I sold a painting through a blurred Instagram story of a coffee cup
A collector bought a piece this spring and when I asked what caught their eye they didn't mention the studio work, the process shots, the exhibition photos the gallery put out. They said it was a story I posted at nine in the morning of my coffee on the bench next to an unfinished canvas, mostly out of frame, half the image out of focus because the phone was still waking up.
The painting was two years old by then. It had been in two group shows. Nobody bought it. And the thing that sold it was basically an accident, a photo I took without thinking so my wife would know I was still alive in the studio.
I've spent twenty-five years learning how to make the work and maybe five learning how to show it. And the showing still defeats me, daily. But I notice the accidental stuff does more than the deliberate stuff, and I don't know what to do with that information. I can't manufacture accidents on purpose. I tried. It shows.
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That's not as strange as it sounds. People don't buy a painting because of the painting half the time. They buy the idea of being the kind of person who has that painting in their life. The blurry coffee cup and half-finished canvas lets them picture themselves in that studio, in that moment. The gallery shots are too finished. Too much like a showroom.
I've had pieces sit for years and then sell because someone saw a photo of my workshop with a piece leaned against the wall in the background, covered in dust. That's the one they wanted. Not the ones I polished and lit properly.
The accident of it is the trick. You can't manufacture that kind of honesty and have it work. The moment you stage it, people can feel it and it's dead.
I know that exact thing. I work in cyanotype, and the pieces that move are never the ones I photograph properly in good light. It's when someone catches a print leaning on the kitchen wall with the window reflection across it, or half-dry on the line outside with the sea behind, that they write to me. One woman bought a small piece she'd only ever seen in an Instagram story I took from the car while parked at the beach, paper spread on the bonnet to dry. She said it looked like it was already living somewhere.
There's something about the unfinished frame around the work. It lets the person step into the rest of it themselves.
The unfinished frame round the work, yes. That's the thing I keep circling. The polished shot says: here is a finished object, priced, available. The accidental one says: this thing already has a life somewhere, you're just getting a glimpse of it. And people would rather be invited to glimpse something than be sold something. Odd, but I can't argue with it.
Your car bonnet story is good. Paper spread out to dry at the beach, sea behind it. Of course she bought it. You sold her the afternoon as much as the print. Genau, you know.
She said it was already living somewhere. That's the whole trick, I think. Half of what we make is just leaving enough room in it for someone else to move in.
That's exactly it. The dust-covered piece against the wall, that's the honest version. It has a life in it. The polished shots are an object, and an object is just an object.
I've started thinking about it the wrong way around, actually. Not "how do I photograph the work well" but "how do I let the work have a context around it." Because the canvas alone isn't the whole thing. The bench, the coffee, the morning, that's part of what's on the wall too, whether the buyer knows it or not.
Annoying that two years of gallery effort lost to a blurry story, though. I keep coming back to that part. The market makes no sense and it never did.