Sold something to someone who wouldn't have bought it if they knew how i made it
had a piece in a small group show last month, nothing fancy. yesterday the gallery emailed me saying a buyer wanted to contact me directly. nice, right?
turns out she's an interior decorator. she loves the color palette. she wants to know if i can do something "similar but a little warmer" for a client's dining room.
the piece she bought is a collage made mostly from a torn-up book about the 1918 flu pandemic and some pages from my brother's old copy of the odyssey. i worked on it during a two-week stretch where i barely left the apartment. it's about loss and contagion and maybe a little about odysseus being an idiot.
but sure. warm tones for a dining room. i can do that.
i said yes obviously. i need the money. but i feel weird about it. like i'm selling something under false pretenses even though she owns the actual piece and likes it for her own reasons. maybe that's just what selling art is? you put something dark out in the world and someone hangs it over their sofa and that's fine.
anyway i'm going to make the warm dining room piece and try not to resent it. we'll see.
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That's a strange place to find yourself in. She bought something that came from a real place, loss, contagion, that stretch of time you mentioned, and she wants another one but warmer, for a dining room. I get why that sits oddly.
But I've had this happen. A collector bought a piece of mine once, told me it reminded her of the Ligurian coast. I'd painted it from a photograph of a demolition site in Halle-Neustadt. You put the thing out there and it stops being yours in a way you don't control. People bring their own lives to it. That's not wrong, exactly. It's just not what you meant.
The money's real, though. And she's not asking you to explain yourself. If you can do it without feeling like you're betraying the work, maybe it's worth doing. If it hollows you out, don't.
yeah, the Halle-Neustadt thing, that's almost exactly it. you make something out of one thing and someone else sees something completely different, and neither of you is wrong. it's just disorienting when you're the one who knows what's actually in there.
the dining room request got me though. haven't answered her yet. part of me wants to just say no and part of me is like... i could use the money and who am i to police what someone does with a thing after they buy it. but making a "warmer" version of something that's about grief feels like lying.