sold a painting to a woman who cried in my studio and now i can't stop thinking about it

ok so this happened saturday and i've been sitting on it. a woman came to my little open studio thing, walked straight past everything on the walls to the corner where i had like six failed window studies stacked against the baseboard, and asked if she could buy one of those. not the finished ones. the ones i was going to gesso over because the wash went chalky and the mullions are crooked.

she said it was the one that looked like her mother's kitchen. and then she just stood there and cried a little, which, honestly, same, i cried in a gallery once over a Vuillard so no judgment.

and i sold it to her for basically nothing and felt weird about that after, like i'd cheated her or like i'd cheated myself, one of the two. my partner says both can be true and i hate that they're usually right.

but the actual thing rattling around my head is that the piece i was most embarrassed by is the one that did the thing i'm always trying to do. i've been chasing this one light for a year, like a lunatic, and it turns out the version i almost threw out was the one that landed. don't know what to do with that information. i just know i'm not gessoing over anything for a while.

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Teddy Lin·1w

the failed stack is always the good stuff. you spend all your energy hiding the crooked mullions and then someone cries over them. ngl the chalky wash is probably doing the exact work the finished version was too polite to do. i've got a graveyard of "ruined" canvases in my closet that i can't throw out and can't fix, so maybe i should just lean them against a wall and see who cries. glad it went to someone who saw it before you did.

Dimitra Vasilakis·1w

The closet graveyard is the problem, not the paintings. Lean them out. I've got a shelf of smalti trials I kept for years thinking I'd redo them properly, and the only time anyone ever reacted to my work in a way that stuck was a woman pointing at a piece I'd already cut down for scrap. Craftspersons are the worst judges of their own honest work. 🙂

Dani OkaforOP·1w

ok "craftspersons are the worst judges of their own honest work" is going on a sticky note above my desk, that's the whole thing isn't it. and the scrap piece is killing me, of course it was the one you'd already written off. what is smalti like to work with though?? i've only ever seen it in mosaics and it looks like it would either be the most satisfying or the most infuriating thing on earth. and yes. leaning them out tonight. i'll report back on how many i actually let see daylight haha

Dani OkaforOP·1w

"too polite" is exactly it, the finished one was me being a good student and the failed one was me actually looking at the light. and yeah, lean them against a wall. cover charge is a tear, apparently. honestly the closet graveyard thing got me, mine are all stacked in the same corner and now i'm side-eyeing them like, are you guys just waiting for your moment??

Inês Costa·1w

The failed ones are usually the honest ones. We spend so long sanding off what makes a thing true and then someone walks past everything finished and goes straight to the corner. Chalky wash and crooked mullions are exactly what a kitchen looks like when you remember it, so she was not wrong to want that one.

I have had a similar thing once, a woman who wanted a print I had already written off as too faint. She said it was the light in her grandmother's house. I stopped gessoing over my misses after that, more or less.

You made the right call selling it. Leaving it stacked against the wall would have been a strange kind of cruelty.

Dani OkaforOP·1w

ok "the light in her grandmother's house" is going to live in my head rent free now, that's exactly it. chalky wash reads as memory, not as a mistake, and i never would have framed it that way about my own work.

and yeah, i stopped gessoing over the misses after saturday too, at least for now. they're in a flat file instead of the corner, which feels like a small step up in the world. the finished ones are the ones i was performing for, the failures are the ones i actually painted.