Buying a painting is a good hedge against inflation. Seriously.

Chosen wisely, a painting is a durable asset that will increase in value over time.

Spring Greens, 8X10, oil on canvas, click for more information.

If you were in midcoast Maine on Monday, you might have heard my yelp as I cashed out a 16-pound bag of Purina kibble. I checked to see if I’d accidentally scanned it twice. No, it really was $26.48.

I’ve been following the current crisis, of course. I know gasoline is over $5. I’m getting regular pings from Discover telling me, “One of your recurring charges seems different” as they all go up. But sometimes it takes a single purchase to bring home the enormity of the problem, and dog food was it.

Apple Tree with Swing, 16X20, oil on canvas, click for more information.

This all seems sadly familiar. Inflation, a GDP contraction, whiffs of a bear market—“it's all a bit 1970s, but without the decent tunes,” wrote the gossip columnist Steerpike.

There are few sure-fire inflation hedges, but the worst thing to have is money in the bank—especially when it’s earning no interest (which is different from the 1970s). Some of us are investing in groceries, but for those who are a little more flush, art is a recognized inflation hedge.

“Art gives its owners the pleasure of looking at it on their wall, and no rate of inflation can take that away. It is both an investment and a form of consumption, and the latter is quite protected against any macroeconomic conditions. When all else fails, spending money is one surefire inflation hedge. Art also happens to be a durable asset, so the expenditure is not entirely wasteful,” wrote Tyler Cohen of Bloomberg.com.

Bracken Fern, 9X12, oil on canvas, click for more information.

This of course requires choosing wisely. Original art by known artists of quality are a different kind of art from mass-market prints of dubious quality. (I’m afraid that here is where NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, will reveal their true worth. In the end, they’re just an ownership record of limited edition digital ‘prints’, not significantly different from the giclee prints we were all hawking a few years ago.)

The problem, of course, is that for every winner who picked up a Van Gogh when he was just an unknown crazy guy, there is a loser who bought art that sank into obscurity. How do you tell the difference? The art market is both excruciatingly logical and highly subjective.

Apple blossom time, 9X12, oil on canvas, click for more information.

Educate yourself. Identify artists you love and learn more about them. Are they showing and selling in good venues? Do they have a social media presence? Ten years ago, I’d have said that their gallery representation was a good indicator, but the internet has changed that. In the end, it’s not just about the talent of the painter, but about marketing as well. Van Gogh might never have become famous had his brother’s widow, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, not tirelessly marketed him after his death.

Of course, if making money is your only consideration, you’re still best off taking all your spare pennies and buying an index fund. Nothing beats equities. But let’s be real here—none of us are shoveling every spare dollar into the future, and art will have a better return than other durable assets like a car, a refrigerator, or a washing machine—assuming those are durable in the first place.

Traveling with wet paintings

You’ll need a wet-painting carrier, a drying rack, some wax paper… and plenty of ingenuity.

Confluence, by Carol L. Douglas, is the Athabasca River in Canada. Available.

“What do you use to carry wet paintings?” a student asked. He’s outfitting a new RV in advance of retirement.

For carrying work back and forth from the field, I like panelpak wet panel carriers. They’re lightweight and when you lose or break the rubber bands (which you inevitably will) the company replaces them at a reasonable cost. They come in many sizes, but only one dimension need match the carrier for it to work. For example, I use my 12X16 to also carry 9X12 panels. Since plein air painters usually work on standard size boards, three carriers cover me through almost all circumstances.

The Whole Enchilada, by Carol L. Douglas, was painted in Santa Cruz province, Patagonia, Argentina. Available.

Another good option is Raymar’s wet painting carriers, which are made of corrugated plastic. They hold three wet boards or six dry boards.

If you feel compelled to paint on stretched canvas instead of boards, there are canvas carriers that hold two canvases together so they can ride face-to-face without touching. They’re hard to get in place, and I think they’re more appropriate for the art student carrying work home on the subway than for a plein air painter. The traveling painter is far better off working on boards.

Tie rack as panel drying rack.

These carriers get you from your painting site back to your RV or hotel room. There, you’ll need a drying rack, unless you want to litter your space with drying canvases. In their simplest form, they’re a set of grooved rails that the paintings stand up in. Panelpak and Raymar both sell versions of this, but I use a ClosetMaid tie rack I bought at Home Depot.*

If you’re on the road for a long time—as I’ve been lucky enough to do—you’ll need a way to carry half-dry paintings. My first stop after the airport is a supermarket where I buy baby-wipes, wax paper and a roll of cheap masking tape. The baby wipes are—obviously—for painting, but the waxed paper and tape are to package partly dry paintings. If they’re dry or almost-dry to the touch, they can travel back-to-front as long as they’re separated by a layer of waxed paper. The tape is to stabilize them on the journey.

I mark these bundles of paintings clearly before flying. The TSA agents don’t want to get covered in wet paint any more than you want them messing up your work.

What if they’re still very wet and it’s time to move on? Your only recourse is to order a pizza. The box is your prize; the meal is a side-benefit. You can stack a lot of pizza boxes in a corner and your paintings will dry peacefully within them.

Sometimes even that can get out of control. When I was driving across Canada, I generated something like 45 paintings in a five-week period. I stopped at a big-box store and bought a plastic bin in which I corralled the loose work between waxed paper. Only one painting—done in very frigid conditions and fairly impasto as a result—suffered any surface damage.

Maureen Hart (r) helping Nancy Huson make a painting box with which to fly at my Sea & Sky workshop of 2017. A little ingenuity will carry you a long way.

There’s nothing like ingenuity, however. I’ve made spacers from old Coroplast yard signs. One of my favorite painting boxes is an old FedEx box for which I rigged handles with duct tape.

*I was shocked to realize I paid $7.98 for them in March, 2017. Today they’re $9.66. That’s up 21%, much higher than the official 6.7% cumulative inflation rate for the same period. Having priced 2X4s, houses and gasoline in the recent past, it’s clear to me we’re entering an inflationary period.