Sold a hare at the market for 60 and did the sums that night. Works out at 4.80 an hour.
Was at the market in Galway on Saturday, the one by the Spanish Arch, and a woman bought one of the hares off me for 60 euro. Handy, she was delighted, I was delighted, she went off with it under her arm.
Then I got home, kids in bed, and I did the sums on that particular block because I'd been putting it off. Lino board, ink, the good paper, that's about 11 euro a print when I'm doing a run. Fine. But that block itself, from the first sketch to the last proof, was the guts of two weeks of evenings. Not two weeks of solid days, I'm not pretending that, but two weeks of the hours I actually have after the small lad is down and the older one has stopped asking me questions about dinosaurs.
So call it 25 hours. 60 minus 11 is 49. 49 into 25 hours is just under two euro an hour, and that's before I count the fact that I carved the thing four times over because the first three were wrong.
The mad part is I'd sell it again tomorrow at 60 because it's the market and people have a tenner in their hand and there's a ceiling on what a stranger will part with at a stall. What I'm realising is the 60 isn't the problem. The problem is I'm putting the two-week blocks on the market table at all, and keeping the ones I actually need to charge properly for on the shelf in the studio where only people who've already decided they want one will ever see them.
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Now honey, I know that arithmetic well. I quilt for people I love and for a few that pay, and if I ever sat down and divided the hours into the money I'd have to lie down. Four eighty an hour sounds like a sad number, but it ain't the whole sum. You didn't just sell that woman a hare. You sold her the two weeks of evenings, and the looking, and the deciding. That part don't show up in the column. I don't have an answer for the rent, I surely don't. But don't let that figure tell you what your hands are worth. What you made there went home under her arm, and it'll outlast us both.
The quilting comparison is the right one. I do the same sums on pieces that took months and the number is always insulting, so I stopped doing them. Mostly.
But I'll half push back on one thing. "It'll outlast us both" is true and it's also the exact reason makers get paid nothing. We keep getting handed eternity as compensation. The hare is worth keeping. So is the 11 euro of lino and paper, and so were those evenings. The rent doesn't care that the thing is eternal.
No answer either. Just wary of that particular comfort, is all.
You're dead right and I'll take the half push back, it's the honest half. "It'll outlast us both" is a lovely thing to say and I've said it myself, usually to a woman handing me 40 quid for something that ate a fortnight. Handy way of not saying the number out loud, isn't it.
The rent one got me. My father did plastering, and nobody ever told him the wall would outlast him, like that was meant to square it. You got paid for the wall and you went home.
Here's the thing though, and I'm working this out as I type it. I'll say the eternity line to myself in the studio at eleven at night when the proof's gone wrong again, and it helps, and I know it's a lie I'm telling myself to keep going. There's a difference between a comfort you use privately and a comfort handed to you by someone who's just paid you buttons for it. The first one's yours. The second one's a bill.
So I'll keep the line for the studio. Just not for the till.
Ah here, you've gone and hit the thing I was circling round the whole post and couldn't say straight. The two weeks of evenings, the looking, the deciding. That's it. That's the bit that don't fit in the column, and I knew it when I was doing the sums but I couldn't get it down without sounding like I was making excuses.
And you're right on the other thing too. She had it under her arm going out the gate and she'll have it on a wall when I'm a photograph on someone's shelf. That hare outlives the rent, which is a grand thought until you remember the rent comes due again on the first.
The quilting and the lino are the same disease, I'd say. Hours nobody counts, and you'd do it again next week anyway, which tells you more than the arithmetic does.
Fifty years of evenings, God, that's the measure isn't it. Not the hours, the years you'd spend at it regardless.