Henri Rousseau, Naif Painter
*When you were a child, didn't you love sketching? And you probably could start up that talent again, wake it up by sketching from life, which is the basis of oil painting.
*As the paintings that galleries are selling go for a minimum of 5,000$ for a landscape, for unknown artists ( go to NEXT MONET DOT COM, ) it's worth it to try. You have it in you to make $ selling artwork, artisanry or best of all, most lucrative, impressionist landscape paintings. How? By taking your work to galleries. Where? Well, to the ritzy area of town. In LA, it's Melrose or La Cienega or Canon Drive or Beverly Drive. In Santa Fe, it's gallery row. I think they call it avenue Conquistador or something.It is fabulous. You walk from gallery to gallery, stunned!
*Every city has its gallery area, its decorators' wholesale area. Or you can sell to passing tourists thru shops, or to the decorators in your town. It doesn't matter if you now THINK you can't paint worth a damn. No one can without daily sketching practice and that's something you can start doing, so you can learn to paint well. Or, stay a simple, primitive painter and learn to DO FOLK PAINTING.
*Start with cheap materials, like generic markers, poster paints or acrylic paints from a huge, wholesale discount art store. Be sure to get newsprint paper to sketch as you are going to pretend that you're a Renaissance student. (they sketched in charcoal stick for years before allowed to lift a brush.) Your daily life will now involve sketching on cheap paper with a charcoal pencil, doing so for a few hours, daily. Wherever you are, sketch, even at work. Don't call it doodling. It's important ground work. By the way, it's important to SKETCH only WHAT YOU SEE and not 'make up' designy things. We are teaching our eyes to be receptive to what's out there. Even if it's only the inside of your office at work.
*Start tomorrow by getting a few books at the library. Get the Naive or Naif painters, Henri Rousseau, Grandma Moses as even a ten year old child can make a living painting this way. You have to study art to loosen up and do what the great artists did....IMPRESSIONISM, (Gauguin, Monet, Cezanne). Let books on these guys inspire you but the main thing you're going to do in Kindergarten for painters is sketching. start doing it all the time.
*VERY IMPORTANT that you also get an art book on COMPOSITION to learn how to see the 'frame' and the articles you choose to include in the picture. Or how to lay objects out (fruits, plates) when you're sketching, for best effect. Get a cheap, newsprint paper sketch book or get butcher paper from butcher and use a piece of burnt wood, charcoal or a marker, or soft pencil but do that daily hour of sketching from life which enables you quickly to duplicate what you see. ALWAYS sketch what you see. Nothing from imagination.
*NEXT: when you graduate to sketching well, you will get ready to paint. Put a good sketch on canvas, or canvas board, or wood, or plywood that has been primed with white latex paint. NOW you will do a painting you'd be proud to hang. Let yourself be influenced by the work of HENRI ROUSSEAU. He's a primitive painter. This guy never studied. He was a customs officer in France. His work is primitive, like a kid would do. Look up GRANDMA MOSES at the library. PRIMITIVE ART. NAIVE art. That's another word for it. Look them up at the library. All these words mean simple painting like a child does in school. THESE sell. They're HOT.
*Paint your rural, country scenes, paint the streets
of the town. Paint people. Tourists will buy. Paint a bouquet, a window,
a view of the garden outside. A child serving tea. Or a cat asleep on the
table, or awake. Sketch fast, you can catch a cat. Put in a bouquet, a
window overlooking a garden, some fruit....Decorators will buy these things. 
*Then, tune into the paintings of the impressionist painters, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Monet, especially but also Matisse, Dufy, getting books on them at the library. IMPRESSIONISM means 1) painting from nature, 2) painting the impression not the exactitude i.e. looser brushstrokes, sloppy paint thrown on, attempting to duplicate the 'light' on objects. The light is yellow, the shadows are blue. If you have cable, watch those shows on painting. They're lousy as they don't paint from NATURE, they paint in a DESIGNY way. But you paint from LIFE. Paint what's outside your house.
GICLEE is the art you find in mall galleries, big PRINTS. Giclee method involves a big COMPUTER PRINTER that shoots out pictures. A lot of real money maker artists churn out work on a PC. You'd have to go to ART SCHOOL to learn the tech but then you can make millions like the Great YUROZ does with MALL GALLERIES. SEE GICLEE article
*Another idea: Expand into ARTISANRY. Do PAPIER MACHE OVER BOXES. I observed Gemma Tacogna and Jeanne Valentine, the two premiere gals in this field, both in Mexico in the sixties. I saw their work secrets. Take a lot of newspapers. Wet & squnch up. Let dry in sun. Pull the ball apart. The papers are wrinkled. Take glue, paste, flour water and stir until you have some thin paste, like cream. Wet a strip of paper, stick down on box. Overlap strips or squares. Wrap around edges, into interior of box. Let dry. Paint outside and inside with flat white tempra or water paint. Let dry. Now paint design, using flat tempras, school type paint. If you do a face, make it smooth as silk with white paint, don't use wrinkley paper there. Regarding BOX: You don't have to paint interior, or you can put fabric in it, glue it on, or paint inside. On outside, you can set phony jewels with string gooped up with paste, glue string around each jewel to hold it. Paint w. colors. Varnish with any good, clear varnish. Mix detergent soap with a little umber brown paint. Brush on, especially in crevices. Let dry a short while, then with soft cloth, rub off, leaving a little 'antiquing' in the crevices.
*WHERE TO SELL? Wholesale to boutiques. Decorate a bank and put price on each one. Bank has people call you if they want one. Decorate cafes. Make jewelry boxes, pencil boxes, glove boxes working over ordinary cardboard boxes. Papermache over wood bowls, wastepaper baskets, frames, all kinds of things you find on junk pile/thrift store. Next start putting your work out in the marketplace. You might set up on the highway with all your papiermache and paintings propped up, and a FOR SALE sign, or outside a super market in the ritzy part of town, or get little boutiques, stores to handle your work, or go to the decorator area or get galleries to sell your work for big money.
*One person had the idea that they could meet
all the wealthiest people in the city at the offices of all the biggest
corporations and they'd agent/ rep or sell the art of the poorest, most
starving artists. They went to every gallery opening, befriended ALL the
artists, went to visit them in their studios and garrets, said 'I can place
your paintings in the offices of big corporations.' and the artists were
of course interested, and said, well, you can have this group...and bingo,
if you do this, you're in business. You of course, rent the artworks to
big corporations. The paintings will have a sign on them, 'For Sale, $1000'
or maybe no price, just 'The Little Gallery' and the city, so the person
interested can look you up online or in the phone book 411, information.
For exhibiting them that way, the corporations get to hang them but they
have to pay you a small amount of money, a token amount, like 30$ a month
rent. You get the rental money, maybe you even chage 50$ and give the artists
half of it. Then, you get 40% of the $4000 if the corporation buys the
painting, artist gets 60 %. Your own paintings can be hung this way, too.
Frequently, the corporation wants to buy the piece for its permanent collection.
LANDSCAPES are what people love in office buildings! 
*ART is a business that fits your desire
for freedom, which I assume you have --as you found me through my GUERILLA
CAPITALISM pages. Creative people like you are rare and it's a pity to
tire yourself out in boring, alienated work when you have the destiny to
do something else. To have your own biz and one day be rich. To have friends
who are creative artists, not drones with no imagination. Your destiny
is to enjoy waking up and doing your work each day! When there are kids,
stay home with them, don't work outside the home where you have FICA deductions
for Social Security ( going down the drain). You have to take care of your
OWN old age. Start your own biz; make money from a cottage industry. You
can make more money, and build to being famous and making a TON of money,
a lot more than you could being a cashier, or some dumb job you hate which
takes you away from your family, your garden, your pets. YOUR LIFE. Look
at the prices of paintings at http://www.nextmonet.com
who used to represent Bruner, my favorite. Look at the landscapes, then
look at Bruner's work. That's the benchmark. Do that kind of stuff you
will make bank. But the new artists make a hundred times more from duplicating
methods. There is an new artist on the scene, YUROZ, a Russian immigrant
who was homeless on the streets of downtown LA a few months ago, who now
makes a quarter to half million for every single painting that he does.
No painter in the history
of the world has made that, starting out. So study YUROZ! Google him. IN
THE IMAGES area of GOOGLE! I ALWAYS LIKED CUBISM braque, picasso, deschamps,
never met a rainbow cubist I didn't think was hot, so do you know the work
of YUROZ? Know of any other the true colorful RAINBOW PRISM CUBISTS are
my faves. LIKE THIS GUY. YUROZ. Google him, IMAGE AREA OF GOOGLE.
Print out the JPGS as big as you can get them. Hang them. RAINBOW CUBISM
is VERY VERY...Punchy. Take a SERIGRAPHY or LITHOGRAPH Print class and
learn to DO this kind of thing. Separate registers for each color? THAT
IS HARD! YUROZ' SKETCHING is cartoony, he's no ace at that, Picasso was
more sinuous but he IS good at finding the CUBISM patterns INSIDE the cartoon
sketch. That's hard but hey, don't lose heart. It doesn't take an EINSTEIN
MIND. My feeling is that the serigraphy thing, breaking down the color
into separate color registers DOES take that kind of mind. UNLESS
a machine can do it, a computer of some kind. This fellow gets 2k or 3k
each printout in Limited EDITIONS OF 150 generally -- so he is making a
quarter of a million for each design, there. YUROZ. Google him on the IMAGES
page. You can choose IMAGES at googles. Or news. If I had a color printer
I'd take about half his work and hang it right now.
THIS
JUST IN. A 7 year old, Alyna Marrero, of Southern California
painted this mask with 'fringe attached,' which became the billboard and
advertising art for a Student Art show and Family Arts festival. Any art
collector would want THIS early MARRERO
in his collection! So give the kids paper, scissors, paint, glue and show
them this article.
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