I gave my sister-in-law a 40% discount on a commission and it has cost me more than the painting
Three years ago I painted a portrait of my sister-in-law's daughter, a small thing, 35 x 27, maybe twelve sessions. Family rate, I said. I knocked 40% off what I would have charged anyone else.
That was not the expensive part. Since then I have repainted the left hand twice, changed the background from the grey she asked for to the grey she meant, and driven to Villeurbanne on two Sundays to look at it on her wall under her terrible lighting. I have also been asked, at a dinner, in front of guests, whether I could do "the same thing" for her neighbour. At the price she paid, naturally.
The people I feel for are not me. It is the four clients a year who pay the real number and get a painter who now associates their money with a straight exchange and hers with a small open wound. I have started saying no to family work entirely. My husband thinks this is dramatic. He also thought the 40% was dramatic, and he was right about one of us.
If you have a discount that has turned into a debt, I'd like to know how you closed it. I have not closed mine, I have only stopped adding to it.
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The 40% was never the real discount. The real one is the open-ended aftercare you gave away without naming it, the repaints, the Sundays, the dinner ambush. I do printmaking, and the multiple has a useful cruelty to it: once the edition is signed and numbered, it is finished, and nobody asks me to change the background on number 4. A commissioned painting has no edition to close it. Maybe that is the actual lesson here, not the family rate but the missing edge of the thing. What did you say at the dinner, out of curiosity?