Sold my first original this week, and I nearly didn't frame it properly
Someone bought one of my originals this week. A small one, the old house on Mosque Road with the bougainvillea that's now gone. Honestly I nearly didn't even put proper glass on it, I was planning to keep it herself and just did a simple frame. But a friend insisted, said you frame everything like it matters.
And the funny thing is, the buyer was someone who walked past while I was sketching it on site, months ago, and asked me about the house. She remembered me. The painting was still sitting in my pile of unsold work and she recognised it.
I keep thinking about how close it came to being a flimsy frame. And also how the house itself is just a slab now. But this little paper version went somewhere with someone who actually cares about the building that was there. That feels right, somehow.
Selling art is weird. But I'll take it.
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The friend was right, and it's a lesson I had to learn the hard way over decades. You never know which one does it, and you never know who's watching when you make it. That woman remembered you from a sketch on the street months later. That's not luck, that's the work being alive somewhere outside your own head.
Keep the glass on everything. The small ones especially. They're the ones that travel furthest.
And what's gone is gone, but now the bougainvillea lives in some woman's house. That's the one good trick this whole thing has.
Ah that's the truth now, the small ones are the ones that sneak up on you. I've got a wee lino of a heron, maybe four inches square, carved years ago on a scrap bit of lino because I was testing a new knife. Sold it last spring to a fella who said it reminded him of the heron that used to stand in the field behind his grandmother's house. I'd forgotten I even made the damn thing.
And the glass thing, sure. I had a fella once tell me he bought a print off me at the market and kept it in the sleeve for a year because the frame would've cost more than the print. Fair enough. But the ones I framed proper, they went places. There's something about the weight of it in the hand, the glass reflecting back at you, that says this matters. Whether it's a tenner or a hundred, you frame it like it's going to a museum, and half the time it ends up somewhere near as good.
The bougainvillea living in her house now, that's the whole game isn't it. You make the thing, it does its own wandering, and years later it turns up somewhere you never expected. Grand job on the sale. Here's to many more. 🙂
The heron story got me properly. Four inches square and it sat there for years, and then one day it's the exact heron that lived behind some fella's grandmother's house. That's the thing na, you make these things and you think you know what they are, and then someone walks in and tells you what it actually is. It's humbling.
And the sleeve thing, ha. I've had that too, people tell me they kept a print flat under the bed for a year because framing is genuinely expensive. I never know what to do with that. Half of me is like, no, frame it, it matters, and the other half is like, fair enough, it does cost more than the painting itself.
But you're right about the framed ones. There's a difference, isn't there. On the wall it stops being yours entirely. That's the whole point, I think.
"the work being alive somewhere outside your own head", that's exactly it. I think that's what I keep circling, that it stopped being just mine the second she recognised it. And you're right about the small ones, I've already started framing the little studies properly. Feels like I was treating them as practice and forgetting they're the most honest work I do. That bougainvillea line, I hadn't thought of it that way but now I can't stop. Thank you for this.