More Images » Youth Employment Services art sale showcases the artwork of YES students. The Montreal job centre offers business training to young artists.Photograph by: JOHN KENNEY THE GAZETTE, The Gazette
A sign of these hard economic times: Two live auctions of fine art were scheduled on the same Saturday in early December, one at Place des Arts and the other at a gallery in Plateau Mont Royal, but despite crowds numbering in the hundreds, both were cancelled at the last minute.
The reason? It wasn’t a lack of interest in the art. There simply weren’t enough people willing to open their wallets wide enough to make the auctions profitable. They wouldn’t even do it out of the goodness of their hearts, either: Both auctions were pre-Christmas fundraisers for artists.
“There just wasn’t the critical mass to make it work,” the downtown event’s auctioneer, retired Radio-Canada personality and painter Winston McQuade, said afterwards. Intended as the highlight of a fundraiser called the Les arts s’emballent!, the auction would have gone to aid financially strapped artists. “The paintings we were going to auction had reserves of $800, $1,000, $1,200, and there was no way we were going to get there if we didn’t have a public interested in their real value,” Mc-Quade said. “So we’ll put it off to another date.”
That same afternoon, uptown at the Diagonale fibre-works centre on de Gaspé Ave., in an industrial building in what used to be the Mile End garment district, several hundred people attended an auction of small works made out of textiles and paper, this year organized on the theme of the colour yellow. A “silent” auction was held in the early afternoon, with a starting price for each work set at $100, half going to the artist and half to Diagonale. But by the time the real, live auction was supposed to take place at 3 p.m., only 25 silent bids had been registered for nearly 300 works on sale. At the last minute, the live auction was cancelled.
“There’s a lot of competition going on at the moment – there are other auctions besides ours,” said Stéphanie L’Heureux, the centre’s director. “We’re asking ourselves if we shouldn’t start changing our formula. An auction draws many different people in – collectors, friends, family – but as a formula it might have exhausted its potential.” Added another board member, after announcing the cancellation to the crowd: “I don’t know if it’s the state of the economy, but we’ve had much stronger years than this. The art world has really tightened up.”
Indeed it has. Since the global financial crisis that began in 2008, professional artists in Quebec and the rest of Canada have been struggling with declining demand for their works. The most entrepreneurial among them have found ways to stay afloat, but others are just barely getting by. Though nearly half are university or college graduates, the average income of an artist in Canada is only $23,500 a year – about 25-per-cent lower than the overall labour force average, according to a September 2010 study by the Canadian Conference of the Arts. For the most part selfemployed, the country’s 35,000 visual artists are at the bottom of the earnings scale: artisans and craftspeople make barely $15,000, while painters and other visual artists earn just under $19,000 – about twothirds less than the average worker.
A separate study by the Conference Board of Canada in 2009 on the effect of the global recession on the “creative economy” warned that Canadian artists’ incomes will decline by about 3.5 per cent a year as the overall economy contracts. With visual arts accounting for just under $2 billion of the cultural sector’s $72 billion in annual revenues, about $70 million a year that would have come from sales of the work of visual artists has simply evaporated.
At the same time, government grants – the lifeblood of Canadian artists, giving them the freedom to create new works between what can be highly sporadic sales periods – are increasingly hard to come by.
Most artists look to the Canada Council for the Arts for support; in 2009-2010, it awarded $146 million in grants to over 4,400 artists and arts organizations in 689 communities across the country; $21 million of that went to visual artists and organizations; in Quebec, the council’s funding amounted to $46 million, with $5.6 million granted to the visual arts.
All those amounts dropped or stagnated in 2010-2011; total grants nationwide contracted by 3 per cent to $142 million, the visual arts stayed roughly the same at $21 million, Quebec arts grants dropped 4 per cent to $45 million and the amount to Quebec’s visual arts also fell 4 per cent to $5.4 million.
Since “the global economic downturn in 2008 – many artists and arts organizations are turning to the council for additional help to stabilize their circumstances, putting great pressure on the council’s resources,” the funding agency noted in its 2011-2016 strategic plan. “The council in turn is facing greater constraint in its capacity to keep up with demand than existed three years ago.”
That’s putting it mildly. With the economy reeling and grants scarce, artists are increasingly under pressure to make money, not just art.
But how? Well, creative people that they are, artists are finding ways. Some are churning out small-scale paintings that they sell online, others have adapted their art to commercial applications like interior design and advertising, while others have targeted niche luxury markets to get more bucks for their bang. Some have gone back to school for crash courses in running a small business, others have seized opportunities to get exposure from corporate clients with a window in the retailing world. Some hold down day jobs that pay to keep up a studio they use part-time, then sell their works at semiannual studio sales.
Damien Siqueiros is a photographer and visual artist who designs and shoots promotional images for dance and theatre companies like Les Grands Ballets Canadiens and fashion spreads for magazines like Elle. “It’s a little bit more slow sometimes,” said Siqueiros, 31, who’s originally from Mexico. His working rule: “Be prepared for opportunities, work to make those opportunities happen, and know your clients.
“You have to get your work out there as much as you can and be really sure about what you’re doing,” said Siqueiros, who has an agent to shop around his portfolio, which is printed as a coffee-table style book. He has won prizes and grants, but says they’re a crutch. “You become a slave to the system. For me, it’s better if the artist relies on the government at first and then looks for a way to become independent and self-sufficient.”
Edith Dora Rey has managed to do that without leaving her studio. The Plateau Mont Royal artist posts one painting a day on her blog, doreyme.blogs.com, and offers them for sale on a U.S. site called DailyPainters. com. Most of the paintings are small watercolours; Rey sometimes does three or four at one sitting and saves them for posting; other paintings take months. To facilitate purchases, she uses PayPal, the online payment service. “When I’m more organized,” she said, “I also have ‘The Edith Store’ on my blog where I sell paintings, usually just small ones because it’s less of a gamble for the buyer – and me, ultimately. Every computer screen is different and I don’t want any disappointments.”
Other artists have scaled back and found a niche they can exploit.
Twice a year, at Christmas and in the spring, Denise Saulnier opens the doors of her Rosemont studio for a sale of her tapestries, scarves, bags and other textile creations. When she started out 20 years ago, she sold her work at three shops in Montreal and the Eastern Townships, but eventually those shops closed, victims of the so-called Wal-Mart effect of big-box stores selling cheap Chinese knock-offs. Saulnier now takes care of sales herself. She can afford to: she has a regular job as a textile showroom manager, doing displays for a wholesaler who caters to decorators. Despite the economic downturn, Saulnier has seen interest in her own products grow lately, perhaps as a backlash against the big-box phenomenon. “I think people are just fed up with finding the same old things wherever they look.”
Business smarts aren’t something artists are known for. But there is help if they need it.
Youth Employment Services is a Montreal jobs centre that caters to young anglophones. Since the early 2000s, it has offered a training program tailored especially for artists, and every June hosts a conference called Business Skills for Creative Souls, which attracts about 350 people. It also publishes a guide called The Montreal Artist’s Handbook. Last month in Old Montreal, the organization held a twoday sale at Marché Bonsecours showcasing artwork of students who’ve been through the program.
Unlike regular job seekers, said executive director Iris Unger, “artists are struggling with questions: ‘Can I make a living from my art? Do I want to? When we started, a lot of them didn’t want to talk about money; they thought if they made money off their art they’d be prostituting themselves. We had a lot of education to do, and I think that attitude has changed. A lot now realize that they can make money off their art and the two don’t need to be incongruent.”
Monika Majewski co-ordinates the artists’ program at YES and coaches students. Today’s artists need to “promote, market, sell, grow, be strategic, develop the tools to do proper governance, etc.” she believes. “The Web and social media have made it very easy for everybody to market and promote themselves, but it’s only a tool, and it only becomes useful if you can maximize its potential. If you haven’t nailed your brand and identified yourself to a larger public, you’re going to miss the boat.”
Professional artists have to be as disciplined as athletes, Majewski said. “You have to think of it as an Olympic sport. You need to produce work all the time, always challenge yourself. At the same time, you have to be an Olympian of marketing, promotion, development, networking; you have to be a master administrator, a master grant-writer, a master proposer and pitcher.
“It really is a very gruelling way to make a living, and it takes ages to build your business. You have to be creative, but that’s one of the advantages that artists have: they’re naturally creative; their creativity is their capital. So art and business need not be polar opposites.”
In tough economic times, multi-tasking is key. For example, a painter might work three or four days a week at a design agency, making artwork that gets mass-produced on canvasses or posters and sold to mass-market chains specializing in home decor. The rest of the time, the artist can work on more personal pieces that eventually find a home in galleries and private collections. Another artist might design props for store displays or commercial photo shoots, and use the income to come up with her own products to retail herself. “In today’s economic climate, a diversified revenue is a safe revenue,” Majewski said. “It’s better than just putting all your eggs in one basket.”
Pascale Girardin understood that long ago. Early on in her career, scraping by on a waitress’s salary to support her painting and a son still in diapers, she got tired of being poor. She signed up for a one-year diploma program in ceramics at a trade school in Old Montreal. “I didn’t want my son to grow up telling his friends, ‘Oh, my mom’s a waitress and she tinkers in the studio on weekends.’ I wanted him to be able to say, ‘My mom rocks: She’s an artist.’ “
Mission accomplished: Today Girardin’s high-end ceramics are displayed as decorative art at ritzy department stores, hotels and luxury-goods shops in Paris, New York, Las Vegas and Dubai, and her plates and other dishware grace tables in fancy eateries here and abroad, including Nobu, the worldwide chain of Japanese restaurants co-owned by Robert De Niro. These days, with the help of 16 artisans hired for the project, Girardin is working on her largest piece ever: a monumental mobile of aluminum strips that will hang next spring in a casino in Atlantic City.
Her secret to success? From the start, she aimed high.
She scoured hospitality and decor magazines and visited luxury stores to get an idea of the high-end market and its prices – finding out, for example, that bowls she was selling for $20 here could actually fetch $80 in New York. One day, seeing her dishware at the Salon des métiers d’art at Place Bonaventure, a buyer for Holt Renfrew ordered the entire lot for the store’s new collection; he was impressed that Girardin was already a “name” in New York.
Sales took a dip after the stock-market crash of 2008 but 2009 was a good year, as Girardin filled contracts she’d already negotiated with places like Printemps in Paris. “A lot of artists that were doing what I do gave up in 2008 and 2009; they didn’t have the stamina,” she recalled. “I have a lot of stamina. I said to myself, ‘If I’ve survived this far, I can do it.’”
Then there are those who capitalize on a bit of luck.
Looking for some visibility in the Christmas rush, Ottawa art student Alessandro Seccareccia found his window of opportunity – literally – in a Montreal cosmetics store. His sister, Nadia works at The Body Shop downtown, on Ste. Catherine St. and Peel. She told him about the chain’s new art competition, whereby stores across the country and the U.S. put an artist in the front window for one day to illustrate the chain’s seasonal theme, “Give Joy!” The paintings were then posted on Facebook and followers were encouraged to vote for their favourite.
Seccareccia got the most “likes” in Canada and won a $1,000 Visa gift card. The exposure was priceless.
“It’s pretty motivating to know there are ways like this to get our ideas across and get more noticed,” said Seccareccia, 19, who plans to move to Montreal later this year. Using bright acrylic paints and some Body Shop makeup, he painted a fanciful landscape: A train leaves Montreal and heads straight to a village in Africa. “It’s to show we’re in the same world and we should give to everyone instead of hogging it for ourselves.”
Kate Lavut is also starting out. A writer and drawer, she moved here from Toronto several years ago and is raising young children. In 2010, she started self-publishing quirky little alphabet books on different themes – cellphone users, smokers, animals – and has also done a gender-bending series about the time she passed herself off as boy in Mexico. Like naive art, the hand-sewn, black-and-white books charm by their simplicity, off-colour humour and lack of polish (the texts have multiple spelling mistakes).
With a new one coming out every two months, the books have sold at small-book fairs like Montreal’s Expozine as well as independent book stores and museum gift stores here and in Toronto and San Francisco. You have to be a bit of entrepreneur to make a venture like this work, Lavut said. “For artists, it can be hard to do the business side as well as the creative side, but I actually enjoy the business side – the marketing, the production, keeping your costs down so you can be profitable.”
For others, it’s a struggle. Back at the Diagonale auction, Natalie Rolland was one of the many artists whose work didn’t sell that day. “I must not be a very good saleswoman,” she sighed afterward. Her piece – a crinkled arrangement of handmade paper framed in a white box the size of a CD case – hung behind her on the wall. “I used to do rather large works, but I dismantled my studio and now only do small formats, working at home,” she said.
“For the last two or three years, I’ve had more than the usual difficulty being productive and finding a gallery interested in my work. Montreal is harder than in Quebec City or the regions, where there’s more government support.”
Lise Létourneau is president of a new organization called the Regroupement des artistes en art visuels. A multidisciplinary artist, she was one of 20 hawking their wares from tables at the Place des Arts fundraiser. Near them, several others led by ponytailed veteran Armand Vaillancourt made brightcolour paintings on the floor. “Doing a show this way isn’t a guaranteed format, because the art market in Montreal isn’t very dynamic,” Létourneau said as people streamed by. “This is more about educating people that we exist than about actually selling anything.”
By building a reserve of emergency money through fundraisers, the Regroupement hopes to be able to help the worse-off. “They’re the ones not getting government grants anymore,” she said. “The older ones, they’ve given their life to their art but don’t produce as much as they used to, so the money’s no longer there.”
McQuade, the would-be auctioneer, lamented the sad fact that most visual artists are financially poor and will stay poor, thanks to the worst economic meltdown since the Depression.
“It’s like a curtain fell,” he said. “I wish it would come all the way up again.”
jheinrich@ montrealgazette.com
© Copyright (c) The Montreal Gazette
January 27, 2012
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