Snelle aankoop en levering Marije Arends

De afgelopen weken ben ik druk geweest om te besluiten hoe ik mijn laatste euro's ga uitgeven. De uitdaging voor mij ligt erin dat enerzijds ik ervan houd om op nieuwe werken en kunstenaars te jagen. Aan de andere kant wil ik de kunstenaars nauwlettend blijven volgen die ik al een of meerder jaren verzamel. Dus toen ik op jacht was naar nieuwe werken besloot ik plotsklaps om de werken te kopen die al ruim een jaar op mijn verlanglijstje stonden. Want ik wilde niet dat die werken weer in het gedrang zouden komen. Zondag stuurde ik een meeltje. Afgelopen dinsdag kwam ze foto's brengen. Werkelijk een record. De kunstenaar heet Marije Arends. Iemand met zo'n naam moet en arendsoog hebben tijden s het maken van kunst. Hieronder staan de foto's die ik kocht. Ze zijn onderdeel ven een documentaire serie. Ze heeft familie en vrienden dicht op de huid gezeten en nam foto's vanuit zeer verschillende hoek.

Bekijk ze zelf maar:

collecting and connecting

As a single and more living inside my head than outside it is often a lonely job being an art collector. My colleagues and friends are at least bewildered when they find out I pay as much as an inclusive two-week Holiday to Turkey for a few works of art I bought at ArtRotterdam and considered cheap.

I don;t have the budget to go with the crowd when buying, so I chase my own taste. I have no spouse or children who are dependent on me. So all the money I have left I can put in my art-budget and no one complains about it.

So I do have some urge to connect with fellow collectors who understand my problems like will I buy three photographs from Marije Arends or one from Hellen van Meene?

As an IT-consultant, to keep the headhunters away I will not specify my specialty, I have a profile on linkedin. I'm already connected to three different art groups.
The problem is however is that those artgroups are spammed by professionals in the art scene who want to sell their services, their own art work, or the art work they represent.

Somehow I was delighted when I was made aware of www.independent-collectors.com A networking site for collectors only. It's Germany based so most collectors are European. And for me an important German area as the Ruhr area is about a two hour drive by car. So very close.

The site is just starting so to start up they asked Tommi Brem to start a blog about starting collecting art. So he did here.
He is a really new not in collecting, he collected SF-books and records before this, but he is in art.

Although he is confronted with the same problems as I am. Many impressions, small budget, what to buy, why to buy. There also huge differences. He has a wife, who must be devoted to him and sometimes in complete denial of his actions. (She picked up a piece of art at German customs containing a drawing with a swastika, which is illegal in Germany.) So he cannot exceed his budget without getting up in a row with his wife. I can decide to enlarge my budget whenever I feel like it.
The other one and more important one is that I started to paddle in the sea of art by buying a painting somewhere in 1999 at a local second hand bookshop in Middelburg.
A picture of it, I show in this post. He really plunged in the deep. He has been to Art Basel with side shows and Art Basel Miami, these are fairs I've never been to.
He decided to collect. I somehow found out two years ago that I was collecting art when I had been buying for 8 years and collecting for two years.

The similarities are, we both blog and both collect and enjoy it.

Tomorrow I will go to my first foreign ArtFair. Art Brussels is just abroad, someone from my MFAC students will join me to the always surprising Belgians. Let's see what happens.

more lists

In a previous post I wrote about my two lists of artists. The list with artists I own works from and the watch list. The latter consist of artists I think are interesting to buy work from, but I haven't done so. You can find those lists at the right hand side of my blog.
A few days ago I added a third list, the alas list. These are artists I like but won't buy work from. There are plenty of reasons I don't put them on my watch list. The main reason is I want to keep my watch list small. Because the supply of art is huge I can maintain a high standard. Because I have a third list I won't "lose" the artist but can still reconsider her position. The price is an important factor in my considerations. I just decided to put Erwin Olaf on my alas list. He was on my watch list, although in group E. I like his work, but he is way too expensive. I'm afraid Hellen van Meene and Carla van de Puttelaar will leave the same way. Remarkable is that they all are represented (or in stock) by the Utrecht-based Flatland gallery. For me the Gallery out priced itself. However there are many collector with much deeper pockets than mine. So Flatland won't need my purchases. While writing this I realised one of my guiding principles. Because I like collecting and buying art I don't want to spend my yearly budget for a few works. I want to buy many works and the only way to collect this way is by buying many cheaper works.
This finally takes me to my fifth list. (My fourth list is still work in progress)
On this list I put the specific works of art I want to buy. This is less intuitive way of buying art then I'm used to, but this is the only way to more or less structure my collecting. After 36 year I got to know myself. I like too many thins so must force myself to enforce my own collecting policy.
There are 6 works of art on my want list. Three of them are form Marije Arends (Arends means "from the eagle")I just own now one picture from her, which shows in this post.