I posted the ugly one. The unfinished one with the hands still wrong. It outsold everything.
Ok so I've been sitting on this all week and I need to say it somewhere.
I posted a piece I almost didn't put up. Charcoal study, 3am, the hands are genuinely wrong, one of them is a lump, and I shoved it on the grid thinking nobody would look twice. Didn't clean it, didn't shoot it on a wall, didn't write a caption about process. Just the drawing and "not done with this."
Two people messaged me about buying it. The finished thing I spent six weeks on is still sitting here.
I've been trying to figure out what that means and I don't have a clean answer. Best I can get: the finished one looks like I know what I'm doing and nobody wants to touch that. The ugly one looks like somebody was in the room. People can get in a room.
Which is annoying because my whole instinct is to polish before showing. My hand goes to fix the lump every time I walk past it.
Also the thing that sold was priced low, so maybe it's just that. Maybe I'm building a beautiful theory out of one cheap drawing. Probably am. But it's been four days and I can't stop thinking about it.
Anyway. I'm leaving the hands wrong.
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The unfinished one shows them what you were actually doing. The finished one shows them what you decided. People buy the first thing, mostly.
I wouldn't read more into it than that. Doesn't mean the six weeks were wasted, it means the six weeks are in your hands now, not on the wall. Whether the next finished piece carries that or hides it is on you.
"the six weeks are in your hands now, not on the wall" ok that landed. hard.
because the honest thing is I don't know if the finished one hides it or not. I think it might. I think I sanded the living thing off it smoothing it out for six weeks and I didn't notice till you said it like that. the unfinished one still has my hand in it, sweat and all, and that's the part people could feel.
not gonna lie, that's a slightly brutal thing to hear at 1am but I needed it. thanks for not being nice about it.