sold a painting today and immediately wanted to buy it back
Somebody bought the big charcoal from the March series. The one of my mother's hands. She paid full asking, no haggling, which honestly made it worse because it meant she actually wanted it.
I sat in the car after and cried like an idiot, then came home and started a new one same size. Same hands.
I don't know how people do this long term. Do you eventually stop feeling like you're amputating something? Because I've sold maybe twenty pieces now and every single time I hand it over I have this split second where I want to say actually no, never mind.
You're supposed to be glad. I AM glad. Rent is paid. But there's a version of that drawing that only existed on my wall and now it's in some stranger's dining room and I'll never see it again.
Anyway. Making it again. Bigger.
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You have painted your mother's hands, and then given them into somebody else's keeping. That is not amputation, ji, that is the whole difficulty of this work. Twenty pieces and still that split second means you are not making copies, you are making something with your life in it.
Myself Ramesh, Mithila painter from Madhubani. I have sold paintings of my grandmother's stories, and one of a fish that she used to draw in the corner of the aripana, and I have felt that same thing you are describing. What I have learned slowly: the painting does not leave you. It goes and sits in another house, and that person looks at those hands every day, and your mother's hands keep working in the world even after. The one you are starting now, same size, same hands, that is not a replacement. It will be a different painting. It will carry what you felt in the car.
Do not be ashamed of the crying. It means you are honest in your work. Blessings to you 🙏
Mr. Ramesh, I would push back slightly on "the painting does not leave you." It does leave. The one I regret most is in a house I will never see again, and I have no idea what light it hangs in, whether it is fading, whether anyone looks at it. That is a real loss and I do not think it is useful to call it anything else.
What stays is the work. The hours at the desk, the corrections, the thousand small decisions. Those are mine permanently and nobody can buy them. But the object goes, and pretending otherwise is how you end up making copies to comfort yourself.
I sell because a painting in a drawer teaches nobody anything. That is the whole argument, and some days it is enough and some days it is not.
Ok this is the truest thing anyone has said on this post and I've been sitting with it for an hour. "Pretending otherwise is how you end up making copies to comfort yourself." God. I've done that. I have a version of a piece I sold two years ago that I keep almost repainting and I always stop myself and I never knew why until right now.
The light thing kills me too. I think about it way more than I should. Where it hangs, if it's in a hallway nobody walks down, if the sun hits it every afternoon and eats it slowly. Nobody warns you that you'll grieve furniture.
The hours being mine, the object not being mine. Yeah. I'm going to steal that and I'm not sorry.
Ramesh. I read your comment three times and then went and sat with the new one for a while.
"She saw it." I keep coming back to that. And you're right that I can't un-know it. But I think what you said about the fish in the corner of the aripana is what actually got me, because that's where the whole thing lives for me too. My mother's hands are the aripana. She used to do this thing where she'd hold her cigarette between her thumb and middle finger and her whole hand would go still when she was listening to you, like the hand was listening too. That's the painting. That's what I handed over in a parking lot on a Tuesday.
I don't know what I think about the rest yet. Whether it leaves you or not. Maybe both. Maybe it leaves and it stays, and the staying is the part that's yours. But I'm glad you're here, honestly. Twenty pieces and still the split second. That's a relief. I thought I was just bad at this.
Is there a version of the fish that's still yours? Like do you paint it again for yourself, or is that a betrayal of the thing?