I sold a print to a gallery for 180 and saw it at 520 three months later
I finally worked up the courage to ask a gallery in Lisbon to take some of my cyanotypes. Twelve pieces, seaweed and net photograms, all of them made with seawater from the beach near my flat. She offered me 180 each. I said yes because I was tired and because she said it in a way that made 180 sound like a favour.
They went up in her window at 520. Three sold before Christmas.
I know about the standard split, I know she has rent to pay and she has to make it worth her while. I am not naive about that. What I did not expect is how quiet it made me feel, walking past that window, doing the arithmetic in my head every time. My paper costs about 9 euros a sheet and I ruin maybe one in four. The seawater I carry up from the shore in a bucket like an idiot. I don't say any of that to her because it sounds like I want pity rather than a fair price.
I wrote a new number down in my notebook and I have not sent it yet. 340. Which still feels like too much and also like not enough, and I cannot tell which of those is the honest one.
What I keep circling is that she never asked what I wanted for them. She just told me a number, and I took it, the way I always do. That part is mine.
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Honey, that quiet feeling you're describing, I know it. It ain't about the math. Anybody can do the math. It's walking past your own work and feeling like a stranger to it.
I quilted for thirty-some years before anybody called it art, and I've had that same taste in my mouth. Somebody takes what you made with your hands and your own two feet in the salt water, and they get to name the price of it. That part sits heavy.
Here's the one thing I'd say, and take it or leave it. You did not lose that money, you paid tuition with it. Next time you walk in there you'll know she can sell three before Christmas, and you'll know what you're worth before she opens her mouth. That's not nothing, baby. That's the lesson.
The work is still yours. The seawater's still in it. She just rented the window.
The tuition line is right, but I'd push on one thing: the lesson isn't "ask for more next time," it's that 180 for a photogram is a wholesale number and 520 is retail, and those are two different jobs. She's not cheating you, she's doing the job you didn't want to do, which is stand in a brightly lit room and talk to strangers about your work. That part is real labour and most of us are bad at it.
Where I'd agree it stings: the little card you didn't write. That's the part that costs more than money. In Germany we have a word for it, the Fremdbestimmung, being determined by someone else. You gave her the work and she gave it a story. Next time give her the story too, in writing, a paragraph she can copy. It costs nothing and it keeps your hand on it.
You are right about the two jobs, and I have been avoiding that part. Standing in a bright room talking to strangers about the work is a job I do not want, and she does it, and that has a price. 180 wholesale, 520 retail, fine. I can hold both of those numbers in my head now without flinching.
What I keep coming back to is your word, the Fremdbestimmung. Being determined by someone else. That is exactly the quiet. Not the money, the being written about by a hand that is not mine. I never thought to write the card myself. I would have said how long the net lay on the paper, that the water was February water. She could not have known that. Nobody could, except me.
So maybe next time I ask for the card, before the number. Obrigada for the word, I did not have one for it.
The stranger part is what got me. I made those twelve with my hands in cold water in February and by December they belonged to somebody's window, with a little card next to them I did not write.
Thirty years of quilting. That is a long time to make something before anyone calls it art. Did the people around you ever come round to it, or did you stop waiting for that?