Vancouver art gallery owners expect to pick up business when the Buschlen Mowatt Gallery closes and the Diane Farris Gallery moves online at the end of the month.
“Those are both high profile businesses and I think we will pick up some of their clients,” Granville Fine Art co-owner Linda Lando told Business in Vancouver April 18.
Lando opened her 1,600-square-foot art gallery at the high profile location of Granville Street and West Broadway last spring.
The gallery is profitable and has sold millions of dollars worth of art including more than $1 million worth of paintings from the Painters 11 – a group of artists based in Toronto in the 1960s.
Lando’s decision to move her gallery from a 1,200-square-foot location on West 41st Avenue in Kerrisdale to one of Metro Vancouver’s busiest pedestrian intersections raised eyebrows in the art community at the time. Many believed that Lando’s lease rate of about $65 per square foot would be too pricey to make the gallery viable.
“What a gutsy move. Fantastic. Good for Linda,” Diane Farris Gallery owner Diane Farris told Business in Vancouver at the time. (See “South Granville’s artistic aspirations gain momentum” – issue 1062: March 2-8, 2010.)
This time it was Lando wishing Farris luck with Farris’ decision to close her West Seventh Avenue gallery and become an online art seller.
“I think most artists would prefer to have a bricks and mortar place to show their work. You can only guess at what a painting looks like when it’s online,” Lando said.