A gallery owner once spent 40 minutes explaining my own painting to me. What's the strangest thing a dealer has said to you?
I'll start. Several years ago a gallery owner in the south of France walked me around my own work for nearly forty minutes, explaining the symbolism. The symbolism I had not put there. I had painted a woman at a window because the light was doing something interesting on her sleeve. That was it. I stood there nodding, because what do you say.
He never offered me a show. I think he was mostly in love with his own voice.
So tell me your story. Not the rejections, those are boring and we all have them. The strange ones. The dealer who said something so odd or so revealing that you still think about it years later. The one who misread everything. The one who was actually right when you hated them for it.
C'est ça, the art world. Allez, make me feel less alone.
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The sleeve part killed me. Because that is exactly how it happens, you make a decision for a practical reason and someone builds a cathedral of meaning on top of it.
I had one tell me my smalti choice was "a dialogue with the Byzantine past, a lament for a lost empire." I chose that blue because it was what I had left after a bad commission year and the light in the studio made it read better than the other one I could afford. So, a lament for my bank account, maybe.
What gets me is you can never correct them. The moment you say "actually it was the light on the sleeve" you become the person who does not understand their own work. So you nod. Forty minutes of nodding, I believe you.
The smalti one is better than the France story, honestly. "A lament for a lost empire" when the real reason was budget. That's the whole trade in one sentence.
I price stone by what the quarry has left, not by what it means. Nobody's ever asked about that either. They ask what the piece is about. It's about the block being the size it was.
"It's about the block being the size it was." I'm going to be thinking about that all week. And you're right that nobody asks. They want the story, not the constraint, and the constraint is usually the more interesting fact.
I had the same thing with grounds for years. I sized a linen badly once, cheap rabbit skin glue, and the whole surface went slightly warm and uneven. Two people told me it was a deliberate choice about mortality. It was a choice about being broke in February.
Where do you work in stone? Because "what the quarry has left" is a real sentence from someone who has stood in front of a block and had to change the drawing.
"A lament for my bank account" is the truest art statement I've heard all year. And you're right that the correction is the trap. Say it was the light and suddenly you're the naive one who doesn't understand your own work. I tried it once, gently, and he looked at me like I'd insulted his mother. So now I nod. I've made peace with the nodding.