Article 3.
Tan Lines 40 x 24″ Oil on Canvas
Realist Artist William Wolk’s Upcoming Book
I thought there might be some value to others involved in the visual arts; artists, gallery owners, as well as others, to learn about my experiences and observations from my career in Fine Art. So, I wrote a book, and although it is still in its proofing stages, I thought I’d release excerpts from time to time. Below is part of the Preface from the upcoming Wisdom and Luck.
Preface (abridged)
One afternoon, an elderly gentleman visited my one-man gallery at The Greenbrier, a West Virginia resort, with his adult children and grandchildren. He and his family were flying home and only had a few minutes to spare, but the following morning he called back to purchase a painting. I received a call from the employee at my gallery who had interacted with him the day before, with the good news that she had made a sale. It was a nude of the beguiling 26-year-old model with whom I had recently begun working. “Who bought the painting,” I inquired.
“Some old guy. He was really old. I think he may have been a pervert.”
Well, naturally.
A few months later I produced a new brochure which featured, among other subjects, another nude of that same model, and I mailed it off to my list of collectors. Two days later, quite early in the morning, I received a call that woke from me from a deep sleep. It was the old pervert. After I managed to croak out a groggy “Hello,” he asked:
“How much is the nude on page three?”
Shaking the cobwebs from my head, still half asleep, and in a thick morning voice I answered, “Thirty Thousand dollars.”
“Do you take American Express?”
That was, word for word, my exchange with the old pervert. Short and to the point. That woke me up faster than a double espresso. We shipped the painting to Birmingham, Alabama. About this time, I had begun a practice of printing out self-adhesive wine labels on which I reproduced a full color image of the painting the client had purchased. At the top of the label it read The (customer’s surname) Collection. William Wolk Fine Art was printed along the bottom. I always selected an excellent wine (in case they actually drank it), arduously scraped off the original label with a single edged razor blade, and applied our vanity label. Altogether, it took about thirty to forty minutes to prepare. I shipped them out in custom wine mailers.
I sent a bottle of wine to our pervert in Birmingham as a little “Thank you.” It had pleased him so much that a couple of days later, he called me to ask if he could get another bottle. “Yup.” Then, just a few minutes’ latter, he called back again to ask if he could get two full cases.
When the wine was ready, I called the client and told him that I could either ship the order to him, which would be pricey and a bit risky, or I could deliver it personally and, if he’d like, I could also bring down some additional paintings for him to see.
“Bring down everything you have!” We were invited to spend the night at his home and join him for dinner at The Club. We rented a U Haul trailer and arrived at the client’s home with seventeen paintings in tow.
There were hundreds of paintings on display, but it was his condo on the beach in northern Florida that housed the biggest part of his collection. Being a building contractor, he had built the building and reserved the penthouse floor for himself.
His office in downtown Birmingham also housed many works of art. When he gave us a tour we saw the first painting he had purchased from me. It was still sitting next to its shipping crate on the floor beside a small Monet that had just arrived that day. I was in good company.
In short order, this vibrant elderly collector selected another four of my paintings (not nudes) to add to his already overwhelming collection. He gave no thought whatsoever to where they might hang. He just loved collecting art. Afterward, we all readied to go to dinner. While our host was in the shower, his daughter stopped by. She looked around at my paintings and, pointing, said, “Please tell my father that if he’d like to buy me a birthday present, I’d like that one!” We relayed the message to our host and he bought that one too, making it five paintings that night…plus dinner at The Club. The success of this visit led us to designing our own custom built trailer.
The dialogue which lead to the sale of six additional paintings was opened because I did two simple things. First, I mailed the brochure, and second, I sent the customized bottle of wine as a Beau Geste. Our “sales associate” who decided that the old pervert was just a one-off event because of his age, saw the world differently than I did. She wrote up an order for a customer; I cultivated a relationship through which I sold six additional paintings and I had the pleasure of enjoying the company and hospitality of one of my most interesting collectors.
When the gentleman passed away in 2010, I was contacted by his estate to clarify the titles of some of the work he had purchased. His collection contains over four hundred paintings, many of them by master artists, being tended by a private curator. The collection is housed in a cloistered museum where they will be displayed in perpetuity.
