Real Art In Pinellas Park, Fl.

Even as a kid I have always had a great appreciation of art.  I used to go to the Ringling Museum of Art to see the great Renaissance period works with my parents and ever since then it has been one of my favorite places on earth.  I'm almost afraid to bring my youngest one there, in fear that he won't see the beauty that I see in it.

I was always amazed at the scale of the paintings.  It was hard for me to even imagine completing one of those great paintings in a lifetime and being amazed that one man could do so many.  What I consider art is eclectic, but the things I really appreciate is 14th-16th century Flemish and Christian art.  Specifically Ruebens.  I also have a great love of mechanical things..... cars, planes, automatic wristwatches, and well made guitars.

Having a pawn shop in what is not considered a metropoliton area I never expected "real" art to ever appear in the store or at least very rarely.  Well less than ten days with the doors open in walks real art.  Not lifestyles of the rich and famous, but, some interesting stuff.

We had a customer come in and sell some coins.  Common US coins.  He also has some Irish coins, not my thing, but I liked it that he showed me.  He also had a good story about the coins and it was obvious that he had enjoyed having them. He also taught me a few things about the coins that I looked up to confirm and his information was correct.  I got to check off my learn something new for the day box, cool enough.

Then he says to me  "I brought the litho that I talked with you about in an email".....hmmmm.  Here is where our story makes a detour.

Right now most of our marketing is contacting Craigslist sellers and making offers for there stuff.  We use a combination of live and software generated offers initially.  If any interest is garnered then we get into a "live" negotiation with them.  We go through about 300 emails per day.  I had misssed this last email because had told me he was coming in then followed it up with another email saying he had more stuff.

Once I put a customer in the "coming in box" I generally ignore the follow up emails, beacuse I cant handle any more emails.  Not the ideal procedure but necessary right now.

Getting back to the story.  He tells me he has a lithograph of Frank Frazetta's original artwork of "the lieutenant".  Frank Frazetta is the artist that made the movie Heavy Metal, drew Conan, drew Tarzan and other famous dark, gothic, sci-fi greats.  It was obviously well framed with COA and it was a beautiful Lithograph.

If you don't know the difference between a good and not good litho the difference can be hard to see.  Fortunately, for me, I can see it. This particular one had great color separation and really nice paper, well framed.  It was a plexi-glass face but that was easily fixed.  I didn't put a number on it and asked for some more time.  Graciously he accepted my request.  Hopefully I can still buy it at his offer and I'll put a picture of it here.  Maybe, just maybe, there is some hope for culture here yet.