs a LOT to sell things or to offer a service of some kind, and you might not realize that it does. You can’t put artwork in a corner of your garage, never mention it to anyone, and expect to sell anything anytime soon.
The stonehenge model is an easy project for a beginner, and looks and feels great when you’re finished with it.
The extra glue is another project you’ll enjoy after you’ve made the item. It takes about half an hour to get all the extra glue off the project, if you insist on purity.
You’ll soon discover that there are a myriad of unsuspected projects which abound in the rock area of creative impulses, and you very well might indulge yourself in some dozen or so of them.
Don’t neglect the marketplace in your enthusiasm to get things done.
With a little application, you can use rock painting to reinvent yourself and rebuild your life, grab back some of your life in the form of precious personal time, and get things going on track again, if such a thing is possible in Trump Land — his new name for America, which is so reminiscent of Emperor Norton and Lola Montez.
“Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets”, runs the lyrics in the 50s stage hit song, but it was based on the story of Lola Montez, who dreamt of becoming the Queen of America, and almost succeeded beyond her wildest dreams.
The name of the Broadway show in which Lola Montez figures is “Damn Yankees” — it’s about a guy who sells his soul to the Devil so he can pitch the winning World Series game for the Yankees.
My advice? Don’t try that at home. Luckily, Lola Montez did not become the Queen of Lola-Land. It didn’t happen then, and it isn’t going to happen now.
Trump is about to get his ass kicked politically, and he won’t ever know where the blow came from, but it came directly from himself. He is singularly the most self-destructive idiot I’ve ever seen outside the funny farm. As a matter of fact, I would expect to run into him well within the confines of a home for the seriously disturbed.
Each character in every Shakespeare “Tragedie” (sic) has within himself or herself a “fatal flaw”, which brings down judgment upon the head of the aforementioned soul in dramatic torment.
Speaking of unspeakable dramatic torment, you might want to watch some of the political debates that will dominate the news for the next 30 or so months.
There are people being interviewed now for a thirty-month from now airing of the video. Soundbytes are everywhere, and the clinics are setting up for extra benefits.
In short, hang on to your shorts, and get ready for the wildest ride of Mr. Toad’s life.
See You At The Top!!!
gorby