I charge €1,800 for a 30x40 portrait and I said it out loud at a dinner party
Someone at dinner last Saturday asked what a portrait costs and I said the number before I could do the little dance I usually do. Eighteen hundred for a 30x40, head and shoulders, four sittings. Two people put down their forks. One of them said, kindly, that she'd had her whole family photographed for less.
She's right, and I've stopped arguing with that. A photograph takes an hour. Mine takes about nine weeks, and the last three of those I am not fit to talk to before noon.
What struck me afterward isn't the shock. It's that I've been quoting €1,800 for two years and every single time I say it I still hear a small voice asking permission. I've never once raised it and lost the work. I've only ever lost the work when I talked myself down mid-sentence and the person heard it.
The price isn't really the paint and it isn't really the hours. It's that I'm the only one in this city I'd trust to paint my own daughter's face, and that took fourteen years of grinding at it. The trouble is that when I'm standing in someone's kitchen with a glass of wine, that conviction goes quiet and the number comes out apologetic.
Voilà. That's where I am. Not asking what to charge. Asking how you stop your voice from undercutting a price you already believe in.
4
6commentsSaveFollow threadShare
the fork thing made me laugh but the part that stays with me is nine weeks and the last three not fit to talk to before noon. that's the real price and nobody at the dinner table sees it. i make pots, not portraits, so my numbers are small compared to yours, but the same thing happens: people hear a price for "a bowl" and they're comparing it to a bowl in a shop, not to the four that cracked in the kiln before the one that survived. saying the number flat, no dance, is the whole skill and it sounds like you just found that out at a dinner party instead of in a studio. honestly i think the hesitation is what makes people push. flat number, no apology, let them sit with it.
The cracked pots point is the honest one. In my line the failures at least still stand there in the corner, three metres of wrecked steel and a bad idea, and I can point at them. A kiln gives you nothing to show. Just a sound, and then a bill.
But I'd push back a little on the flat number being the whole skill. Flat is good, flat is better than the dance. What I've noticed is that people don't actually want your hours or your dead pots. They want to know you will not disappear halfway. So I say the number flat and then I give them one sentence about what happens if it goes wrong, and that sentence does more than the price ever did. Certainty, not arithmetic.
That last sentence is the one I've been circling without landing on. "They want to know you will not disappear halfway." Yes. The number answers a question they haven't asked yet, and the sentence about what happens if it goes wrong answers the one they're actually afraid of.
For me that sentence is: if it isn't right at the end of the sittings, I keep painting until it is, and that time is mine, not yours. Costly for me and it has bought me more commissions than any discount ever would. The kiln people have it harder. You can't promise a pot will survive, only that you'll be the one standing there when it doesn't.
The four that cracked in the kiln. Yes. That's the part I can never make anyone see, and with pots it's worse because the failed ones literally don't exist anymore. You can't point at them.
Small numbers, big numbers, it's the same arithmetic though. A bowl in a shop was made by someone who made five hundred of them. Yours was made by you, once. That's not a cheaper thing, it's a different thing, and people hear the price before they hear the difference.
And you're right that I found it at a dinner party and not in the studio. Nine weeks of work and I learn the lesson at the table, over the fish. Voilà.