Said 4,500 for the portrait, then worked out I'd paid myself 19 an hour
I quoted 4,500 euros for a half-length portrait of a notary's wife. Head and hands, dark green chair, one window. Two sittings in the studio and the rest from photographs, which I hate and always accept anyway.
She said yes without blinking. That should have told me something.
I did the accounts afterward because my wife asked me to stop talking about it and start writing it down. Fourteen days of work, not counting the sittings. Linseed, lead white, the good Belgian linen, the frame at 380. It comes to nineteen euros an hour.
I know what the answer is. The next one is 7,000 and I am going to say it with a straight face and my hands still, and it will feel like a lie for about four seconds and then it won't. But what I cannot get past is that she said yes too quickly and I did not raise it on the spot. There was a silence available to me there, one of those little ones, and I filled it. That is the part I keep chewing on, not the money.
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Fourteen days after the sittings, sure that's the bit nobody ever wants to hear when you say it out loud. The 4,500 sounds like a grand sum until you divide it by the days and suddenly you're doing worse than the lad pricing shelves.
The one that gets me is the photos. You hate them, you accept them anyway, and then you pay for it twice, once in the work and once in the soul, and there's no line on the invoice for that.
I print, not paint, so it's a different racket, but same disease. I sold a hare linocut at a market years back for 40 quid, woman near skipped away with it, and I went home and worked out it was about six euro an hour once I counted the carving, the proofing, the paper. Sat in the van and laughed at myself.
The 7,000 isn't greed, it's just the maths finally catching up with you. The only thing I'd say is say it out loud the same way she said yes, no flinching, no explaining. The ones who don't blink at 4,500 won't blink at 7 either. It's us that blinks.
The photos are the part people never price in. Dead light, dead skin, and you spend three extra days fighting the painting back to life. I stopped accepting them on anything over a head, and I lost two commissions over it. Cheaper than losing the days.
One thing on the fourteen. You counted the sittings as nothing. They're not nothing. Two sittings is two days of your life and your heat and your tea, even if you spend them talking. Put them in the numbers and see what hour you're actually on, then decide if 7,000 is enough. It's probably still not.
Fair. And the two days of sittings are in fact the only part of the job I enjoy, so I count them as nothing to protect them. That is not accounting, that is sentiment.
You are right about the photographs though, and you put your money where it hurts. Losing two commissions to hold a rule is more discipline than most people in this trade have, and I mean that without the compliment being decorative.
I did the sum again with the sittings in. It is worse. 7,000 still leaves me short of a plumber, but it stops being a story I tell myself about how I am nearly there. So c'est ça, 7,000, and if the next notary's wife wants four photographs instead of four sittings, the price goes up, not down.
The photos, yes. You paint from them and you can feel the painting going slightly dead, and you still do it because the notary's wife cannot sit four more times, and the money is the money. Twice paid is exactly right.
But the hare. The woman near skipping away with it, that is not nothing. Prints you can make another one, so the 40 is not the whole story, but I know what you mean. Some part of the work goes out the door with them and you cannot invoice for it.
My wife says the same as yours, more or less. Write it down, stop talking about it. She is right and I hate that she is right.