Charged a collector €1,100 for a 140x140 and the frame cost more than my hourly rate

Sold a 140x140 oil and cold wax piece to a regular collector for €1,100. Then I saw the invoice from the framer. He'd paid €400 for the frame, plus delivery, plus the wall hanging rig. I did the math on my end afterwards: between the stretcher, the oil, the cold wax, the months of drying time sitting in my studio, and the actual painting hours, my rate came out at around €14 an hour. The frame he chose costs more per square meter than my painting does.

I'm not saying the price was wrong. He's passed on two smaller pieces since, he's serious, and €1,100 for a painting that size from a mid-career artist in this country is roughly where the market sits. But there's something slightly absurd about a piece that took me a year of thinking and painting being worth less than the aluminium profile holding it up.

The real problem is I'm the one who has to be the one saying the number. The framer never flinches. I do, every time.

I keep asking myself what the actual number should be, and the honest answer is I don't want to find out by losing the collectors who made this a living in the first place. That's the trap, and I know it's the trap, and I'm still sitting in it.

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Elin Holm·3h

The frame math is brutal but it's a different economy. He paid for the frame like a consumer. He paid for the painting like... well, whatever collectors think paintings cost. The two aren't priced on the same logic and they never will be.

What gets me is the drying time. People never see that. Months of the piece just sitting there, taking up space, doing its thing, and it doesn't count for anything on paper. That's the part that makes the hourly rate a bit meaningless, you can't really price a painting in hours anyway. But €14 an hour after a sale that should feel good is a hard number to look at.

I'd hold the line on the price. He's coming back, clearly it works for both of you. That's not nothing.

Lukas BrandtOP·3h

You've got the drying time exactly right. Nobody prices the months of the thing just sitting there, taking up floor space, demanding nothing and everything. It's the invisible cost. If I factored it honestly I'd have to charge for every piece that never sold too, and then where are we.

The two economies thing is the part I keep turning over. He's not wrong, it's just that when the frame costs more per meter than the painting, you start to wonder what exactly the collector thinks he's buying. Or what I think I'm selling. Both maybe.

€14 an hour though. I'm not sure the price was wrong either. But it's a strange feeling to do a sale that should feel good and walk away with that number in your head. Genau. Maybe that's the real cost, the arithmetic afterwards.

Roman Petrak·3h

I've been in the same spot. I don't frame my own work anymore for exactly this reason. When I stopped controlling that part, I stopped being able to see the bill without doing the hourly math and feeling sick. But here's the thing I've landed on after thirty years: nobody's paying you for your hours. They're paying for the thing on the wall and what it does to the room and what it says about them for owning it. That's a completely different price structure and it has nothing to do with your time.

The €14 an hour will make you bitter if you let it. It's real, but it's also not the actual question. The question is whether €1,100 was the right number for that collector and that painting, and you said he's come back twice, so it was probably low.

The frame costing more than the work isn't an insult to you. It's just how that market works. Frames are finished goods with a retail markup. Paintings are bets. He paid retail for the frame and he's betting on you with the painting. That's actually the better position to be in.

Lukas BrandtOP·2h

The frame-himself point landed. When he picks the frame, he's in consumer mode, comparing it to a kitchen renovation or a sofa. When he's buying the painting, he's making a different kind of decision entirely, and those two decisions never meet in his head at the same time.

I still frame my own work, for what it's worth. Not because it's cheaper, it isn't, but because I want the frame to be part of the painting, decided by the same hand. So I get to feel sick about it twice: once when I buy the materials, once when the collector tells me it's right. Naja. Different bad, but at least it's mine.

Thirty years and you still do the hourly math? I thought that wore off. Maybe I'm just not there yet, or maybe you're the more honest one and I'm the one still squinting at the invoice. Either way, I suspect you're right about nobody paying for hours. Doesn't stop the sheet of paper from looking at me funny.