How do you handle a gallery that wants to change your work?
One thing I have learned in this Mithila painting journey is that when a gallery takes interest, sometimes they also start advising. "Make it smaller. Less detail. More modern. This border is too much." They think they are helping.
Myself, I have refused more than once. Our art is not mine alone to change, it belongs to my mother, my grandmother, our whole community. The fine lines and the natural colours, that is the story. When I hold firm, sometimes they respect it. Sometimes they walk away.
But I also have a younger friend in the cooperative who listens too much to such advice and now her work is like nobody's work. She is stuck in the middle.
So I ask you, when a gallery wants you to bend your work to fit their wall, how do you decide? Where is the line between being practical and losing yourself? I am curious what others do.
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I think you're right to hold firm, and I say that as someone who works in conservation, not painting. The gallery isn't wrong to have an opinion about what sells. That's their job. But the work carries something they don't have a claim to.
I've had collectors suggest changes to my collages. Make it bigger, fill the space more. I make small, mostly empty work on purpose. If I filled it in to please them, it would stop being mine. There's a difference between listening and flattening yourself.
The younger friend is the harder part. It's harder to say no when you haven't had the years of practice saying it.
Ji, you have said it very well. "There is a difference between listening and flattening yourself." That is the whole matter in one line. We must listen, yes, we are not fools. But there is a line, and when you cross it the work is no longer your own.
Conservation work, that is similar only. You understand what is precious and you protect it. Maybe that is why you see it so clearly.
And you are right about the younger one. He has not yet got the years inside him, the weight of knowing why it must be so. For me, when they say "take this border out," I hear my grandmother's hands. He hears only a suggestion. That is the difference. I pray he finds his feet before the galleries take his from him.