Marina Brown
\n\u00a0|\u00a0 Tallahassee Democrat correspondent<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not whether you get knocked down, but whether you get up.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.\u201d<\/p>\n
It seems that these very aphorisms might apply to artist Paul Tamanian<\/a>, 70, a nationally-acclaimed, Tallahassee painter who less than six months ago \u201cstepped off the plank\u201d to open Paul Tamanian Fine Art, a 3,000 sq. ft., bespoke art gallery in the middle of the capital city’s bustling Midtown area.<\/p>\n But now, the big glass doors have closed on the totally renovated stand-alone premises at 1130 Thomasville Road \u2014 and the dream.<\/p>\n There are other galleries in town: Venvi Gallery; Signature Gallery; 621, Strauss. But the size and what might be called the \u201cchutzpah\u201d of the Tamanian enterprise set it apart.<\/p>\n Paul Tamanian had decided to \u201ctake a chance\u201d on Tallahassee, believing that North Floridians could be connoisseurs of fine art as much as a Manhattanite or the international collectors adorning their homes with his mega-size abstracts.<\/p>\n Yet on the last weekend of July, Paul Tamanian sat quietly alone in his sprawling gallery, six to nine-foot explosions of abstract art lining the walls, each created on aluminum with paint blow-torched into position. His polished steel sculptures perch on wooden stands; his idiosyncratic lacquered surf boards, megaliths by themselves, rest in corners \u2014 but no one is here.<\/p>\n And according to Tamanian, it has been this way from the start.<\/p>\n \u201cI guess you could say I misjudged the market,\u201d he admits. He had expected professionals\u2014attorneys, physicians, large company leaders wishing to decorate their offices to be a major part of his buyers. He believed that with the exploding housing market, there would be new owners seeking his brilliant wall-hangings.<\/p>\n But, he says, the long weekend afternoons and hours during the week of sitting alone in the gallery, \u201cwith not one person coming in even to look around,\u201d grew enough to lead Tamanian to finally say, \u201cYes,\u201d when the landlord indicated there was a gym owner who would like to rent the space.<\/p>\n He says candidly, \u201cEven though I have 18 paintings in The Huntsman Restaurant in Tallahassee, and will fill their new restaurant near Carillon Beach, as well as other commissions around the country, you just can\u2019t pay $5,000 a month overhead for a gallery forever with no sales.\u201d<\/p>\n He did try. There was using his gallery as a wedding venue, for receptions, private parties, and fundraisers \u2014 he even thought of opening it up for yoga. But it was never enough. And purchases were never made through those efforts.<\/p>\n However, the dynamic Tamanian, who didn\u2019t take up professional art creation until his 40s, says that he will go on creating. \u201cI always have new ideas, one after another. And I will continue to sell my work to Tallahassee from my home and have \u201chome shows\u201d there.\u201d<\/p>\n But he admits that the life of an artist hasn\u2019t been easy. \u201cFrom the social media agency that wanted $5,000 a month, to the big gallery-owners, who want most of the profits,\u201d sweating in the sun to make his art has been the easy part.<\/p>\n A glance at art magazine, Contemporary Art Issue, tells some of the story: \u201cThirty percent of art galleries are losing money. After expenses, only 18% have profit margins of 20%.\u201d<\/p>\n Local gallery forums commiserate that, \u201cBetween recessions and COVID, we\u2019re going out of business;\u201d \u201cWithout foot-traffic, you\u2019re dead.\u201d And, perhaps the basis of all other problems: \u201cbasically, we\u2019re trying to sell something that nobody really NEEDS.\u201d<\/p>\n And yet, as Paul Tamanian will attest, artists will make art. And along the bumpy way, there will be images that, need them or not, someone will pay for simply because the colors or the lines spoke to them \u2014called out from behind a window \u2014 and promised joy with every glance.<\/p>\n Paul Tamanian can be contacted at paultamanianstudio.com or<\/a> paul@paultamanianstudio.com<\/a> or 850-459-0999.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Marina Brown \u00a0|\u00a0 Tallahassee Democrat correspondent \u201cIt\u2019s not whether you get knocked down, but whether you get up.\u201d…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":115031,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[647,1037,38023,72226,648,1032,1033,171,3188,979,425,666,8160,942,50,450,950,1069,36573,646,67,132,68,643,27718],"class_list":{"0":"post-115030","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-affiliate","9":"tag-art","10":"tag-art-galleries","11":"tag-art-museums-u0026-galleries","12":"tag-arts","13":"tag-arts-and-design","14":"tag-design","15":"tag-entertainment","16":"tag-fl","17":"tag-galleries","18":"tag-local","19":"tag-local-affiliate-arts-u0026-entertainment","20":"tag-museums","21":"tag-neutral","22":"tag-news","23":"tag-overall","24":"tag-overall-neutral","25":"tag-painting","26":"tag-tallahassee","27":"tag-u0026","28":"tag-united-states","29":"tag-unitedstates","30":"tag-us","31":"tag-visual","32":"tag-visual-art-u0026-design"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114963649956510510","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115030","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=115030"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115030\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/115031"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=115030"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=115030"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=115030"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}