Cataloging your Art Work - Part 1
This is part 1 of a two-part article on cataloguing your art work, from an artist's point-of-view.
Cataloguing System for Art Work - Part 2
If you are serious about professionalising your art practice, this article discusses why you should consider organising and cataloguing your work, the information and metadata you should record, some of the ways in which you can do this and some of the additional benefits which you can gain from this.
It's never too early to start cataloguing your artwork. You don't have to catalogue anything in sketchbooks or preliminary sketches but every stand-alone, completed piece should be catalogued. The result is a digital archive of your work.
Old physical catalogue.
But why Catalogue?
Well, it can help keep you organised and it can be more than a digital representation of your portfolio - it is your catalog raisonné and it can provide a record of how you have progressed or how your style has evolved over the years. With a good system, it can provide insights into your painting habits and provide the basis for Certificates of Authenticity, painting information labels, pricing new artwork and estimating a completion date of a new painting.
What information should you record?
Having run my own cataloguing system for a couple of years now, and having researched what metadata other artists and art collectors use, I'd suggest the following pieces of information for each finished artwork you have.
Catalogue Id: This is a unique identification number. It can be a number or a text/number and would be printed on the Certificate of Authenticity. My own system uses identifiers such as P-00001 (P for paintings) and D-00001 (D for drawings).
Genre: This is a text field or a selection from a dropdown list containing genres such as Portrait, Landscape, Still Life, etc.
Title: The title of the art work. Ideally, your artwork should have a good title to help convey what the piece is about or what you're trying to convey to the viewer. If it's not yet titled then give a title of "Untitled 02" or something.
Medium: What the artwork was made with e.g. Oil on canvas board.
Height: The height of the artwork e.g. 500mm. (Actually, I only put a number for height, as I've standardised all my dimensions in mm. This serves two purposes: 1. The number can be used in calculations e.g. pricing, completion time estimates and could be used to convert to inches.)
Width: The width of the artwork e.g. 400.
Size: This is a text field (as is auto-populated in my system using the Height and Width data) e.g. 500mm (H) x 400mm (W). (When quoting dimensions of a painting, the normal convention is height first, then width).
Start: This is the date you started the painting or drawing.
Completion Date: The date the artwork was completed.
Toil: This is the number of hours that you worked on the artwork. In my system, this is a decimal number (to 2 decimal places) and it is calculated automatically from the number of hours for each Task entered. (More about tasks later).
Location: Where the art work is currently located.
Filename: The name of the picture image. You should take a good picture of the artwork so that it can be viewed, printed out on the Certificate of Authenticity or on a printed catalogue.
Notes: This is a large text field. I like to use this field for putting details of the substrate, the ground, the oil paints used, the medium if any and the varnish used. These notes can then be included in the 'Painting label' which can be affixed to the back of the painting and provides useful information for the care of the painting.
Other Notes: Again, this is a large text field and can be used for any other notes which are not intended for the painting label e.g. any new techniques you were trying, or difficult issues which arose and how these were solved. Or the location of the landscape or perhaps your reasons for doing the painting.
Sold To: Who the painting was sold to, if any.
Price: The price the painting was sold at.
Sold Date: The date the painting was sold.
Status: This is a text field or a selection from a dropdown list containing status such as Private, Gift, On Display, On Loan, Sold, Re-Used, Destroyed
Material Costs: An estimate of the cost of materials.
Subject Source: The source of any imagery used when composing or making the painting. e.g. the name of the photographer (so that attribution can be given), or the online source, etc.
Exhibitions: This is a list of exhibitions in which the artwork has been featured, in descending chronological order e.g. Galerie Rudolfinium, Prague, CZ
Bibliography: This is a list of publications in which the artwork has featured, ranging from books, magazines, online articles or even exhibition catalogues. List them in descending chronological order using a recognised academic format e.g. Laura Cumming et al., Y.Z. Kami:Works 1985-2018.
Price History: If you have the information, it's important to note the realised price history (in descending chronological order) including the dealer and the year it was sold e.g. $60,000 (Christie's, London, UK, 2022); $20,000 (private sale, 2019)
Pricing: This is field specific to my own system. Using the dimensions, material costs and the hours spent on the painting, it automatically calculates three prices, based on a set of configurable parameters, and then also calculates the average. It does this for a low, medium and high set of parameters, so that nine prices and three averages are produced. These are purely guidelines or markers for helping me set a price, since pricing artwork is very subjective and depends on many more intangible factors.
Task List: The task list (specific to my system) is a list of individual task data which is input as the painting progresses and it provides the basic data for totalling the hours spent on a painting. Each task includes the following fields: Date, Hours, Description and an IsDone (this is a boolean or Yes/No option). The IsDone field allows me to enter a task which has not yet been completed and with a future date, e.g. Varnishing. This is used to provide me with reminders of stuff I've still to do.
Although I've tailored some of these fields specifically for painting, much of the information could, I think, be used for other art forms e.g. sculpture. Obviously, not all fields require completing but there will be common fields which can be completed for each artwork.
How can I make a Catalogue?
At its most basic level, you can create a Word document and keep it up to date. You can get a Word template from Contemporary Art Issue website (link below) if this would help you along. The next option, probably, is an Excel spreadsheet - this has the advantage that if you do want to make use of calculations, then its fairly straightforward to add those in.
Creating a digital catalogue.
Up a level, in complexity, is probably using Microsoft Access to create a database and use its in-built features to create nice user-friendly input/display forms and reports. My own system is a web front-end application with a SQL database backend which I host locally - I'll do a follow-up article showing the system and some of its benefits.
Isn't it a lot of work?
It is a bit of work to get things up and running but once it's there, it takes little to keep it up-to-date and it's already helping me on a number of fronts, so I think it was worth the investment of time, and I'm not producing a lot of artistic output at the moment. If I were a much more prodigious artist, I'd definitely need a system to help organise me.
References:
Open source software for cataloguing: www.collectiveaccess.org
For art collectors: www.artworkarchive.com
Contemporary Art Issue template: www.contemporaryartissue.com
