Priced a commission by the square centimeter and it came out to less than my hourly as a waitress in 1998

A collector asked me for a small interior piece, maybe 40 by 50. I quoted by surface area, which is how I sometimes do it when I don't want to think too hard. It came out to 900 euros. Fine, they accepted, no problem.

Then I did the math on the hours. Grinding, underpainting, the glazes, the sitting around staring at the light. It worked out to something like eleven euros an hour. Less than I made waiting tables in Lyon in 1998, before inflation, before everything.

The painting is good. I'll sign it and be glad of it. But there's something broken in a system where the better I get, the slower I get, and the slower I get, the less I'm worth per hour. Nobody wants to hear that the price reflects the life behind it, not the surface area.

I'm thinking I need to stop quoting by the centimeter and start quoting by the years. Scared to do it, honestly. Someone tell me they've done it and survived.

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Kasia Nowak·4h

I did this exact thing recently and had to stop myself from doing the hourly math, because I knew it would ruin the whole week. I'm a lot slower than I was two years ago, and it's not because I've gotten worse, it's because I know better now. I see more, I fix more, I walk away and come back and fix it again. Nobody pays for that part. They pay for the surface.

The skill ceiling problem is real too. A talented amateur can bang something out in six hours that looks impressive. It takes me twenty to catch the things in the likeness that I'd have missed entirely a few years ago, and half the viewer will never notice them. The ones who do notice won't pay me for it either.

I don't have an answer, just solidarity. The painting being good is genuinely worth something, I think. We just never get to charge for it properly.

Camille LaurentOP·3h

The stopping yourself part is the skill, honestly. The moment you do the division it stops being a painting and starts being a wage, and the wage always loses.

That thing you said about walking away and coming back, that's the part nobody can see in the room, so nobody's paying for it. They see the surface, they think it arrived in one go. It's like being paid for the cake and not the two days the dough sat in the fridge.

And the amateur point is uncomfortable but true. I could teach someone to make a thing that reads well in a photo in a month. Twenty years in and I still have mornings where I look at a passage and think, no, that's not it. That's not something you can put on an invoice. You just have to eat it and trust the next commission covers it somehow.

Niall Doherty·4h

Ah sure, you were always going to do that math, and I'm nearly sorry you did. There's no version of that sum that ends well for anyone.

I've the same trouble with linocuts. The carving is the slow part, and I've got better at it over twenty-odd years, which means I'm slower, because I see everything wrong with a cut now that I'd have happily left in when I was starting out. So I price by edition, and every now and then somebody does the hourly math on me and I can see them doing it, and I want to tell them, look, the hour you're paying for isn't the hour at the bench, it's the twenty years of hours that got me to the point where this block comes out right the first time.

But that's not really the system working either, is it. The better you get, the slower you get, and the slower you get, the less you're worth by the clock. And the collector's happy, and the painting's good, and you'll sign it and be glad of it, and then you'll eat the difference and try not to think about Lyon.

I don't have a tidy answer for you. Just take the 900 and know that the next one, you quote it different. We all do, eventually. The hard part is not letting it take the shine off the work itself, because the work is good and you said so yourself. That's not nothing.

Camille LaurentOP·4h

The linocut thing is exactly it. You get better, and better means slower, because you can see the thing that would have satisfied you at twenty-five and it's not good enough anymore. Nobody prices the vision. They price the hours and the square centimeters, and the vision is the part that doesn't fit on the invoice.

And the edition thing, that's a real answer to it. I've thought about pricing by the piece, by what the painting is worth to me rather than what it cost me. But then I'm charging what feels like a lot of money and I get shy about it. What I can't get over is that I'd rather undercharge than feel like I'm asking too much. That's my problem, I know it is.

Still. Eleven euros an hour and the person is happy. Some days I tell myself the waitressing taught me the work ethic and this taught me patience, and it's both true and it doesn't fix the math. Twenty years isn't on the invoice though, you're right. Maybe that's the part I should be signing.