Cataloguing Prints - an update

After the earthquakes in Christchurch one of the jobs that got less attention while NZ Fine Prints re-organised behind the scenes was the cataloguing of new prints.  Since then it has been a huge relief to get our waiting list for artists who had submitted work down to just a few weeks after stretching out to several months during late 2011 and 2012.

We receive artist submissions most days and the guys answering the phone often get the call to find out what's involved in having reproduction prints made of an artwork after an artist is told they "should be having prints made of that painting".  (As an aside - sometimes this comment to the creator is perhaps meant as a compliment rather than commercial advice, we wonder too if it's sometimes a nice way of saying "no thanks" to buying the painting!).  It should be pretty straightforward to list new prints for sale but for most of the past three years we have had a backlog of at least 150 new prints waiting to be properly catalogued for sale both in our catalogues and at Prints.co.nz

The reason that listing prints is not quick and easy is because we put a great deal of effort into writing interesting listings for our new artists. In addition for each individual print listing we try and anticipate many of the questions print buyers may have in their minds as they are not in front of the print in a gallery but looking at a representation of the artwork on screen.

One blessing is that we no longer have to re-photograph 90% of the prints submitted to us because the ubiquity of digital cameras means artists usually supply us with .jpgs that are ready to use online.  Fifteen years ago we had a $1600 1.2 megapixel camera and a studio rigged with expensive lights and still couldn't take a decent picture of anything with lines in it!  Maps were my particular bete noire, all those decorative borders that had to be photographed straight on and completely level or the image would look distorted.  I don't recall a "straighten" tool in Photoshop back then. [We also didn't have the benefit of articles like "how to photograph a painting"!]

Glenn Jones "Gumboot Graffiti"
Kiwiana AND street art, or maybe Pop?

Apart from writing a good artist biography that combines the best of a background on their life with the drivers behind their work (like an artist's statement, but written by someone else) each print should also have a blurb, or what we call the "curator's comment".   This tells a person looking at the print a bit more about it, what the artist was thinking, how this print fits in to the artist's catalogue of work - for instance have a look at listings for recently added new NZ artists such as Glenn Jones, Holly Roach and Sean Chen. We also spend a lot of time figuring out the best way to describe how the print was made - as we mix both reproduction and original prints, open and limited editions. In the next part of the cataloguing process we have to figure out the galleries or collections that the prints should be placed in.

You can still see glimpses of how we built up the online galleries originally, a very dry and academic classification of prints into movement (eg surrealism, or pop art), nationality and period. Since then whole new categories have emerged (step forward Kiwiana, Street Art) and we have added the ability to search by price and size.  Although we don't want to have our catalogue too finely divided up (because it would be tedious to browse the website if lots of the same prints were appearing in multiple collections) the number of galleries have somehow multiplied to  a list of nearly 80, the latest being portraits and still life.

We thought we were getting to the crossroad where we could either add more and more finely grained collections or try and reduce the number of galleries so customers can find the prints they are looking for more quickly.  However we think we have solved the problem (some small changes coming soon), it's an interesting intersection between indexation and usability that's exactly the kind of thing that keeps me interested in the job of cataloguing prints for sale after twenty years!

NZ Fine Prints sells gallery's land to the Crown

New Zealand Fine Prints and associated companies (such as Capper Press and Avon Fine Prints) moved into the old Royal Exchange Assurance building at 202 Hereford St in the Christchurch CBD from cramped quarters above the National Party offices in Tuam St. It was the end of the 1960s and staff numbers were growing with projects like "Captain Cook's Artists in the Pacific" in full swing.  For nearly fifty years the 1890's era warehouses at the rear of the site was packed full of books and prints and the 1920s two storied building facing Hereford St comprised gallery and office space.

After September 4 2010 we spent well into six figures on temporary repairs and because of this early warning we were extremely fortunate that no-one was injured or killed although February 22nd 2011's earthquake damaged both buildings beyond repair.

Because such a large proportion of our business is now online (New Zealand Fine Prints is behind NZ's largest art print and poster site - prints.co.nz) the physical destruction of our buildings was, we thought, a temporary setback - an opportunity even to rethink the design of our buildings to relate better to other businesses on our block with a more pedestrian friendly access from Cashel St, Liverpool St and Woolsack Lane.   Our plan had always been to redevelop the site over time, preserving the character of the buildings in a central city location with plenty of parking with our unique business offering the largest range of prints in NZ as the anchor tenant.  We were not property developers, ours was a staged development intended to keep 202 Hereford maintained and economically viable for the next generation above all else.

When the Crown announced that our land was going to be seized for the so called green frame our initial reaction was disbelief.  But today we are announcing that along with many other CBD property owners we have been steamrolled by the Crown into accepting their offer for our land.  For an owner occupier with a sentimental attachment to our family's land we would never have sold our land at the low price offered by the Crown in the open market.  The idea that we are a willing seller is ridiculous as with only a single buyer and the threat of compulsory acquisition hanging over us we simply had no choice but to accept.

The ghostly outline of NZ Fine Prints' old gallery after demolition

Our main shopfront may be online but central to the DNA of our business is our love of NZ's visual culture and history, a sense of connectedness that is rooted in a specific geographic location.  The internet is ephemeral, a stock room piled high with packs of art prints on hundreds of shelves is tangible, even if a customer had never visited us they knew that behind the online gallery lay a family run business that had been around for a long time in one place.

Freed from a physical location (we may have been 2 1/2 years in Cashmere but it still feels transitional) we have renewed our focus on growing the online side of the business but despite the exponential growth that a website offers in terms of extra sales for our artists we are very sad that we are not being allowed to rebuild on our completely undamaged land (our place is being taken by a lawn).

It is businesses like NZ Fine Prints that make a central city different.  Taking our land away from us and imposing a top down plan on the rebuild of the CBD removes the entrepreneurial skills that the businesses around us had to make our block work with the hand the earthquakes dealt us.  NZ Fine Prints were also committed to the rebuild (trapped even) and prepared to invest more than a developer would based purely on the numbers as we had a sentimental attachment to making this patch of Christchurch awesome for our kids even if we didn't make much back financially for twenty years.

New location - look out for JK's kiwi sign
on Hackthorne Rd just past the school.

While we assess the options for a future site of a gallery, stockroom and warehousing we have made the decision to stay in our temporary premises (we are working from the basement of a classic Cashmere character house opening out into a superb garden with views across Christchurch, it's pretty nice here if a little quiet compared to the CBD) for at least another year while we wait and see what happens with the rebuild.

Customers looking for prints who are in Christchurch are always welcome to visit us, we now have nearly all prints back on one site thanks to some pretty innovative shelving (our prints are now double and triple bunked instead of luxuriating on a shelf of their own) although we are not carrying quite so many framed prints in stock framing to order within a few days instead.

The fact that the Crown will be packaging up our land for re-sale in the future without possibility of us buying it back at the same price seems really unfair and why businesses got such a harsh deal compared to property owners in residential neighbourhoods where the land was damaged (full payout of GV plus demolition costs) are the two things that we continue to feel bitter about. However we have decided to just give up and move on, lets hope the bureaucrats from Wellington flying down here each week know what they are doing with Christchurch.

NZ's most dramatic art gallery opening!

A few weeks ago the stockroom of New Zealand's largest art print store was opened in dramatic fashion after the front wall of the 100 year old warehouse sustained structural damage during the Feb 22 Christchurch earthquake. Over the next 5 hours nearly 3 tonnes of prints were then successfully shifted to New Zealand Fine Prints' new location outside of the cordoned off CBD - at 139 Hackthorne Rd, Cashmere. 

New Zealand Prints - Delivery & Customer Service back to normal after Christchurch Quake

All new art print orders placed via phone or Prints.co.nz have been shipping as per normal since Friday 10th September. Thank you to our dedicated warehouse team who have worked over the weekend to catch up on the backlog of orders placed after Saturday's earthquake, the last of which were delivered to the couriers at 1pm today.   An especially big thank you to all our customers who have been so patient with the unavoidable late delivery of their prints & gifts during the past very difficult week as we worked to stabilise the damaged gallery exterior to make it safe for our warehouse staff to pack your orders.

Picture framing delayed by last week's quake is due to be completed by Wednesday and delivered to customers throughout New Zealand by Friday 17th September.

All of us at New Zealand Fine Prints would also like to thank the owners of the neighbouring properties in Hereford St - Kay Fisher of 198,  Lewis & Barrow, Joe's Garage, Miles Construction and Calendar Girls who gave us alternative safe access to our gallery via Liverpool St across their properties without question.  Also thanks to Colliers International & Canterbury Development Corporation who allowed our engineers and construction team access to their carpark to place the supports for the rear wall of the gallery.  And to Ben & the guys at Leigh's Construction who managed to place four huge supportive braces and steel beams into our building (see the photo!) without damaging a single artwork - you are amazing!

NZ Prints - Christchurch Earthquake Update

As of Wednesday 8 September New Zealand Fine Prints is up and running from temporary offices out of the inner city.  You can contact us via our usual telephone numbers and email is also working again. Initial emergency stabilisation work on the gallery and adjacent building is due to be finally completed within hours. Huge thanks to our engineers, Anne MacKenzie of Buildgreen who was there for us when we needed it the most in the first few hours,  John Tait from Lewis Bradford and the guys at Leighs Construction. Also big thanks to our near neigbours in Hereford St Arrow International whose team dealt with the immediate dangers from the collapsing gables and put a temporary cover over the holes just after the initial quake to help keep all our thousands of prints snug and dry.

Our first post-quake shipping day is not going to be set until we are certain our staff are going to be safe in and around our gallery - especially in light of the continual aftershocks that have brought down already unstable buildings across the city today.  We are contacting all customers individually, please be patient while we arrange delivery of your orders made since Saturday's earthquake. We expect to update the revised shipping date Thursday around 3pm.  All NZ Post and CourierPost services are running again, we just have to be absolutely sure our gallery is safe for staff working to send out your order.

Printmaker Annie Smits Sandano told to boycott prints.co.nz

Auckland contemporary print-maker Annie Sandano is today under pressure from her high st galleries to stop promoting her original prints through www.prints.co.nz

This is the first time we have heard of conventional gallery owners pressuring artists to stop selling their work through companies like New Zealand Fine Prints that primarily sell New Zealand artworks online. Is this something to do with the recession squeezing conventional galleries paying those high st rentals to be in the right suburbs we wonder?

Many conventional New Zealand galleries have superb online stores, lots of artists now sell direct from their own websites and companies like New Zealand Fine Prints, TradeMe and Artfind have helped artists grow their sales enormously over the last ten years.

Times have changed and of course artists should be reaching the largest possible audience for their work using the internet.

We say lets see who can sell the most prints for our artists and we'll continue to focus on our customers rather than our competitors - as we know that's what generates ongoing sales in the long term!