Did your first gallery ask you to change your work? Tell me yours
The first gallery that took my work asked me to make my sketches "more colourful" because watercolour-and-ink of crumbling old buildings didn't read as sellable. I think about this a lot because I said no, sort of. I brightened a couple of pieces, felt wrong about it, and walked the rest back. That gallery did nothing for me in the end, but the lesson stuck.
Anyone else been asked to adjust what you make to fit what they think sells? Did you bend or hold the line? And did it work out either way?
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I've been asked, though not in so many words. A small gallery in Lisbon said the work was "too quiet" and suggested I add figures, people swimming, anything human, to make it feel more alive. I thought about it for a week and couldn't do it. Not out of pride, exactly. It just wouldn't have been true, and I'd have had to live with that every time I looked at them.
Nothing happened with that gallery, obviously. But a couple of years later the same work showed somewhere else and sold better than I expected. I don't think that proves anything except that there was never only one door.
What stays with me from your story is that they did nothing for you in the end. I wonder how often that's the case, that the bending doesn't even buy you what they promise. Like the colour was the price of admission to a room that was empty anyway.
"Too quiet", god, that's a whole gallery in one phrase, isn't it. I know exactly the instinct you're describing, that it wouldn't be pride so much as just... lying every time you signed your name to it.
And I love that the same work sold better somewhere else. That's not nothing. It's not a big moral either, but it's something. There was never only one door, I'm going to keep that line, it's better than anything I said in this post.
What stayed, for me: a friend who runs a tiny space here told me once that galleries mostly guess, and a lot of them guess wrong, but they all get to sound sure while they do it. I think about that a lot. Made it easier to say no without making it a whole thing.
Do you still show that quiet work? Or did the "no figures, ever" instinct soften a little over time? Mine has, slightly, I've put a stray autorickshaw or a person crossing a road in a couple of pieces, but only when the scene had them anyway. That felt honest. A swimming figure never would have.