Friday, February 20, 2009

Consumed with new art gallery website

Geronimo! Here we go again diving into another business venture while the whole economy is in hiding!
Not stupid though, people want nice things, but they want to save money. We sell nice things at a fraction of what people usually pay! So we said to ourselves - Selves - duh!
It's been about a week since we selected Homestead to host the website http://www.nakedwallartgallery.com/ for our new online gallery. Homestead is way easier than Yahoo in our opinion and seems to have much better features. I should point out we are no experts, but we've created a few websites for the Framed Art Superstore - http://www.framedartoutlet.com/ and for Soyfire Candle - http://www.soyfire.com/ . This has been the easiest and most exciting experience, making huge progress each day and the art looks beautiful on the site! We hope to be ready for customers to start buying our canvas transfers by March 1st at the latest.
The Naked Wall Art Gallery is different from our store in North Conway and our other websites because all we sell is frame-less canvas transfers. Each item is on the site, easy to shop, easy to buy, put in in your shopping cart and wait by your door! Selling art is usually a challenge with lots of options - we took away all the options - no frames, no mats - just pick your picture and it comes on canvas ready to hang with finished edges and life has never been so good!
At the Framed Art Superstore in North Conway, canvas transfers have been our best sellers for about a year now. Fewer people want frames anymore, especially under glass when you can have the same print transferred to canvas and looking like an original painting for the same price!
So, times being what they are, we need to expand our business in some way, so why not share our amazing deals on canvas transfers with the world!?
Our art buying is changing a bit too - we're in FL for the winter while our friends in North Conway NH are cursing us thinking we're just basking on the beach. Truth is North Conway is beautiful in winter so they shouldn't be jealous and besides, we're here with our heads stuck in a computer all day anyway. Oh yeah, art buying - one can't help but be influenced by the beautiful colors and bright light of summer - that's January in New Smyrna Beach! We just visited the big annual art festival here - over 25 artist from all over the country put on an amazing show, which gave us great inspiration and several artist we would like to feature in the future.
For the new naked wall art gallery site, we started by shopping through every major art publisher's collection of fine art prints. We have over 100,000 prints available to us, but that's way too many - it's just overwhelming and tons of them are really crap - that's technical jargon for ugly art that was a waste of paper and ink to produce as prints!
We selected our favorite 500 or so images. Okay, Sal selected about 400 of them, so I will probably be adding about 100 more of the best images in the coming week or so once we get the web site up and ready to take orders! Our tastes run a little different. We both love the latest abstract art - boy it's not what you would expect if you haven't been art shopping in a while - this is not the 1970 abstract art you're thinking of - today's new abstract art is gorgeous!
We also love wildlife - nothing with contrived though - you know the ones where you're waiting for an elf to pop out from under a bridge?! We like real wildlife - in New Hampshire we love the moose, in Florida we love the huge birds. We have three great Blue Herons that live in our neighborhood and I must admit they are a little intimidating since they are as huge and will walk right up to us, they squawk like a junk yard dog - I wonder if anyone has ever been eaten by a Blue Heron... oh yeah - art - in our Florida home we prefer bright abstracts and tropical themes - no, not my mother's pastel Golden Girl's theme! We've found a lot of very cool and hip looking tropical art. Here's a link to our coastal images:
http://stores.nakedwallartgallery.com/-strse-Coastal/Categories.bok

What I want to add (when Sal's not looking) to the Naked Wall Art Gallery will be fun things, like Will Rafuse music, kitchen and bar art. Notice the bartender and the chef we chose for kitchen art. I love funky fun and bright colored art. Most people relegate fun art to the kitchen and bath, preferably in only tiny pictures. That's too bad, because hanging something that makes you smile every time you see it would be great in the living room and in larger sizes. I love the fun flip flop poster we transferred to canvas to look like a museum piece - at first glance it looks serious, but you do a double take and smile yup, it really is a painting of a flip flop!
All this talk of flip flops make me think of Margarita ville - stepped on a pop top, blew out my flip flop - maybe it's time for me to cruise on home and put something in my blender! Good thing home is only in the other room!
Good night for now, maybe next rambling will start to take some direction!

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