Rosinplukker
How I went from art student, to advent calendar artist, to a (hopefully successful) image broker for big tech
In November, 2023, I wrote just over 72,000 words of a psychedelic pirate novel, which has strong biblical overtones. At the beginning of the month, I had assumed that the book would be around that length and would therefore be finished within 30 days. My plan was to edit it in December and then release it in January, on Amazon.
It is now clear that the novel is going to be at least 120,000 words and probably longer. I should have a first draft done by early January. It is a very violent book with an extraordinarily high body count, but also a lot of imagination and weirdness, and made-up nautical terms.
Yesterday, I took a well-earned break from the pirate rabble and wrote a monologue/short story with a more Christmassy theme, which I have posted below.
Occasionally I will be asked what made me want to design advent calendars. Less frequently, but often enough to be of note, a friend will introduce me as Florence Sterry, adding “she makes advent calendars for a living” as an additional point of interest.
I am aware of my curious profession's potential as a conversation starter. I have made my peace with it and I am more than happy to answer any questions that you may have. I apologise in advance if my responses come across as over-rehearsed. As you can imagine, I have already given them many times before.
Just to clear things up, I neither design, nor do I manufacture advent calendars. What I do is produce small pieces of art, at a rate of several thousand a year, a small percentage of which end up in advent calendars. As to why I chose this unusual career, the answer is that no-one chooses it. The profession chooses you, and when it does you won't even know it at first. You might not know it for years. In fact, you may well go through your entire life never knowing it.
My artwork has been appearing in advent calendars since the early 2000s. I first became aware of it on the 3rd December, 2014, as I hovered behind my daughter, watching her over-excited hands, impaired by her well-trimmed fingernails, fumble to gain purchase on door number three.
“I think it opens the other way,” she rationalised, as she changed ends.
“Hold your horses. You were right the first time.”
Finally, she managed to hook a corner. As she primly folded the door all the way back against the snowy winter scene of the calendar facade, in the process folding the body of a fox in half, I was confronted by a scrap of my past: A sprig of mistletoe that I had painted on commission for a children's guide to British wildlife, back when I was an impoverished art school student. The book was never published. Me and my two friends were paid in advance for our work and spent the afternoon celebrating our windfall over pints of snakebite in the pub across the road from the college. Seeing that picture again, after all those years, was one of those reality-bending moments that are so surreal that it dawns on you that you might be having a stroke, or some kind of mental breakdown.
Over the ensuing days, several more pieces of my artwork appeared, all from the same collection – seven in total, two cropped from the same painting. My discus snail had been garnished with a light covering of snow. At first I wondered whether it might be a copy of my work. Then I noticed the area on the shell where I had messed up the graining, having been driven half mad by my downstairs neighbour, in the university hall of residence, playing I Got 5 On It by Luniz for the umpteenth time in succession.
I began to take an unhealthy, overenthusiastic interest in the contents of my daughter's advent calendar, to a point where I would cajole her into opening the doors almost as soon as she was awake. She responded to my fervour, that masqueraded unconvincingly as festive parental engagement, by declaring that the right time to open a new door would be in the afternoon, just before tea.
I am ashamed to say that I felt snubbed whenever a flap was peeled back to reveal the work of another artist. There appeared to be three contributors. One specialised in paintings of Christmas ornaments, embroidered stockings, bundles of cinnamon sticks tied with blue ribbon, and woollen mittens, all isolated on an off-white background. The other, who was awarded the coveted 24th and final door, painted more detailed winter scenes – miniatures that conveyed an air of nostalgia and melancholy; children gathered around a snowman; a lonely toboggan going down a hill at night.
I was eager to dissect the calendar in an attempt to learn more about it. Unfortunately, Agatha had taken a shine to it and wanted to save it for next year. I had been foolish enough to point out to her the bent-back body of the fox, which had, at her insistence, been treated with a carefully-placed band-aid that she, of course, insisted on applying herself.
I told her that we needed to send the calender to Santa, in the North Pole, as a thank you for all the Christmas presents he had delivered. She took this explanation in her stride. We shuffled it into a large envelope, which I had to purchase, as we didn't have any big enough. After Agatha had gone to bed, I placed a glossy, single-page promotional wall calendar, that a local window cleaner had forced through our letterbox, into an identical envelope and wrote 'Santa, Number 1 North Pole' on the front. Under the watchful gaze of Agatha, I reluctantly surrendered one of my first-class stamps to it. The envelope was too big to fit through the slot of a post box, but there was no way I was taking something so absurd to the post office. I rolled it up and forced it part way through, before lifting Agatha so she could push it in the rest of the way.
With the deception complete, under the cover of darkness, and two glasses deep into a bottle of red wine, I peeled away the facade of the advent calendar and discovered... well, very little indeed. It was manufactured by Stammstern, who I learned later are the biggest producers of advent calendars globally. They used to be a family-owned business, based in Calw, Germany. The great-grandchildren of the founders sold up shop in 2008 and the company is now a subsidiary of Unilever.
I mentioned the unexpected reappearance of my paintings to one of my art school friends, Ernest Calcraft, who now runs my local art supply shop. He said that if Stammstern was using my art, then I was probably on their books, and there was a chance that they might offer me work if I got in touch with them. He mentioned that it could be a nice supplementary income for me.
I emailed Stammstern. After a little back and forth, someone in personnel telephoned me from Germany. Not only did they have me on file, but they had a record of every piece of my art they had ever made use of. Company policy is to only use an artwork once in an advent calender. Afterwards, the paintings are parcelled-up in bundles of anything up to ten-thousand and then sold, mostly to image brokers, though lately these visual media companies have faced competition from AI developers who use the pictures as learning tools.
Stammstern commissioned me as a spot artist, which is someone who paints miniatures specifically for advent calendars, although the pictures do have other applications. As I mentioned, the rise of AI has opened up a lucrative new market. They send you briefings of the kind of things that they want you to draw. Every twenty-fifth picture you create can be an image or a scene of your choosing, though it has to be Christmas or winter-themed. If they like what you do, then they will commission more of the same. There was a painting I did, that I have in a frame beside my bed, of a snowman on a mountainside at night, looking down over the lights of a town below. Stammstern liked it and commissioned one hundred more in a similar vein. There are some artists who have a good handle on what the company wants and get supplementary commissions like that all the time. For me it's only ever happened the once.
Rosinplukker is an anachronistic Danish expression. In its country of origin, it is intended less as an insult and more as a critical observation of a character defect. It refers to somebody who plucks the raisins out of fruit cake or, more broadly, to the kind of person who takes the sweetest parts of something for themselves, depriving others of pleasure in the process. There is a type of very boozy cake also called Rosinplukker, that originates in Denmark. It is made with fruit that has been soaked in alcohol. After the cake has been baked, it is cut into thin rectangular slices. The pieces of fruit are removed and preserved in jars, leaving a sweet, dark bread that is riddled with holes and craters like Swiss cheese. Traditionally it is dipped into cups of mulled wine.
In the vernacular of advent calenders, a rosinplukker (Kartenmetzger, or 'card butcher,' in German) is a person who purchases the rights to works of art that they then carve-up into small squares, thereby obtaining multiple images from a single piece. They sell these 'even-scraps' to calendar manufacturers in bulk.
Rosinplukkers are not looked upon very favourably by artists who, it turns out, dislike having their paintings cut-up for personal gain by anyone other than themselves. It was a rosinplukker named Bruce Hughes, who lived in a third-floor flat on Greek Street, in Soho, who purchased my natural history drawings and sold them to Stammstern. I looked him up recently. He died in 2020. He is most famous for claiming to have cut up MacCrain's Turneresque oil painting of the snake-tongued Eden Fork Peninsula in Northern Scotland. He sold the pieces to a bespoke calendar maker. When what he had done was made public, there was outrage, accompanied by the usual political grandstanding and empty threats of prosecution. Nowhere greater was this anger felt than in the Scottish arts establishment, where MacCrain is regarded as a minor but nonetheless important figure, who would be far better known if so much of his work wasn't buried in private collections. Kadeem Wilkins famously described him as “a rumour of an artist”.
Eventually, some of the canvas scraps that had been sold by Hughes were recovered and proven to be fake. The true owner of the painting is unknown and chose not to reveal themselves. Hughes, who was born a few miles away from Eden Fork, claimed belatedly to have cooked up the scheme in the hope that they would step forward and thereafter could be encouraged to display the artwork, which had not been seen in public for over 50 years.
The highest tier of advent calendar artists are the Türkünstlers (the door artists) who produce complete background works that are only seen piecemeal as the doors to a calendar are opened. Some calendars are designed to destroy the underlying artwork if attempts are made to reveal the totality by peeling away the facade; what is hidden away is as important as what is shown. Usually a Türkünstler will work on a single calendar a year. What they create are formally classified as objet d'art by the Beauséjour Institute in Paris. They are printed in limited quantities, sell for a high price and subsequently increase in value as collector's items.
Working on the fringes of the industry are the refinishers who modify existing pieces of art with additional detail. My snow-covered discus snail was worked on by someone in the profession. It is a more skilled job than it sounds – one that requires a certain amount of deference to the original artist.
The primary tool of the refinisher is their palette of surfacing inks, all of which are derived from one of nine colour foundations, called ink roots. These pigments are traditionally produced by Christian monasteries, mostly scattered across Europe, with each community specialising in the manufacture of a different tone.
Surfacing inks were created originally for illustrating religious texts, though they also found their way into the hands of secular artists, and were a reliable source of income for convents and priories. The Sky Abbey, located outside Rouen, in Northern France, was the source of pigment for Picasso, during his blue period. The abolition of the monasteries, by King Henry VIII, in the early 1500s, robbed the art world of many shades of English green and red for which our nation was once renowned. For years afterwards, oil paintings in Europe were noticeably limited, both in their range of tones and in their vibrancy.
Nowadays, more and more refinishers are working from less pricey and more easily obtainable digital palettes.
Advent calendars can be a good springboard to more mainstream work. Laurence Adams, the famous bird illustrator, started out as a spot artist in the 1970s, where his talent was noticed by a publisher of field guides, in an advent calendar they had purchased for their daughter.
A few years ago, I began to feel like I was stagnating career-wise. It was obvious that I was never going to ascend into the echelons of the Türkünstlers. Nor did it seem likely that I would graduate from the trade into more serious illustrative work. After giving the matter some careful thought, I took the first steps towards establishing myself as a rosinplukker.
Even though the profession is reviled in certain quarters (Ernest Calcraft has told me to my face that he doesn't approve - he even rescinded my 10% friends and family discount at his shop), and is not as prestigious as that of a spot artist, it actually pays better and is far less labour-intensive. The AI market for even-scrap images is really taking off. I think that a mini-boom is on the way and I intend to ride it from beginning to end. I am tired of being a middle class artist. I want to make some serious money. I want to go on holiday abroad, somewhere exotic and expensive.
At the moment I am keeping my hand in with Stammstern, in case my plans go tits up. In the beginning I conned myself into thinking that I would be a principled rosinplukker. I would attempt to make contact with the artists whose work I was butchering for profit. After receiving a couple of very unpleasant replies – one of which was a phone call that my daughter answered, I put an end to that. The bottom line is, if you sell the rights to your art, then it is likely to end up in the hands of someone like me.
My daughter recently asked me what a rosinplukker does. I outlined the work to her and explained the origin of the word. Now she using it as an insult whenever I put my foot down and prevent her from doing something. When I challenge her, the reply that predictably comes back is: “I was only calling you by your job title”.
“I know what you're doing Aggie,” I called behind her, as she stomped upstairs.
“It's Agatha,” she shouted back, slamming her bedroom door.
Our relationship is not good at the moment.