A friend asked me to paint her daughter's portrait. I told her my price and she said "but you'll enjoy doing it."
A friend from the parents at my daughter's school. She knows I paint. She asked me to do a portrait of her daughter, a nice photo reference she had, the girl in a garden, good light actually. I said yes, I'd be happy to, and told her my price for a bust-length oil on linen, 40 x 50 cm, which is 1 200 €.
She paused and said: "But you'll enjoy doing it."
Not in a nasty way. She genuinely thought that because I would like the work, it shouldn't cost as much. As if pleasure and payment are opposites. As if a baker shouldn't charge for bread because he likes to bake.
I explained that enjoying my work doesn't mean my time and materials are free, and that the years I spent learning to paint a child's face well enough that she'd want to hang it are part of what she's paying for. She said she'd think about it. She hasn't replied.
I don't blame her exactly. Nobody taught her what this costs. But I'm tired of explaining that my enjoyment of the work doesn't subtract from the price, it's the whole reason the work is any good in the first place.
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This really got me because I think the same logic shows up in printmaking all the time. People see you pulling a proof and visibly enjoying the moment it works and somehow that means the edition should be cheaper. As if suffering is what makes something valuable.
But the thing is, the pleasure is in the solving. The hours of registration problems and bad ink and pulling proofs that go straight in the bin, that's not the part anyone sees. The enjoyment she's talking about is the result of all that invisible work. You're not charging for the enjoyment, you're charging for everything that had to happen before the enjoyment was even possible.
The baker analogy is good. I might steal it.
This is it exactly. With cyanotype, people see me standing in the sun, watching the paper turn blue, and they think it's magic. And it is, a little. But they don't see the coating failures, the paper that wasn't right, the test strips that came up blank, the days the light was wrong and I wasted half a dozen sheets before giving up. The enjoyment they see is real. But it sits on top of a lot of days that were just stubbornness.
Yes. The enjoyment is real but it's not the whole story. People only see the part that looks like ease and they think the rest was easy too. They don't see the bad days, the ones that went in the bin, the years of being mediocre before you got good.
Exactly. The enjoyment she's talking about is the last five minutes of a process that took twenty years to get good at and fifty hours of actual work. Nobody enjoys the part where you're fighting registration or scraping dried ink off the plate. But that's the part you're being paid for.