My older work outsells the new stuff every time. Not sure how I feel about it.

I painted a new interior last month, spent six weeks on it, thought it was the best thing I'd done in years. Put it up next to a study I did in 2019, the one where the light was wrong and I nearly scraped it down. Guess which one sold in three days.

It's not the first time. Almost every buyer who writes me mentions a painting from five or eight years ago. I should be grateful, and I am, but there's a part of me that wonders if people want the maker they already know, not the one I'm becoming. Or maybe the old ones are just more honest. A painter's early work has a hunger the comfortable work doesn't.

I keep telling myself the new one will find its person. In the meantime it's propped against the studio wall and I catch myself glaring at it while I clean brushes.

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Inês Costa·59m

I know this feeling well, and I don't think it's about honesty or hunger. I think it's about what people can hold onto. Early work has a rawness, yes, but it's also simpler to enter. The comfortable work asks more of the viewer. It's quieter. Not everyone wants to do that work.

I sell more of my older cyanotypes too, the ones from when I was still fumbling with the process, where the blue is uneven and the seaweed pressed wrong. The newer ones are better, I think. More sure. But the old ones have something people recognize, something they feel they got to witness.

It isn't that the old ones are more honest. It's that they're easier to love. And there's a kind of loneliness in outgrowing the thing people fell for. I don't have an answer, only to say I keep making the new ones anyway, because that's the whole point.

The 2019 study sold in three days because it was good. So is the new one. Give it time.

Camille LaurentOP·25m

The cyanotype thing is a good way to put it, actually. Something about the unevenness reads as handmade. As someone who was there, fumbling. The confident work hides the hand a bit, and maybe buyers feel that, even if they couldn't name it.

You said the newer ones are better and I believe you. But "better" isn't what sells, is it. That's the part I keep chewing on.

I don't think it's that people want the old maker either, not exactly. I think they want to feel like they found you early. Even if they're finding you now, through work that's a decade old. There's a whole psychology there I don't have the patience for, but I recognize it when I see it in the notes they write me.

Giulia Bruno·33m

This is such a familiar ache, and I think you're circling something real with the "maker they already know" bit. I work in editions, so the market question is wired into the medium, but there's a version of this everywhere. People buy the thing that confirms what they already believe about you. The new work asks them to update their mental image and most people won't do that for a price tag.

But I'd push back gently on the honesty part. The early work isn't more honest, it's more legible. Hunger reads clearly. The six-week painting is doing something more complicated and that can look like hesitation from the outside. It's not that the old ones are more true, it's that they're easier to have an opinion about.

The real question, the one I keep coming back to in my own practice, is whether you make the work for the person who already gets you or for the one you haven't met yet. The market will always tell you the first answer. I don't think you have to listen to it.

Camille LaurentOP·9m

"More legible", that's the better way to put it, you're right. I keep casting it as honesty versus comfort when it's really about how fast a person can find their way in. The early study says one thing clearly. The new one says several things at once, and nobody has six weeks to stand there and parse it.

You're also right that people buy the confirmation, not the update. I've had the same collector buy the same kind of painting from me four times. Different room, same feeling. They're not wrong to do it, but it does make me wonder who I'm actually selling to sometimes.

The editions point lands too. There's a pressure in a limited run that a one-off doesn't have. Every mark has to carry weight because there isn't time to fix it. I think the six-week painting has the opposite problem. Time didn't make it better, it made it more careful. Maybe that's the real culprit.