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Originally Posted by Walter_Pall
It is much easier to make a decent living from bonsai as artform in America compared to Europe, but it is by no means easy compared to other professions. If you want to make decent money you have to produce and do what your customers want and not necessarily what you want. It requires a certain degree of prostitution here and there.
I know that I could make some sort of a somehow decent living in bonsai in America. But there is no way that I could do this in Europe. By that I mean if I did what I am doing, which is what I believe in.
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One of the keys for making a good profit with bonsai is the
mass production of quality material/pre-bonsai. This would bring down the cost considerably. This can be achieved with a few well trained gardeners. As an artist, you would only get involved in the basic design and then in the final stages. There is one thing having 10 trident maples to work with, after spending 8 years developing them, and there is totally different when you have a growing field of hundreds and hundreds of trident maples, arranged neatly in rows, where you can pick and chose the best material at any day.
The way it is done here is that the artist has to "hunt" for good material and if he is lucky he can find a few good deals. And than there is collecting, which is fun, but there is no way that it could support a business.
This results in exorbitant costs and low volume. A business can only thrive if there is a constant, reliable source of raw material at a relatively low cost.
This wouldn't mean that the artist has to produce only low quality, cookie cutter bonsai. A certain percantage of the mass produced material would have excellent quality and sold at high prices for the high-end collector. The rest would be sold at affordable prices (a few hundred dollars) to the average hobbyist.
I have not seen this done here in the US or Europe. Bonsai artists don't seem to be very talented running an well-designed business. Maybe they think that it is below them to "lower themselves" to the status of a salesman.