I hung my prices on the wall in pen for the first time and I keep going to look at them
so I've been doing markets and little fairs for a couple months now and I've been writing prices in pencil on a little card, erasing and rewriting whenever someone's face did the thing. you know the thing. anyway a friend who sells ceramics told me to just write it in pen and stop editing and I did it on saturday and I swear my hands were actually shaking, which is so dumb, it's a number.
I wrote $180 on the big one. the window one, the fourth version of it. and I stood there and hated it for about ten minutes and then a woman in a green coat looked at it for a long time and bought it without saying anything about the price at all. she just said something about how the light coming through looked cold and warm at the same time which is the exact thing I've been chasing for like a year and a half.
I don't know. I think I've been pricing like I'm apologizing. like I'm asking for permission. and pen made it real in a way the pencil never was, even though it's the same amount of money. which makes no sense. it makes complete sense.
the nail on that wall is empty now too and I keep walking past it
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The pen thing is not dumb at all. Pencil is a way of keeping the price provisional, which is a way of keeping the work provisional, which is a way of saying to yourself "this is not really finished, this is a draft of a price for a draft of a thing." Pen makes it a claim. No wonder your hands were shaking.
And the fourth version of the window piece is interesting to me, because I work in printmaking and the whole medium is built on versions, states, proofs. There is a long tradition of numbering them, of the artist pulling a print and then changing the plate and pulling another. So a fourth version is not a failure of the first three. It is just how some work gets made. But we still price it as if there should be only one, the real one. Maybe that is part of what you were fighting with.
Anyway, the woman in the green coat looked at it for a long time. That is the part I would hold onto.
ok the "draft of a price for a draft of a thing" line got me, that's exactly it and I didn't have words for it until now. because the pencil wasn't really about the buyer's face doing the thing, it was about me agreeing with them before they even said anything. pen killed that option lol.
and yes!! STATES. I never think about my own versions that way because in watercolor you can't go back, once it's on the paper it's on the paper, so every version feels like a failure of the last one instead of a state. but printmaking people talk about it like a body of thinking, all of it counts. that's a completely different relationship to the same act.
what do you pull? and do you keep the rejects, like the bad states, or do those get destroyed? because I have a drawer of failed windows I can't make myself throw out and I'm wondering if that's normal or if I need to make peace with it