announcing a STILL fine art collection

warning: long post.

i’m trying an experiment this year: the short version: i hope to sell a limited number of curated collections of my prints, as an art-quality set, to be shipped in time for the holidays. don’t worry. STILL blog will remain what it has always been, and will not suddenly become a vehicle to sell prints of my work. but i do want to take one day to describe this new project, and then we will return to our regularly scheduled programming.

i get a lot of requests for prints of my work, and i sell quite a few high-resolution digital images to individuals and businesses. but selling digital files sometimes feels as if there is a step missing. i like the physicality of a beautiful ink print on luscious textured rag paper, and i like the deeper connection that happens—the transfer from one human hand to another—when a print that i have looked at, assessed in good light, swept a speck of dust from, and placed carefully into a box for shipping, becomes part of somebody else’s home. i miss that connection, and decided this year that i would like to work with paper and ink again, in a very limited way, under conditions where i can make the final product something that meets my own standards of simple beauty and minimalist calm, and that carries STILL blog into the realm of fine art.

as a result of all of this, i have decided to create a set of seven signed and numbered prints of STILL images that I will be offering for sale. i have curated the images within a complementary color palette, i will have them printed at 11” x 17” by a fine art custom printer, on my favorite, heavy, museum-quality Hahnemühle cotton rag paper, and ship them in a custom-made, archival French folio, timed to arrive anywhere in the world by the upcoming holidays. this first collection will be called the Zen Collection. my goal is not to sell a lot of prints, or make a lot of money, but to sell prints that make me proud, and that i hope will bring some of the spirit of STILL Blog—its love of nature, its craving for simplicity, its invitation to moments of calm—into the homes of a few of my friends among you, in a way that is new and unlike the daily stream of digital images that appear on the blog. the collection will be beautiful and elegant and restful and of collectible fine-art quality, and also, because of all of the above, expensive. there is no way to do this cheaply—not only because every step will be done at the highest level of materials and technique that i can manage, but also because, frankly, i don’t want to try to do it cheaply, or to cut corners to try to create a larger market.

for this first experiment, i simply want to make something as beautiful as i know how, and offer it as a small, art-quality collection curated by the artist herself, and see if there is interest. i could make this more financially viable by offering less expensive individual prints, but i love the idea of this harmonized collection, and i want to try to make something a little bit extraordinary in this particular form. i hope I won’t offend any of you with this foray into new territory. the first images have come back from the printer, and they are breathtakingly beautiful, as i hope you will see above. if  you are interested in a set, please order one online here, by november 30. i will be shipping the collections out around by december 7. thank you again for being yourselves, and for being part of my life.

love,

mary jo

Link to shop: https://still-by-mary-jo-hoffman.myshopify.com/