A 40-year-old welded piece I made as an apprentice finally sold
Sold a piece from 1984 this week. Was one of the first things I ever welded on my own, a little figure in rebar, rough as hell. The welds are ugly, I can see every mistake in it. It's been sitting in my attic for forty years because I never thought anyone would want it.
A woman from Ohio saw a photo my daughter posted of my workshop and asked about it. I told her it was apprentice work, not good, she should look at something else. She insisted. Paid more than I would have asked for it.
I packed it up careful, wrapped the parts I'd have let go. Felt strange sending it off. That piece taught me the right way to hold a torch through every bad weld on it, and now it's going to live in someone's house instead of quietly rusting up there.
Not sure what the lesson is. Maybe that you don't get to decide what's finished with you.
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That's the thing about the rough ones, they hold something the finished work doesn't. You see every mistake because you were standing there when you made them, but someone else just sees the density of it, the labour. Forty years in an attic is a kind of proof too, almost like the piece earned its own patience.
I make prints, so I think about this a lot, the exact opposite problem. A plate can be pulled a hundred times and each one is technically identical, but the value keeps moving. What sells is never the cleanest proof. It's the one where you can tell a hand was involved.
That woman in Ohio probably saw something in your apprentice work you didn't trust yourself to see. Sometimes the distance is the whole point. Good for you for letting it go.
I keep thinking about the "forty years in an attic is proof" part. You're right. There's something about a piece surviving long enough to outlive the maker's own judgment of it. The artist is the worst person to price their own work, always will be, because you remember the struggle and the person you were when you made it. The buyer just meets the object.
And I know exactly what you mean about the clean proof. I've pulled editions where the one that sells is the one with the wiped mark still visible in the corner, the one that's slightly off registration. I've stopped correcting some of them. That little unevenness is the only thing that tells you a body made it. It's not a flaw, it's a signature.
That woman from Ohio probably didn't want a perfect rebar figure. She wanted the one that had lived somewhere.
That wiped mark thing, yeah. I do the same with stone. Leave a chisel mark nobody asked for, a corner I could have eased off. It's not that I don't see it. It's that it's the record of a decision, and I'd rather keep the record than sand it flat into something perfect that never happened.
You're right about the buyer too. They don't know the struggle, they just meet the thing standing there. Forty years of my bad opinion of that piece and she met it fresh. Maybe that's the whole lesson of selling anything.
The prints thing is interesting because you're right, it's the opposite problem. With stone or steel you can't pull another one, it's done the moment it's done. But a plate keeps giving and the hand shows anyway. That's not a flaw in the process, that's the part nobody can copy.
What did the buyer end up taking, the clean proof or the one with the hand in it?