Trees For Life, Save the Caledonean Forest

Novem­ber 7, 2011 UPDATE: My Trees For Life Paint­ing did sell at this event along with many oth­ers.  The last tally I read said they had made more than 5,000 pounds for their char­ity.  Not bad. Not bad at all.

I gen­er­ally do not con­tribute paint­ings to black-tie char­i­ta­ble events. There are a num­ber of rea­sons why, but mostly it is because I do not feel char­i­ties in gen­eral play win-win with the artists who donate to their event. The artist gets noth­ing for their dona­tion of time, money, effort except a warm fuzzy and that is a lot to ask when a char­ity is ask­ing for a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of an artist’s poten­tial gross income. 

Trees For Life by Jake Beck­man. Blue Palo Verde, ASCII Binary read­ing Trees For Life and iconic saguaro cactus

In the US, the artist can only deduct the cost of mate­ri­als that goes into a prod­uct they donate, in con­trast a per­son who pur­chases art can deduct the actual value of the work of art they donate. That means a paint­ing that sells for $1000, but which cost the artist $100 in mate­ri­als to cre­ate is only deductible on the aritist’s per­sonal income taxes as an item­ized char­i­ta­ble deduc­tion of $100. If the artist does not item­ize and they are not incor­po­rated, they get NO deduc­tion for their work.

Some artists only pro­duce a paint­ing a month, or a paint­ing a week. Would you want to give away 1/12th of your gross income for a warm fuzzy feel­ing? 1/50th?

The char­i­ties usu­ally say there is pro­mo­tional value in the dona­tion, but in my expe­ri­ence it is gen­er­ally min­i­mal, it is often lim­ited to sig­nage on the art­work at the event. Charities do not usu­ally list artists indi­vid­u­ally brochure or other places the artist can reference.

There are lit­er­ally thou­sands of worth­while causes clam­or­ing for free art­work; an artist sim­ply can­not afford to donate to them all.

Art can auc­tion for less than it is worth influ­enc­ing the value of an artist’s other work, which harms the artist’s collectors.

When artists are not paid any­thing for their con­tri­bu­tion, they may be tempted to donate lower qual­ity work or work that does not sell, which reflects badly on the char­ity host­ing the event and the artists who participate.

Not pay­ing artists for their work feeds a bar­gain base­ment men­tal­ity toward artists and their work in general.

The solu­tion is that char­i­ties should pay the artist some­thing for their work-say 50% of the sell­ing price.  This solu­tion would encour­age artists to donate their best rather than their worst.

#Twit­ter­Ar­tEx­hib­tion by Jake Beck­man, ASCII binary reads #TwitterArtExhibition

All that said I have bro­ken my rule and donated art free.  The first was #Twit­ter­Ar­tEx­hibit in Moss Nor­way, and recently I have par­tic­i­pated in #TreesFor­Life. Both of these events have hash tags in the event name-these are both search­able events on Twit­ter.  Both of these events came to @dejakester via Twit­ter.  The artists spon­sor­ing and par­tic­i­pat­ing in these events widely pro­moted them via Twit­ter, Face­book, Pos­ter­ous and other social media venues.  Wow, real pro­mo­tional value — how nice.  Because of the nature of both of these events, the size of the con­tributed art­work was small, think post­card.  The work I con­tributed to both of these events was on par with my other work, except­ing in scale; that meant I sub­stan­tially scaled down my invest­ment of time and money; also the cost of ship­ping was min­i­mal as well.  Additionally, my cur­rent body of work has to do with social media and other forms of elec­tronic com­mu­ni­ca­tion, there­fore the orga­niz­ing nature of both of these events had direct tie in with what I am doing in my art. For these rea­sons, I could jus­tify the warm fuzzy dona­tion to myself.

Even so, I don’t think I would want to do a hun­dred of these kinds of events.  I think I will limit myself to one a year.

If you would like to find out more about Trees For Life or pur­chase donated art­work please visit Trees For Life Char­ity Exhi­bi­tion.  I also posted a While I Paint album of this work on Face­book, check out TFB WIP if you are curious.

Jake
Artist, AKAJake.com Come Expe­ri­ence the Art!
The artist has fed­er­ally copy­righted all art­work in this blog. The artist retains all repro­duc­tion and pub­lish­ing copy­rights. You may not copy, re-distribute, imi­tate, derive OR oth­er­wise use this con­tent in any form with­out the explicit writ­ten per­mis­sion of the artist.