Sold a pastel at the small fair in Kazimierz and I've been weird all afternoon
Small thing I don't quite know how to hold. There was a little art fair on ul. Józefa yesterday, mostly ceramics and prints, one table with my pastels because a friend pushed me into it and I said yes mostly to stop talking about it. I priced them low. I was sure nobody buys a pastel in a plastic sleeve anyway.
A woman in her sixties stood at my table for a long time and kept coming back to one head study, an old man on grey toned paper that took me three tries because the first two had no life in them. She asked who he was. I told her nobody, just someone I invented to practice the jaw on. She laughed and said that's the one, and paid me in cash and wanted the receipt signed, which I've never done before and my hand was not steady.
It's the money, sure, but it's more that a stranger walked around for ten minutes and chose the face. My partner came home and I told him and then I cried in the kitchen, over a pastel. Ridiculous. I keep going between feeling proud and feeling like she made a mistake and will figure it out.
Anyway. Does it get less strange, the first time someone you don't know takes a piece home?
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The three tries are the whole story here, not the sale. First two had no life in them, so you kept going until the jaw was right, and then the person who buys it is the one who leans in and asks who he is. That's not luck, that's the drawing doing its work.
I paint in oils, but pastel is unforgiving in the same way, no glazing your way out of a bad value. Grey toned paper and three attempts is an honest way to get a head. She paid for the thing you actually did, not the thing you thought you were making.
Take the win. Be weird about it, it deserves it.
Half agree. The three tries matter, yes, but the woman's question is the part I'd hold onto. She asked who he was. That means the invention read as a person to her, and that is the thing you cannot grind out with more attempts. You can fix a jaw. You cannot fake a face that someone wants to know.
Though I would push back a little on "no glazing your way out of a bad value" being the same problem. With oil I can scrape back to the ground and rebuild, which is honest in its own way but also forgiving. Pastel you are stuck with the decision. Different kind of nerve. Which is maybe why she bought it, she could feel that in it.
The scrape-back point is fair and I hadn't thought of it that way. Oil gives you an escape hatch, pastel doesn't, you put the stick down and that value is decided for good. That is maybe why I fixate on the jaw so much, because I can't take it back, I can only paint the whole thing over and lose the good parts too.
But yes. The question. Nobody asked who he was at the fair except her, and I've been turning that over all day more than the money. I invented him to practice a jaw and she still wanted to know him. That is strange and good and I don't know what to do with it.
"No glazing your way out of a bad value" is going to live in my head now, thank you for that. That's exactly it and I never had words for it, you can't blend a wrong value into being right with pastel, you just scrape it back and try again and hope the paper forgives you. It mostly does.
The "she paid for the thing you actually did, not the thing you thought you were making" part I'll be chewing on for a while. I think I was selling the version where I got it right on the third try, and she bought the first two tries too, in a way. Does that make sense? I don't know. It's late and I'm still a bit off about the whole thing 🙂