Sold out the small pieces online, then a collector asked why I don't make bigger versions

Sold a run of small prints on the Instagram side in three days. Little 15cm squares, cheap enough that people don't think twice. Then a collector who bought one messaged asking why I don't do a large version of the same piece, one meter wide, because that's what she'd actually hang.

Thing is, the big ones don't sell through social. They need to be seen in person, in a gallery, with the light right. I can photograph a cyanotype until the sea turns grey and it still flattens into just another blue rectangle on a feed.

So I keep making the small ones because they move, and the collector sits there wanting the big one I haven't printed. There's a version of this economy I don't fully understand yet. The work people say they want and the work people actually buy, they're cousins, not the same person.

Anyway I'm prepping the large one this week. I think I'll keep making the smalls too. One feeds the other, even if I can't say exactly how.

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Ananya Iyer·1h

This is such a familiar ache for me too. I paint mostly small, mostly on location, because that's where the truth of a place is for me. But every now and then someone sees one and says "imagine this big." And I know exactly what they mean, and they're not wrong, but a big piece is a different painting, not the same one scaled up. The bones change. The light changes.

Also your point about the feed flattening it, that's so real. I've photographed things I know have depth and warmth and on a screen it's just a rectangle among a hundred rectangles. One metre wide needs a wall and a body standing in front of it. That's not a marketing problem, that's a medium problem.

I think you already answered your own collector pretty well. The small ones move, they're how people find you at all. And the big one that hangs on a wall, that's a different relationship, for the person who buys it and for you making it. Maybe one day a gallery does it for you. Until then, 15cm squares are how the door stays open.

Inês CostaOP·50m

"a big piece is a different painting, not the same one scaled up", that's exactly it, and I've never heard it put so plainly. It's not that I couldn't stretch the image, it's that the whole relationship with light and water changes when the paper changes. The sun hits a meter of wet paper differently than it hits a palm-sized square. It becomes another thing entirely.

And yes, the body. That's what the feed can't give you. A small cyanotype you can hold, cup in your hands like something found on the shore. A large one needs the person to stand in front of it, take a breath, let the blue fill their field. I don't know how to sell that breath through a screen.

Maybe the answer is making one large piece anyway, for the show, not for the feed. Let it live where it can be seen properly.

Elin Holm·1h

I understand the collector, but I think the small ones might be the point. I work in paper, and the scale is part of the material. A torn edge reads one way at fifteen centimeters and another thing entirely at a meter. It stops being the same piece and becomes a different object.

Also, the small run selling out in three days is not nothing. That's a whole conversation with people who actually bought the thing, versus one person who says she'd hang a big one. Both are real, but one of them already happened.

If you want the large version to exist, make it because you want to see it at that size, not because of the message. There's a gallery somewhere that'll show it. But don't apologize to the small ones for moving fast.

Inês CostaOP·46m

You've put your finger on the thing I keep circling. At fifteen centimeters a torn edge is a texture, an accident you can hold close. At a meter it becomes a statement about the paper itself, about violence almost. Different object, you're right.

And the selling out, that part landed too. Three days of strangers spending their own money beats one person's maybe, no matter how sincere. I've learned to stop trading real for hypothetical.

I'd like to see it big just once, to know. But I think I already know what knowing would cost.

Inês CostaOP·32m

The torn edge thing is so right. Scale isn't a slider you drag up or down, it changes what the piece is even saying. And I think you're onto something with the three days selling out, people vote with their wallets, not their words, and that run already voted.

The one-meter version might be worth making anyway, but not as the same piece. As a separate thing, a sibling. Let it be its own conversation instead of trying to make it compete with the small ones.