Stephen Hit the road, !
Fly Paper
Posted by Stephen Dilauro on May 03, 1999
Pierre, I'm in New York City, paving the way for relocation.
I'm showing your website marcelart.com to some people. They are
favorably impressed. One artist wants to know if you have sold anything
over the web yet? Be well. I'll be back in a few days. Please email
me in the meantime.
Stephen DiLauro
Note: 
Stephen Di Lauro wrote the article: A grower and a shower, a biographic tale about artist Pierre Marcel.
In Reply to: Flypaper posted by stephen dilauro on May 03, 1999.
Dear Stephen: You belong to New York, and I am happy
that you are looking to relocate there. May is a good time, (better
than November).
To answer your question I don't need to have a web site to sell
my art, as I have a very nice gallery that has after 14 years become
more a Miami Beach attraction.
I notice that more and more people,
when they visit Miami, make a point to pass by Espanola Way and
tour the gallery to see my and Mark Rutkowski's latest work. They
enjoy to bring their parents, friends or lovers by the gallery for
a stroll. The students that I use to greet in 1987 are
now 40 pounds heavier, and very pleased to see that I am still painting,
and as all starving artists, not gaining any weight. Sales have
been improving. Christopher (the actual manager of the gallery)
is doing a good job to communicate with clients (he does speak better
English than me, that's for sure!).
While the web site is a
tool to show the whole array of my work, the gallery itself has
no pieces from past years, (they are all sold out!). Since
I do not have an attic full of molding canvases, the web is useful
to show prospective buyers the course which has led me to the work
which I am currently presenting. They can see that I am serious
about the job, that I am not a dilettante, even If I started my
career only 9 years ago.
My advice to other artists is, by all
mean, to have a web site with their work, but not hope voluminous
sales directly related to it..
Conversely, building a web site only with the intend to sell paintings
is illusory, as anyway the bulk of your visitors will be. . . .
bored kids and other broke artists like us, looking at what
you do! My personal conviction is that web presentation should
be informative, entertaining, and offer interactive features. After
all, we benefit from a system that was developed by creative lunatics,
and I would feel some guilt to appropriate such a tool merely as
a of Yellow page/junk mail/buy me now special offer of the month!