Charged 3,200 kronor for a small collage and it was the right number, which is the problem
A woman bought one of the small ones in November, 24x30, six pieces of torn paper and a lot of nothing. I asked 3,200 kronor. She paid without blinking.
That is the part that stays with me. Not that she paid it. That it took her four seconds.
I priced it by counting hours, which is the wrong way to price anything I make, because the hours are mostly me standing at the window deciding not to glue something down. Comes to maybe 700 an hour if I only count the cutting. If I count the thinking it is a joke.
So now I have a number that works and I am afraid of it. Not afraid to say it again, afraid that it was luck, that the next person will look at the same size and hear the number and go quiet. And I have already caught myself, twice, drafting a lower figure for a piece that is actually harder. A 40x50 with hand-torn edges from a 1940s Swedish reader. I sat with the email open for an hour.
The conservation work pays by the hour and nobody argues about it. Paper is paper. The art is the only thing I do where the price has to come out of me.
Anyway. I raised the small ones to 3,600 this month. Nothing has sold since. I am not sorry yet but it has only been three weeks.
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Sir, the hours counting business is itself the confusion, I feel. In our Mithila work also people ask how many days it took, and I have stopped giving that answer, because a painting I made in three days may carry fifty years of my mother's hand in it. The price cannot come from the clock.
But what you are saying about her four seconds, that I understand differently. She did not count anything, she simply knew. When a buyer looks at the work and decides in a moment, that is not insult, it is recognition. The paper and the empty space were speaking to her. In our tradition we would say the work had already reached her before the money came into it.
My worry is only this, that a number which works in one place does not always work in another. Where I sell through the cooperative, 3,200 kronor would be a different story altogether. So keep the number for the people who can meet it, and do not let it become the measure of the work itself. The work is older than the price, always. 🙏
The fifty years of your mother's hand in a three day painting, that hit me. My grandmother taught me to wedge clay before I could read properly and I still do it the way she did, elbow wrong and everything. Never once put that in a price, and now I'm wondering why not.
But I'm not fully with you on the four seconds. Sometimes quick is recognition. Sometimes quick is just someone who has money and doesn't think about it. I've had both and they look identical at the moment of paying. The difference only shows up six months later, when one of them comes back and tells you where they hung it.
The clay thing. Wedging clay before you could read, and still doing it elbow wrong. That is a whole apprenticeship that never went on an invoice, and I do not think it is dishonesty to leave it off. It is just that it is not a service, it is who is doing the work.
On the four seconds, you are probably right and I am probably sentimental about it. I want the fast yes to mean something. Her four seconds felt like recognition and maybe it was just a Tuesday and a card that works. I will find out in six months, same as you.
Though I would say the ones who come back are not necessarily the ones who paid well. I have had a cheap sale come back with a photograph of it on a wall, and an expensive one never say a word again.
The fifty years in the three-day painting, I will be thinking about that for a while. It is the same thing said better than I managed. My grandmother's hands are not in my work though, it is old paper from other people's books. Maybe that is the fifty years too, just borrowed.
You are right that four seconds is not counting. I think I was calling it insult because it was faster than my own doubt, and my doubt took years to build. She walked past all of it in a moment. That should be a relief.
What I still do not know is whether I can say the number to the next person without the four seconds to lean on. But that is my problem, not hers.