A friend asked for a portrait of her mother, I said 800 and now I'm painting it at 5am
Voilà the thing nobody warns you about. A woman I've known since lycée asked me to paint her mother, 30x40, from two photographs, one of them a phone snap from 2009. I said eight hundred euros because she's a friend and because I am stupid.
I'm now on the fourth sitting with the mouth. Four. The photographs give me nothing on the shadow under the nose, so I've been inventing, and inventing is what separates a portrait from a nice drawing of a face. At my normal rate for something this size it would be 2,200 and I would have refused the phone snap and asked for a proper sitting, which is the thing that would have saved me.
She brought a bottle of wine when she dropped off the photos. That was the moment, I think. The wine.
So the discount is not the money. The discount is that I don't have the authority to say "the photograph is unusable, come sit for me for three hours." I gave that away for free and it's costing me the painting.
I'm not going to raise it on her. I'll finish it and it will be decent because I don't know how to do otherwise. But the next friend who asks gets 1,600 and a mandatory sitting, and if that ends the friendship then it was a pricing conversation wearing a friendship mask.
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four sittings on a mouth, joder. that's the part nobody outside the work gets, the mouth is where a face lives or dies and they think you're just "painting a photo".
the friend price thing, I half-agree with you and half don't. yeah 800 is a gift and the 2009 phone snap is a trap, but honestly the thing I'd be angriest about is the inventing. you're not doing a cheaper version of the job, you're doing a harder one, building a nose shadow out of nothing. that's the actual work and it's the part that vanishes when someone looks at the price.
next time I'd price the sitting separate from the size. no photo-only portraits for friends, or if yes, make it clear you're interpreting and the result is your reading of her mother, not a copy of a picture. saves you the 5am mouth.
the inventing point is the one. everyone's arguing about the 800 and missing that you're being asked to make up a nose shadow and then be judged on whether it looks like her. that's not a discount, that's a harder job with no reference to hide behind.
the separate sitting fee is right too. i'd go further, i don't touch a portrait from an old phone snap at all anymore. burned twice, and the second time the family brought a different photo to the reveal "for comparison" lol. never again.
The different photo at the reveal. I felt that in my chest. Because there is nothing to say in that moment, you cannot argue with a family holding a phone in your face, and everyone in the room decides you failed at something you were never given.
And yes, it is the harder job. Four sittings of invention on a shadow that in life would take ten minutes to see. I am starting to think the friend price should be higher, not lower, for exactly this reason. You pay full for the sitting, or you get the invention and you take it as it comes.
The mouth is exactly it. Everything else can be a little vague and the face survives, but you miss the mouth by two millimetres of value and the whole person leaves the canvas. Four sittings and I'm still not certain I have her.
And yes, the inventing. That's the part I underestimated when I quoted 800. It's not a discount, it's the opposite, I'm doing restoration work with no photograph to restore from. My husband asked why I was up at five and I said because the nose only makes sense in the morning light, and he looked at me like I'd lost something.
The sitting separate from the painting, that's the right structure and I'll use it. Though with this one there is no sitting, only a phone from 2009 and her daughter's memory of a face I've never seen properly. C'est ça.