Purified Heart by Ali Cavanaugh. Fresco (watercolor on clay panel, 16" x 20". Sold for $1,800 through Seven-o-Seven Contemporary Art Gallery .

Often in business, companies create different product lines to appeal to buyers with different economic backgrounds and values. This type of strategy helps create a stable, steady source of revenue from the total sales of the various product lines, despite dips and peaks in the economy. In the art world, many artists, including watercolorist Ali Cavanaugh, employ the same strategy.

Cavanaugh consciously divides her time and creates four lines of work, each with different sales venues and price points. She sells small studies online at DailyPainters.com for $250 to $300, slightly larger studies on her own Web site for less than $600, 16" x 20" or larger paintings $1,000 to $9,000 at one of her five representing galleries, and other large works that she may casually complete throughout a period of months at her solo shows. In all, she estimates that she creates between 100 and 120 paintings annually, planning out each week of work on her calendar.

An oil painter through 2005, 34-year-old Cavanaugh co-founded the New School Academy of Fine Art in 1996, after graduating from Kendall College of Art and Design, and giving birth to her daughter, who now serves as one of the models for her work. Although she built a following of talented portrait artists, teaching left her little time to pursue her own art. In 2000, she left teaching and focused on building a fine art career, moving with her family to Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 2001. While she got into a small gallery right away, it wasn’t until she abandoned oil painting and took a courageous leap into a new “fresco”-style work — watercolor on clayboard — that her career took off. The soft, delicate figures highlighted by their stark white backgrounds hit it big with collectors. In 2006, the prestigious Seven-o-Seven gallery in Santa Fe began representing Cavanaugh, and statistically, her work is some of the most visited imagery at DailyPainters.com.

Here, Cavanaugh shares how she stumbled on her unique technique, why her Internet presence is so important to her career and what she’s learned about shipping.

	In the Place of an Old Thought by Ali Cavanaugh. Fresco (Watercolor on Clay Panel), 30"x30". Sold for $3,000 through Bering and James Gallery .

Art Calendar: How did you arrive at your current style and Medium?

Ali Cavanaugh: Oil painting was my medium through art school and up until 2005. My transition to watercolor started when I bartered a family portrait for some construction work. The client requested this family of seven be painted in watercolor. I had never really worked with watercolor before, but I was willing to try anything for the barter (the creation of a courtyard). When I unwrapped the 45" x 22" piece of watercolor paper, I saw that there were actually two pieces stuck together. After that family portrait was done, I chopped up that extra piece of watercolor paper into three pieces and just played with a single figure on the plain white background. I loved the way the light went into figure and illuminated everything. It was at this point that I really fell in love with watercolor. Long story short, the paper became a huge limitation because of the cost of framing. So I set out to develop a plaster panel that would be like the old world fresco that I could work on with watercolor. In doing my research, I found a company (Ampersand) that was already producing the plaster panels that I was envisioning. So I’ve been using these Aquabords for about a year now. (For expanded information about Cavanaugh’s painting technique, visit ArtCalendar.com.)

Art Calendar: Can you describe your watercolor/clayboard process and materials?

Cavanaugh: The flawless pebbly texture of the Aquabord takes layers and layers of pigment without wearing down. The paint is amazingly workable and removable on this surface. My process starts with a very light pencil sketch to map out my composition. I use a variety of flat brushes sizes 2 to 8 to lay in basic value and then use synthetic round brushes ranging from size .2 to 2 to build up my surface. For my skin tones I pull from yellow ochre, vermillion, cadmium red medium, thalo purple, sap green, burnt umber, burnt sienna, and Vandyke brown. I don’t have a set formula for my skin tones. Color is relative so I have to be flexible with the flesh colors to capture harmony with the fabrics in each individual painting. My paint application process is very labor intensive and can sometimes consist of close to 50 layers of pigment. I would say that my application process most closely resembles egg tempera painting. When painting the fabrics on my figures I use minimal color. I layer the color and its complement to build up depth. In my black and white pieces I layer a combination of lamp black, Payne’s grey, indigo, and cerulean blue. I like to seal my paintings in groups. I line them up and give them about 3 or 4 good coats of the claybord matte finish. Once the top is sealed I use about three coats of poly finish on the sides. The smaller pieces are hung by simple hardware; a saw tooth hanger and rubber bumpers. The larger pieces get D rings and wire for hanging.

Art Calendar: At what point did you develop a Web presence for your work?

Cavanaugh: I can’t remember the exact date, but around 1998 one of my art school friends was just dabbling in Web design and he gave me a Web site for Christmas. It was the funkiest, most awesome Web site. I can still remember it vividly. There are still pieces of that Web site that are in my current Web site. It was around 2001 when my Web site became a serious part of my marketing.

Art Calendar: Did you have assistance in developing your current Web site?

Cavanaugh: I work with a web designer whom I respect as an artist. He is also a collector of my work and “gets it.” So I am very lucky. The site should be an extension of the artist. I find that many artists come into virtual world and get intimidated with the virtual materials, freeze up and come up with a site that’s not doing anything for the art. A good site needs to fit with the work, but not be too much of a work of art in itself. It needs to complement the art, not compete.

Art Calendar: What are some of the most important components of your Web site in terms of capturing your audience and generating interest/sales?

Cavanaugh: Aside from a good design in general, I would say from my experience that a blog is the most important. It is a place where collectors and fans can come on a daily or weekly basis and enter into the life of the artist. I keep track of every person who sends me an e-mail or leaves
a comment.
Secondly would be a clear format on how to purchase a piece. My web designer and I reviewed my site statistics to find where viewers travel throughout the site. My new site is being geared toward the results of those stats. We found that the blog is at the heart of the Internet interests, so we’re going to make that the home page. This will keep my site alive because it is updated with a new image every few days. But to our surprise, the blog is not the most clicked-on link: The store is. So now, the blog will be the home page, and the store and available work will be the first options for the viewer.

	The Fuzziest Little Piece of My Heart by Ali Cavanaugh. Daily painting, 8" x 8" unframed fresco. Sold at DailyPainters.com for $450.

Art Calendar: When did you get involved with DailyPainters.com ?

Cavanaugh: I’ve been with daily painters since March of 2008. I post work on average every two to three days. It has definitely boosted my sales and given me exposure to a nice circle of artists and collectors. I love doing the little pieces for the collectors of smaller works, but the biggest benefit has been to be connected to such nice and supportive people.

Art Calendar: How do you price the daily paintings, and how long to they take to complete?

Cavanaugh: I try to keep the daily paintings under $300. They usually take an afternoon, not an entire day to complete one. The tiny studies are usually just color studies to figure out my palette for my next larger painting.

Art Calendar: When you are working on a piece, do you have a particular venue in mind to sell it? (For example, do you say, “Okay, today I’m going to paint a couple of small pieces for DailyPainters.com, but the rest of the week, I’ll work on a bigger piece for gallery sales”?)

Cavanaugh: I have a big game plan board that I use to plan out shows. I coordinate this with my calendar. I know how long each piece takes, and I’ll lay out my work for the week. When I feel like I need instant gratification, I’ll sit down in the afternoon and do a small study for DailyPainters.com and post it on my blog before bed, and it’s usually sold by the time I wake up in the morning. It gives me a great energy boost.

Art Calendar: How much work do you produce in a given time period? Do you consciously set goals for yourself?

Cavanaugh: I produce about 10 pieces a month. This ends up being about 100 to 120 paintings a year.
I have the paintings-on-demand that I do when the gallery calls and says they need more of this or that, but then I also have the work for big shows that I have to chip away at for eight months leading up to the show. Like right now I have a 24-piece, one-woman show in September in Portugal. So I’m down to my last six paintings for that show, and it needs to ship out by July 1. Then I have two shows in spring of 2009, which total about 50 paintings. I have to be totally organized and have a good sense of how long things take me and how it’s all going to fit together in the schedule.

Art Calendar: Do you have set hours that you work in the studio?

Cavanaugh: I work anywhere from eight to 12 hours a day in the studio. My schedule is very flexible. I love to keep things spontaneous, so I take a lot of breaks and meet up with friends at their studios and play with my kids.

Art Calendar: I noticed your Web site does have your prices listed. Are these the same works carried in your galleries, or ones that are for sale directly on this site?

Cavanaugh: Almost all of my paintings are in galleries. I very rarely keep a painting in my studio when it is done. The price listed is the price that the gallery has on the painting. I cannot undercut the gallery.
My new Web site will have a store where I’ll offer archival prints and very small studies all under $600. These are pieces that the galleries don’t want to mess around with, but can still be very profitable. This lower price range appeals to collectors of small pieces, and new collectors. The galleries sell the larger pieces to more established collectors. It seems to work for me and my galleries because we are selling to two different markets.

Art Calendar: With selling work online as well as in galleries, you probably do a lot of shipping. What are some of the key things you’ve learned?

Cavanaugh: It is very important to wrap the work properly, and:

• Shop around; sometimes there is a big difference in the
shipping rates.
• Learn how to package the work yourself.
• I order boxes and packaging supplies from ULINE (uline.com) in bulk.
It takes experience of shipping often to figure out the rhythm.
I have two different boxes that I use for all of my work. Also, most of the shipping companies have a “get a quote” feature on their Web sites. There are certain box sizes that don’t fit into the standard. A box that is only a few inches bigger than the standard can be almost twice as much to ship.

Art Calendar: Do you include any printed or written material inside the packages you ship to your buyers?

Cavanaugh: Each shipment that goes out gets a little handwritten “thank you,” a few business cards and a few promotional items, like a few note cards, postcards or magnets of other paintings of mine. In my opinion, it is very important to make this personal gesture. We need to take the time to connect to each collector. AC

For more information on Ali Cavanaugh’s work, visit www.AliCavanaugh.com .

Kim Hall is a Florida artist who serves as Art Calendar’s Editor. She can be reached at KHall@ArtCalendar.com .