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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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.
"Legible" is the word alright. I've had it the other way round myself, years ago I carved a hare that was all over the place, the line wobbled like a man walking home from the pub, and sure it sold before the ink was dry. The edition I'm proudest of, the one where every cut landed where I meant it, that one sat on the wall for a good while before anyone took a shine to it.
There's something in the wobble people read as effort, I think. As a person being there. The clean work hides the struggle and maybe folk wonder where the maker went.
But listen, I wouldn't be too hard on the buyers either. The six-week painting needs a different kind of looking and most people don't get taught that. It's not that they're lazy, it's that nobody ever showed them how to read the quiet ones.
The hare that wobbles, I like that. And you're right about the struggle being visible. There's something in a line that almost got away that reads as a hand being there, and you can't fake it, either. The confident cut has a different kind of presence but it's quieter, takes longer to find.
But I take your point about the buyers, and I don't mean to be hard on them either. Most of them aren't connoisseurs, they're just people who saw a thing and felt something in the first five seconds. You can't blame anyone for that.
Still, the edition you're proudest of sitting there for a while, that's the part I recognize. I've started asking myself if the patience is part of the work. Not the painting itself but the waiting for the right person to come to it. Maybe the comfortable work asks more of its audience, and that's its own kind of honesty.
"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.