My hourly rate is a lie and I keep quoting it anyway

I did the arithmetic properly last month for the first time in years. Not a guess, a real column of numbers.

Three weeks on a half-length figure. Not three weeks of painting, three weeks of everything: the drawing, the underpainting, the scraping back, the four days where I sat in front of it and moved almost nothing. Divide the price by the hours and it came to 14 euros an hour. My daughter earns more than that at a café in the Croix-Rousse and she comes home smelling of coffee instead of lead white.

The problem is I still quote by the canvas. A 50 figure is 1,800, a 30 is 900, and that grid was set in about 2011 by a version of me who could work faster and had no idea what her materials actually cost. A tube of good cadmium is 40 euros now. I am not going to sit down and reprice the whole grid, because then I have to tell people the new numbers and I already know what two of them will say.

So I raised one thing instead. Half-length, 2,000. Told a new client on Tuesday, she said "d'accord" and asked about the frame. No drama at all. I have been slightly annoyed about this for two days, which is my own fault, not hers.

The old clients still get the old price until they ask.

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Inês Costa·2w

The four days of moving almost nothing are the ones that make the piece, and they are also the ones that pay nothing. I work in cyanotype, camera-less, and my "hours" are mostly washing paper in seawater and waiting on the sun. If I counted honestly I would stop. So I understand why you keep quoting by the canvas. The price of the object is how people can hold it; the price of the hours is not something they can see. I never found a clean way to charge for the waiting either.

Mateo Serrano·2w

The seawater one hits me because my version of the waiting is the kiln: I load it, I close the lid, and then I just have to live my life for a day and hope. And I've had people ask me to lower the price of a piece because "it's small." Small is not the thing. Small is the thing that took four firings because the first three cracked.

Half-agree on one bit though. The hours being invisible, I think that's partly our fault for never saying them out loud. When I started telling buyers "this one took six weeks" they didn't haggle less, but they stopped thinking of it as a mug. Anyway, you and the poster both came to the same honest place and I'm just glad someone else counts the standing-still time.

Camille LaurentOP·2w

The kiln is worse than the easel, I think. At least when I ruin something I get to watch it happen. You close the lid and just go to bed and find out tomorrow whether you own a piece or a pile of shards.

And you're right about saying the weeks out loud, I'll give you that. I've been hiding behind the price like it's a number that fell from the sky, when telling someone "this one was six weeks of my life" costs me nothing and does the work I was too proud to do. Pride, c'est ça. The hours felt like a confession.

What I won't do is price by them. The day I start charging per hour I'll start painting faster to make the rent, and then I'm just a man with a brush and a deadline.

Camille LaurentOP·2w

The seawater washing, that's a good example. Nobody buys the sea, they buy the blue. And the blue is mostly a record of you standing there deciding when to stop.

I think you've put your finger on the real thing: the object is what can be held, so it's what can be priced. The hours are invisible and always will be. Which is maybe not a failure of the market so much as a failure of my own nerve. I keep quoting the canvas because I don't want to say a number out loud that sounds like a confession.

Four days moving nothing. C'est ça exactly. You can't invoice for attention.

Dani Okafor·2w

The four days of moving almost nothing is the part that never makes it into anyone's math, and honestly it's the whole thing. I paint the same window in my apartment over and over and there are days I just stand there with a loaded brush and do nothing, and that time is real, it's not laziness, it's the painting happening slowly. So when you divide by hours you're not just underpricing the labor, you're pricing it as if every hour was a productive hour, and no art hour is.

That said I half-disagree with the conclusion. Quoting by the canvas isn't automatically a lie, it's just a different unit, and buyers understand a 50 figure the way they understand a size of anything. The problem is you're charging a size price for a size of work that might take three weeks or eight, and you have no lever if it goes long. What I'd want to know is whether the 1,800 is the number you'd actually be ok with if every one took three weeks, or if you've been quietly absorbing the long ones. Because if it's the second one, the rate isn't the lie, the flatness of the pricing is.

14 an hour is brutal though. The lead white detail got me.

Camille LaurentOP·2w

The window, yes. I have a north-facing one I've painted maybe eleven times and the eleventh was the first where I understood anything. Nine of them are in a stack against the wall. Those nine are also "hours" and I would rather not do that division.

You're right about the unit, and I'll take the half-agreement. Painter's hour and café hour are not the same substance, so the hourly figure was never a real number, only a witness statement. What it actually told me is that my canvas prices are stuck at 2011 and I've been too proud to move them.

So the honest version, maybe: quote by the canvas, but price the canvas by what the last three really cost, days of nothing included. Less tidy, less humiliating.

I'll look at your cyanotypes. Washing paper in seawater is a slow trade, and slow trades know each other.