An excerpt from Brush for Hire by Larry Mansker
The first part of the story began while I was still living in the River Quay, but I didn’t understand its significance until I had moved to California. The story starts when I was trying to learn how to make silk screen prints. My subject was a stand of trees near my grandmother’s house that I had been looking at for as long as I could remember. I managed to complete it; not too bad for a first attempt. The print was displayed in a local art gallery owned by a friend of mine.
This was my first experience dealing with art galleries. Up to that time, all my business was in advertising and public relations markets. I was excited when he told me that many of his customers really liked the art, but they couldn’t use it because the colors were wrong. The popular at that time were blue and brown. He suggested that, if I would print the piece in those colors, he could probably sell a lot of them. My answer to such an outrageous idea was, "ABSOLUTELY NOT!"
Mr. Bashor, my college teacher, had drilled into his students’ heads: NEVER LET ANYONE TELL YOU WHAT TO PAINT! Therefore, I should not and would not change the colors. Mr. Bashor would have been proud of me.
Now for the second part, the punch line. I was now living in California. I showed a couple of my new silk-screens to the owner of one of the biggest art print marketers in the world. (How I got there is also a good story, but that’s not the lesson here.) I was pleased when he said he liked my work, but then he added he could not use it. “Look around the gallery,” he said. “When I sell ten prints, nine of them are blue and brown.”
Okay, I finally got it.
The story doesn’t end here. My artist friend, Donna, from Kansas City, was taking an etching class. I suggested that she send samples to the gallery, preferably blue and brown. She did and for several years, until the print market declined, she was one of their top-selling artists. I was motivated to produce my own series of etchings a few years later.
No, the story is not over yet. One of the silk screen samples that I showed to the big print dealer, the one with the wrong colors, depicted a sunset over the Pacific. The colors were purple and pink, and I made only about a half dozen artists’ proofs because I could not find a market for the prints. A couple of years later blue and brown were out. Guess what colors were in? My purple sunset worked very well with the new fashionable colors of mauve and rose. All six of the artists’ proofs sold. Now that’s the end of the best marketing lesson I ever learned.
