Yes, if you know how to do it, you can double the value of your money — at least the collectible part.
Here’s the deal:
You buy a coin for, let’s say, ten bucks. Then you hold it for a couple of decades and bring it back to your coin dealer. You’ll get at the maximum, five bucks for your trouble, but if you deal with wholesalers, as I do, you get a QUARTER of the price back, because they have to wholesale it for half, see?
So you’ve got some coins, but they aren’t very rare, very scarce or very desirable. In fact, they fall into the category of “junk collectibles”, which are things that only a collector could love, and for which the market is very limited.
Now what?
Now you listen very carefully, while I tell you the secret, which most folks will neither get, nor believe.
You can easily get the full retail value of your coin OR MORE, just by the process of a “Value Added” strategy, and I’ll tell you exactly how it’s done:
Let’s take a very ordinary 1944 Mercury dime. Okay, put it into a flip, and paint the flip, sign the flip, and mount the flip in a $4 mini-frame, and sell it for $39.95, which brings in a lot more than the coin ever would, as a coin.
Get it???
That’s it, that’s the whole secret. You’re making a FINE ART PAINTING, a miniature fine art painting, but a fine art painting nevertheless. It also happens to incorporate a coin, so it’s more correctly called a “collage”, or “multimedia” than a “painting”, but it’s up to you — those words are all about marketing, not about art.
So if you have some coins that are unusual enough, nobody knows the values. This is both a good thing and a bad thing.
You show a flip featuring a walking Liberty silver half dollar. First of all, any COIN collector is going to evaluate the offering by the state of the coin, more than the artwork, but an ART collector will look at the thing as a whole art piece.
And that’s my point. You’re changing the coin from a coin to something incorporated in a work of art, and that’s hard to calculate value.
I happen to be a Listed American Artist and a member of the Cedar Bar School, the Woodstock School and the Pop Art School out here in California.
I was a member of The California Nine, and showed at the best galleries in Los Angeles and New York.
I had a booth at the Javits Art Shows for many years, and my painting of Herbie Hancock is in the National Museum, so I think I have the right to charge professional rates for my artwork, and I do.
What I’m offering today are some flips that are unusual, and I have several collections of DIY unfinished flips, meaning that they have the basic drawing on them, but no color, and no signature — that’d be up to YOU.
What I have in mind is that you color in the flips, sign them and sell them, as if you’d cut them out of a coloring book, finished them and sold them, which is perfectly legitimate in today’s art market.
Jasper Johns issued a collaborative piece that you could color and sign, along with his co-signature. I painted several dozen of those, just for fun — he gave me an entire carton of them at a show we attended for Andy Warhol, who before he was a fine artist, worked as a sci-fi fantasy illustrator, and he illustrated many of my Dad Horace’s stories.
The size of the coin makes a difference. You can do a lot more with the smaller coin, leaving more painting room on the flip, see?
The really nifty thing about this is that you are increasing the value of the coin by altering not the coin, but the flip containing the coin in perfect safety.
That coin couldn’t be better protected unless it were slabbed, but that’s not about to happen with coins of little value.
Now, what about putting a major expensive coin in the flip?
Sure, but what then happens is that the coin value becomes more relevant than the art value, unless you’ve actually sold pieces at $35,000.00 and have the receipts to prove it, as I have in the past.
Even then, you’ll have a hard time getting big money for small paintings, as I was warned so many times at Otis Art Institute.
“Paint wall art,” I was advised by my sculpture teacher — I was a sculpture major at the time.
He was right. Sculpture doesn’t sell — nobody has a place to put it.
But flip art is wall art, and sometimes desktop art, meaning that your frame might stand by itself, making it a great little desk item.
These little things make great gifts.
And they’re cheap, too, but they LOOK expensive and rare, and they can be really fun to give and to get!
I’ll be offering silver coins this morning, so cheaply that coin collectors would champ at the bit to get into our little meeting at 6:30 this morning on zoom.
I might also be persuaded to bring out some of my more rare Greek coins for show & tell — they’re not for sale, but I will help you find coins that you are looking for.
I now have fully re-established my Egyptian contacts, and can easily get legitimate ancient objects of daily use.
If you want anything in the way of ancient items, let me know at the zoom meeting — my email is unreliable, and I’ve been known to go for several years without checking my “in” box.
I do want to emphasize that the whole coin thing is a RUSE — it’s a gimmick, and I’ll tell you how and why:
Pure Copper, Silver and Gold are great “caches” for any spiritual force or presence, and can be “tuned” and “harmonized” to resonate with any consciousness anywhere, instantly, in quantum.
You simply load up the copper, silver or gold with a Blessing. The precious metal holds the charge and “leaky waves” emanate all day from it.
The charge can be enhanced by placing the flip in your Cloud Chamber for a three or four minute fumigation. Be sure to capture the incense cloud before closing the dome onto the grooved base, which helps hold the cloud inside the glass dome.
If you don’t happen to have one of those, and you’re rolling in dough, I’m currently in the process of ordering 3″ and 4″ top-hook domes even now, as we speak, to fulfill several orders pending, and one rather timid inquiry about “What is a Cloud Chamber, anyway?”.
So the object is to get those Blessings out there, and they currently wear the disguise of fine art flips containing rare coins — so be it, that’s the way of the world.
This is a photo of me holding the official Egypt Exploration Society’s full and complete excavation records of the City of Akhenaten, and particularly the North Palace, which is where our 18th Dynasty treasure comes from. Look where I’m pointing, then compare with our color photos in my studio:
Speaking of which, I’m working to get releases on several albums that sat for years without anyone knowing they hadn’t ever been released, although they’re quite finished and ready for prime-time, and have been ready for prime-time for quite some prime-time.
Also in the process of getting the MOVEMENTS book republished, hopefully with a few changes to bring it up to date.
If you haven’t noticed that INVOCATION OF PRESENCE is back in print, take note, and order it today from Gateways Books & Tapes or place your order in the chat at this morning’s workshop meeting.
See You At The Top!!!
gorby