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Wander around any commercial art gallery and you’ll see people looking at pictures. You’ll also notice people avoiding making eye contact with any of the gallery staff for fear they may be invited to discuss a painting which, horror of horrors, could lead to a sale. But surely the primary purpose of a gallery is to make money for fts owners and the artists by selling the pictures and associated paraphernalia.

But artists manage to sell their work in other places and by other routes. Quite often hotels decorate their rooms and corridors with art, often with a price tag attached. It can of course take much longer to sell art this way – the number eyes viewing per week is probably smaller than a gallery would have and the hotel guests are not there to buy pictures. Cafes are perhaps a little faster at shifting artwork. People sit and stare while waiting to be served, or for the coffee to cool so can be more susceptible to the advertising nature of having paintings on the walls.

And it can work the other way too. Galleries install a coffee shop and some of the customers will go on to view the paintings and make a purchase.

Other artists will bypass the gallery and the high commissions they usually charge and set up their own sales website or use one the established shopping methods like eBay or Etsy to keep administrative costs down.

One interesting method I cam across was a charter boat which had walls decorated by artists specific to the route the cruise was taking.

Patrick Baum

Drive through the centre of Oxford and you’ll see roadside railings covered with paintings – all for sale. I’ve wondered about having a travelling gallery in a lorry but suspect it probably wouldn’t pay for itself.

I want to paint a scene set in a garden. So the best way to start is probably at home and the best/place would be the top of th the steps leading to the garden. In my last piece I wrote about artists displaying their wares on fences at the roadside in Oxford. Standing at the top of these steps I’m reminded of a fairy tale from my childhood – something about the fairies painting miniature pictures and getting the pixies to hang them with gossamer threads from the spidered webs on the hedgerows. Not sure about that.

Lets see if imagining where the fairies might hang a painting inspires me to paint anything. There’s a nice cotoneaster bush in front of me with lots of potential hanging spaces but because it’s quite large and covered with spring flowers it’s kind of smothering the scene and unless I go abstract I don’t think there’s a picture there.

Looking to the right I’m seeing the longer part of the garden through an archway. By late summer the arch will be covered in runner bean bean pods but just nose the plants are still making their clockwise twists around the metal uprights and the bright red flowered are still hiding within the tight buds. This does make for a more open framing of the view though and perhaps there’s a picture in there. The trick here is probably to change my height. Getting low gives me a different perspective with a large area of sky, no clouds just now but they’d add something. Standing tall I lose the sky but gain a lot of foreground. It’s a little boring just now – mainly grass, cut as a rough lawn, but it has the potential for additions.

Think we could be looking at a still life setup. Some objects laid on the grass with the arch and sky acting to frame the scene. We could stick to the fairy idea and lay out a little tableau though I’m feeling tempted to pop into the house and pick up a small pile of books to “throw” artistically onto the grass. I could still end up s with an abstract painting or else give myself a good workout exercise in sketching perspective with all the different vanishing points a pile of books offers.

Moving on through the arch the grass opens out with an apple tree on my left and a kitchen garden beyond and on my right a pear tree, two gooseberry bushes and a lot of nettles. The gooseberries will fruit soon and be followed by fruit from some escaped raspberry canes which are growing up through them and the nettles. The latter are probably at their best for harvesting for nettles soup at this time of year.

I think the only painting here would be a close up of leaves or flowers and i don’t fancy that today. So I’ll move on. Further along there a raised garden on my right. It’s used for vegetables in the summer. Just now it’s almost ready to be planted, it’s still got a partial covering os seaweed from my winter attempts at addding some extra nutrition to the soil. That does have potential to inspire a picture though. Maybe something low with emphasis on the seaweed a bit like waves going away from me. I’ll ponder that one.

Well there’s not much further to go in this direction. There’s a the fence with a footpath on the other side, some wild roses growing upmztzhis side and distant trees visible over the top.if I take that scene and add a few people walking along the path I could have myself a quite nice paicture.

Walk

Go outside

Find a another

Wild gatden

Indoor plants

Time to take a walk up the side garden. its a narrow path to start with as I squeeze past the fuchsia plant which form a hedge here. Now that would be a chat]llenfe to paint. The flowers which keep blooming all through the summer a but buds just now and can be hard to see when open, That’s because this wild version of the fuchsia, which grows quite profusely in this area, has dark purple flowers, probably easy for the bees to see using ultra violet light but not so easy for humans.

Theres a small kitchen garden on my right. Still some shafts of chives struggling to survive the remains of winter, the perpetual spinach doing its thing and shoots from some escaped narcissi pushing their way up.

Welcome

King Kenneth MacAlpine I

Use this story as a framework for your own memory palace, rather than trying to remember where I journeyed,

1 School (Malcolm II)

Walking north out of the village I’m passing the school on my left. There is a procession of students walking out being led by a lad with two heads! And he was carrying a banner which said *Welcome!”.