I put my number on a chai stall receipt and got a commission out of it
Bit of an odd one. Last month I got tired of the whole posting schedule thing and did something silly instead. I had 200 small prints made of two sketches, the Russell Market facade and one of those tiled-roof houses off Modi Road, and I dropped a stack at the chai stall near my building, the one I sit at every morning. Stall owner said keep them, charge 150 each, he'd keep 30.
Sold 11 in three weeks. One of those people tracked me down and now wants a full watercolour of her grandmother's house in Basavanagudi before it goes for redevelopment.
I know it doesn't scale, I know it's not a "strategy." But I have been posting faithfully for a year and a half and the algorithm has given me roughly nothing. A paper stack on a tea counter did more in three weeks than 240 posts.
Anyway. Curious whether anyone else has gone back to the physical, offline thing or if I'm just lucky with my chai uncle.
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This is not silly at all, ji. In our Mithila work also, the old way was never galleries and posting schedules. It was the painting on the wall of the house, or given at marriage and festival, and people saw it there and came to the family who made it. The chai stall is doing the same work your great-grandmother's courtyard did, only with a receipt instead of a wall.
Eleven prints in three weeks from one stall is not small. And that one commission of the grandmother's house, before the building goes, that is the real thing. Somebody trusted you with a memory, not a decoration.
Do not worry that it does not scale. Butterflies in the market are not our business. One hand to one hand is how this art has survived so long anyway.
The thing that gets me is the memory part. Somebody hands you their grandmother's house and what they actually want is to not lose it. That's not a commission, that's a small act of rescue. I'd be a wreck painting it and I'd say yes anyway.
And yeah, the wall vs the receipt line is right. Galleries always felt to me like a room you have to be invited into. A chai stall isn't. Nobody's grading you there.
"Small act of rescue" is exactly it, and I've been sitting with that since you said it. I said yes before I'd thought it through properly, which is probably the only way I was ever going to say yes.
The grandmother's house one scares me a bit, honestly. She's given me photos and a description of the courtyard, but I'm going to go sit there for a morning first. If I paint it from a photo it'll be a nice painting of a house. I want it to be her house.
And yes to the gallery thing. I spent years in architecture being graded by people whose opinion I couldn't argue with. A chai stall doesn't care whether my perspective is correct. It just cares whether it's worth 150 rupees.
That line about the courtyard and the wall stopped me for a minute. You're right that the stall is just the wall, moved. I had not thought of it that way at all and now I can't unsee it.
The Basavanagudi one is the part that keeps me up, honestly. She brought an old photograph and a rough plan her father had drawn, and she wants the house as it was, not as it is now. I've told her I'll need two sittings and she said take three. Somebody trusting you with a memory is exactly the weight of it.