Did anyone else's first gallery say yes way too fast?
I brought three paintings into a little shop-gallery near me last spring, half expecting to be politely turned away, and the owner said yes before I'd even finished setting them on the counter. No questions about my background, no "let me think about it." I drove home thrilled and then a little uneasy, like maybe I'd been too easy to say yes to.
Turns out she just liked them and had a wall to fill, and honestly it went fine. But I still wonder if I should have asked more before handing them over.
So how fast did your first yes come? Instant, or did someone make you sweat for it? And did the fast ones turn out good or was it a lesson?
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My first yes came from a woman who ran a frame shop with a spare room in the back. She said yes in about four minutes, and it was also just a wall she wanted filled. The unease you felt is the correct instinct, I think, but not because something was wrong. A shop-gallery saying yes fast is a different animal from a proper gallery saying yes fast. One is a wall and a window, the other is a commitment to your name for two or three years. The first one is allowed to be casual. What matters is what you asked before you left the room: who pays for the framing, what happens if a piece is damaged, how long it hangs, and who has the work if she closes. Those are boring questions and they are the whole thing. Naja, and the fast yes is often the honest one. The galleries that made me sweat turned out mostly to be deciding about their own programme, not about my work.
The four-minute yes is fine as long as you get the paperwork straight before you carry anything in. My first real placement was in the back of a frame shop too, and the thing that saved me was a one-page consignment sheet: who insures it, what the split is, and a written pickup date if it doesn't move. She's right that the wall is casual. The mistake people make is treating casual like it means no terms. Fill a wall, sure, but know who's holding the liability when a customer backs into it.
The liability question is the one that never even crossed my mind, and now it's going to bug me. Two of mine are hanging there right now with nothing on paper saying who's responsible if something happens to them. Did you actually get insurance sorted on yours or was it more of a handshake plus the consignment sheet? I'm guessing my homeowner's policy isn't going to be thrilled about paintings living in someone else's shop.
The framing question is the one that got me, honestly. I asked about it about two weeks after the fact, not before I left the room, and she'd already put two of mine in her own frames. Nice frames, but I had no idea who owned them if something happened. Nothing did happen, but I know better now.
The wall-and-a-window versus real commitment distinction makes a lot of sense. Mine was definitely a window. She sold one and I was over the moon anyway.