For 20-somethings fresh out of college, it’s a familiar story. Graduate with a fancy degree with big dreams, move far away to a city you love — and then look, scavenge, hope and pray for a job.

Whitney Zeldow knows that story. After graduating from San Francisco State University with a degree in mathematics, the 24-year-old moved to Chinatown and started hunting for jobs, but nothing quite fit.

So Zeldow decided to strike out on her own. Eschewing traditional jobs, she decided to shoot for something more creative — creating an unstuffy way to connect regular people with great art.

The result is Honeymoon Letters, a new email newsletter that will market art through the Internet. It won’t launch until next month, but Zeldow says her goal is to make it easy for people to appreciate good art without all the intimidating pretension of art galleries and traditional distribution.

“This is a very anti-art-industry newsletter,” Zeldow said. “Part of the reason I have it is because the art industry is kind of a big bad wolf. It’s so anti-customer service.”

She’ll partner with a few artists in each weekly issue, writing about their work and letting readers know where and how to buy the art. In between, she’ll write shorter, bloggier features to keep feeding people content.

Zeldow said she thinks the newsletter will have national appeal, particularly among the crowd that’s interested in buying stuff off the artisan-commerce behemoth Etsy, a demographic she describes as being women from 25 to 35.

But Zeldow said she hopes the newsletter will have a good amount of local appeal as well. In many of the nice condos in the South Loop, art is a hot commodity.

“I have no doubt that everyone in the South Loop has at least one piece of art hanging on their wall,” Zeldow said.

The idea for the newsletter came from two places, Zeldow said. She wasn’t originally the kind of person who was terribly interested in art, but one day two years ago she found that a painting “got stuck in her head.” It wasn’t something she realized she was capable of, but it got the artistic wheels in her head churning.

Secondly, she was talking to an artist friend who said he paid a public relations firm $2,000 to promote his work.

With her recently realized appreciation for art, Zeldow figured there had to be a better way to promote artists’ stuff than hiring someone else to fire off press releases blindly into the night. By building a dedicated audience of consumers and feeding them information about art in an easy-to-understand and appreciate format, she could provide a new option for artists.

One of the artists Zeldow is discussing working with is Portage, Ind.-based Gina Femrite. An impressionist painter, Femrite’s work ranges from anthropomorphized animals to historic Valparaiso streetscapes.

Femrite said she’s been a professional artist for about 25 years and has sold her work online for a few years now. But when Zeldow approached her about the newsletter, Femrite said she thought the idea was new and exciting.

“She has a different approach. Mostly when people go and look for art it’s overbearing. People talk about how wonderful they are and how famous they are, blah blah blah. She looks at it from a different perspective — artists are just people,” Femrite said. “I’ve been in the art market for a long time — she’s doing something completely different than I have ever seen in my career.”

Zeldow’s also talking with a Eugene, Ore.-based Kiana Keiser, a painter specializing in abstract figure painting, mostly of the female form. Like Femrite, she, too, was taken with the idea of a newsletter.

“I think everyone enjoys art and should be able to,” Keiser said. “I felt like she was presenting fine art to not only fine art collectors on potentially an academic level, but on a base level to people who enjoy art and art theory without necessarily having the academia behind it.”

Going forward, Zeldow hasn’t yet accomplished her goal of turning the newsletter into a source of income — and she isn’t sure yet how she will. She thought about selling smaller prints of the artists’ works herself, but found that artists were cold on that idea.

Ads might be a possibility in the near future, but for now she’s writing the newsletter for free while living frugally off her savings. She’s not that worried about it, though, and has faith that things will come together.

“Right now, I have no specific plan. I know that I’ll find something — I’m not too worried about it right now,” Zeldow said. “Running a newsletter is not that expensive, until your list grows a lot or your advertisements grow a lot. I have time to worry about that.”

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By Vicki Ross from NW Arkansas
Posted: 10/03/2011 12:53 PM

Whitney, you are a brave girl! I'll be watching and reading as you develop your idea...cheering for your guts! I've been an entrepreneur since my 20's...some ideas worked, some not so much but it was always fun starting.

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By Whitney from Chinatown
Posted: 09/01/2011 1:53 PM

Thanks Cathy!

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By Catherine Youngerman hernandez
Posted: 09/01/2011 11:58 AM

Proud 0f you Whitney!