Priced a 40x50 oil at $1,800 and the silence after I said it was worse than the price

I finally said a real number out loud today. 40x50 oil, six weeks of work, and I quoted $1,800. The woman went quiet for like four seconds and I swear I almost said "or whatever you want" just to make the silence stop.

The thing is $1,800 is not even good money. Tube of good cadmium is $60 now. I've been buying Utrecht because the real stuff makes me flinch. Add up the panels, the medium, the fact that I ruined two canvases before this one worked at all, and I'm probably at $9 an hour. Maybe less.

Somebody in here said numbers without the shame and I keep coming back to that because the shame part is the whole problem. I spent years charging $400 for things this size because I was scared of the face people make. Then a painter I half know told me she doesn't negotiate, full stop, and I wanted to be her so badly it made me angry.

I don't know if she said yes yet. I keep refreshing my phone like a teenager.

Anyway the number went up. Not sorry. Terrified, but not sorry.

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Lukas Brandt·55m

The silence is not about your price. She went quiet because she expected to hear a number that told her how to place you, and $1,800 was lower than her idea of a gallery artist, so it landed as "there is something I am missing here." That is worse than being told no, I agree.

But the arithmetic is the real problem and you already did it. $9 an hour is not a price, it is a subsidy you are paying for the privilege of being the one who made it. I priced work like that for years, and the market did not reward the humility, it just assumed that was the level. When you set a number, you also set the ceiling for the next one.

Naja, one practical thing: the cadmium. If you are flinching at a $60 tube and substituting, that flinch will show up in the work eventually, and then you have saved money and lost the reason anyone was going to pay you. I would rather sell one 40x50 at a number that covers the real stuff than three at $1,800. Genau what that number is, only you know.

Sol ReyesOP·35m

The subsidy line hit me in the chest. Because you're right, that's exactly what it is, and I've been calling it "being realistic" for years.

But here's the part I keep chewing on. What if I raise it and she just... doesn't care? Like what if the silence wasn't her doing math at all and I've built a whole philosophy on four seconds of a stranger's face. I don't actually know what she was thinking. I just know what I was thinking, which was "she knows now, she can tell I'm not a real one."

I told myself the number was the brave part. Feels like the brave part is standing there after I say it and not filling the quiet with a discount.

Inês Costa·53m

That four seconds is its own thing, and I think you are the one who filled it with meaning, not her. I have watched people go quiet and then say yes. It does not mean what it feels like it means.

But the $9 an hour part is where I would push back on yourself a little. I work in cyanotype, so my materials are cheap and I still spent years underpricing because I was counting only what I could see. The cadmium, the panels, the two canvases you lost, that is the honest ledger. Six weeks of a person who knows what they are doing is not a rounding error.

The number that finally helped me was not a big one. It was just one I could say without flinching, and $1,800 does not sound like it is that number for you. So the silence did its job. It told you something.

Sol ReyesOP·11m

"I was counting only what I could see." God. Yeah. That's the whole thing right there, and it never once occurred to me to call it that.

And the four seconds thing, I hear you, but I ALSO think the silence was partly me, like I handed her a number and then stood there waiting to be told it was ok. Which is not her job. Nobody can agree to something I haven't actually asked for.

You cut off right at "not a..." so now I'm sitting here like, what was the number. because I've been pricing off what I think a person will say yes to, which is just... guessing out loud. If yours was built off something that doesn't move when someone goes quiet, I want to know what it is.