A few days ago, Jasmine Becket Griffith, a world renowned fantasy illustration artist, announced that she was releasing some of her work into the public domain.
This has never been done before by any living artist in the history of the world. Ever. You can probably imagine the gasps that rippled through the artist community - my own among them. But if you want to talk about divine timing......let me tell you a story.... Imagine a much younger Maigan Lynn, about 25 years old, on a leisurely forest walk with my husband. This was around the time when the 2008 recession had hit, forcing me to take some stock in my future as an artist. I had lost a lot of my former clients. Art was not a thing people were spending money on while they were trying to keep their homes. I maintained a few clients but not near to the extent it had been. I was essentially starting from scratch, as were so many others at the time. But on this walk, of which there would be many more like it, my husband and I started talking about dreams. Not necessarily anything we were working on right then and there....but eventual stuff, even if we didn't currently have the know-how to bring these things to fruition. And It was the second time I remember having a very clear goal to my life - the first time happened years before when I was making an actual list of all the things I was looking for in a partner, vowing to not date again unless that person came along.....and then lightning struck when my now-husband came home from an overseas tour....but I digress. The second very clear goal fell out of my mouth in a "I would like to one day own a studio/gallery where I can support myself and the work of my artist friends" kind of way. I absolutely had no way to make this happen at the time. It was just a dream I kind of threw out to my husband and the universe that would stew around in my mind for the next 13 years.....Every so often my husband and I would come back around to these types of conversations. So many things happened and changed in that time frame that my quiet dream never felt like it really had a concrete space to come to life. It just floated around.....waiting..... Enter the summer of 2021. At this point we were all a year and a half into the greatest global upheaval we had ever faced. For a safe small summer getaway, the three of us (my husband, my son, and myself) had rented a cozy little cottage for a week-long vacation - one which we had all desperately needed. This was our third stay in an air bnb rental within a years time as it proved to be the safest way for us to get away from the city and reset. At each stay my husband and I always found ourselves having discussions like "Maybe we could just buy a place for ourselves...." and with each new rental it started seeming less and less like a far-fetched idea. To be fair, during our first rental for my sons 7th birthday nearly a year before this trip, I was already hooked on the idea and spent the next year daydreaming about it quite often, every now and then looking into the details to find out what it would take. I apparently wasn't alone in this thought because during this particular summer stay, we actually went and looked at a couple listings in the area that had popped up while we were there. The ball was rolling. I know you're probably wondering - what in the world does this have ANYTHING to do with selling another artists work?!? It does....I promise. Anyway, By August 2021 we had found it....the cutest, sweetest little cottage. This bright yellow little beauty a 300m walk to the nearest body of water, along a main route through a quaint touristy area, tucked sweetly into a cove of trees, was going to be ours by Labour Day weekend. It came with a separate bunkhouse in the back that allowed for an additional 4 more persons to sleep in addition to the 5+ sleeping spaces inside the cottage itself......but what in the world would 3 people need an extra 4 sleeping spaces for if we already had more than enough inside? So my brain started to spool around.....We could maybe rent it out like our own little air bnb.....or we could convert it into something...but we don't really need more space......I could use a place to have a little studio space while we're there so I could work.... .....and then the lightning hit again..... "OH MY GOODNESS I COULD USE IT AS THE STUDIO/GALLERY I'VE ALWAYS DREAMED OF!!!!!!!!!" The way it happened was the most bizarre. A studio/gallery space wasn't the intention when we started looking for cottages. In all honesty, we had legitimately thrown around the idea of running our own Air BnB but we also knew that if we owned a cottage we would want to use it as often as humanly possible. It wasn't until we had put an offer in on the cottage that we started talking about this as a possibility. I was a little apprehensive at first as I didn't want to railroad my family if they saw a different need for this space. But my ever supportive husband went from the studio/gallery being just an idea to "This is happening!" in about 3 seconds flat. It wasn't even a question for him. In all these years being a military spouse, in all the moving around, never getting a say in what happens or when, just rolling with whatever his job needed us to do, he's tried to sneak in any opportunity he could to support me. Whether it's been helping me with shows or running to ship off mail or pick up printer ink....he's found things he could do to be supportive in a lot of little ways....but for the first time....this was a REALLY big way. This was a thing he was on board with from the second it came out of my mouth....it barely had enough time to be an idea before it was happening. So January 2, 2022 rolls around. The second day of this very New Year. I've already started working on new projects to sell in the gallery this coming summer. Things are already rolling along because I have no time to waste. I'm still toiling around the best options to try to get other artists work in the shop...trying to figure out the best way to go about it and what's also manageable for me to start ....when I happen to see Jasmine's husband, Matthew, share a post from her art page......and it states that Jasmine has decided to release 625 of her images out into the wild. She's allowing personal and commercial use for some of her images. Jasmine is an artist friend of mine.... I have a gallery space I can share her work.... There's no red tape in order to be able to do this.... WHAT IS EVEN HAPPENING?!?! And this is what I mean by divine timing. This piece of a puzzle that I've been working towards, slowly but surely, for the better part of the last 14 years, in tiny little bits and pieces, recently stewing on how I was going to make it happen......this piece has just fallen RIGHT INTO MY LAP! I don't think a lot of people fully understood how gobsmacked by all of this I was when it initially started coming into place. It genuinely feels like magic for me. It hasn't just happened out of thin air. I've worked, in one aspect or another, for years to make all of this a viable option....but there are also some things that just can't be explained. So with all of that being said, I got as quick a jump on it as humanly possible and started right away on creating her own space in my web shop. And despite not having a contract or legal obligation to do so, I will be sending a percentage (fair market value) of the print sales of her work through my shop directly back to her. Because supporting an artist and their work is really important to me - whether payment is expected or not. It's something I've wanted to be able to do for most of my professional career. I also opted to sell her work in my shop immediately instead of just having it in the gallery this summer because as far as I'm aware, there haven't been any print shops that sell her work in Canada until now. Being able to offer quality prints, made in Canada, with Canadian prices, of Jasmine Becket Griffith's work is such an incredible opportunity that I didn't want to let pass me by. To sweeten the pot a little here, Jasmine is not only an incredibly kind and wonderful human, she is also exceptionally successful, having contracts with companies like Disney and The BradFord Exchange, to name a few. Her catalogue of work goes far beyond the images she's released....and she keeps painting more. To be able to start a dream of mine with an artist idol such as Jasmine is beyond what I could have hoped for. To have her work listed in my shop alongside my own is THE MOST surreal. I honest to goodness feel so incredibly lucky that all of this has fallen into place this way. Jasmine has many MANY paintings, prints, and merchandise that are still only available through her site or those of her licensed companies. So if you would like to support her directly or you're looking for something I don't have, please visit her Strangeling website. Alternately you can support her on Patreon and have access to new shows she's doing and new work she's working on! When you support living artists you're directly contributing to the hopes and dreams they bring to this world. You're nurturing the seeds of great things to come and I can't begin to say enough 'thank-you's' for that.
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