Taking Care of Business for Artists

Rather than go it alone, some 1,800 artists and craftspeople around the United States and Canada have become affiliated with Guild.Com, a Web site for high-end crafts that was sold this month to Ashford.com, a retailer of luxury items.

Applicants are reviewed every month in Madison, Wis., where the guild is based. Each piece is chosen or rejected by a jury led by Michael Monroe, former curator-in-charge of the Smithsonian Institution’s Renwick Gallery and past director of the American Craft Council.

“I have always wanted to help artists make a living doing their artwork,” Guild.Com founder Toni Sikes said. “One of the ways to do that is take the administrative work away from them. We do all the marketing, all the bookkeeping. I want them to have the time to make great stuff.” In what is a fairly standard arrangement, the guild splits proceeds from most sales 50-50 with the artists.

The unique items--colorful, sensuous and whimsical--jump off the pages of the Guild.Com catalog and Web site (https://www.guild.com) with beautiful handcrafted glass and ceramic pieces, jewelry, furniture, furnishings from clocks to trays as well as photographs. Glasswork is the guild’s biggest seller, followed by paintings.

Local artist Laurie Regan Chase knew that she could not survive only on her oil or watercolor paintings of boats, harbors and landscapes. “The detail of my work takes a considerable amount of time. So how do you get your work to where a lot of people appreciate it?” Through the guild, she now sells limited-edition prints of her paintings, priced from $325 to $500. She can still sell the originals for $3,000 to $9,000.

“A successful artist, besides being talented, has to be marketed properly,” Chase, 52, said from her home studio in the Hollywood Hills. “Art, for me, is a passion, not a commercial venture.” She said the guild is responsible for about 90% of sales of her prints, averaging one sale per day. “All I do is make sure my product is shipped in a timely fashion to the customer.”

Jeremy Cline, a glassblower based in San Francisco, also works with Guild.Com, which allows him to concentrate on his glass sculpture series titled “Birds of Paradise.” His sculptures offered through the guild range from $1,800 to $2,500 per piece, and new pieces from the series will go for $3,000 and up.

“The work with the guild,” Cline pointed out, “is purely sculpture. Totally artwork.”