Sold the edition of 25 for €900 and ate the entire cost of the plates myself
I just finished an edition of 25 screenprints that took me four months from the first drawing to the last pull. Copper plates, inks, paper, the studio time, the proofs I rejected along the way. Sold the whole edition to a gallery for €900, which sounds fine until you do the real math and realize the materials alone were close to half that, and the gallery takes 50% on top.
So I made 25 objects by hand and I think I netted something like €6 an hour. The gallery is happy. The collector is happy. I'm the only one who knows the number.
The part I keep turning over is that I priced it like a print. Like the edition makes it cheap, because it's a multiple, because the original is the plate and the prints are just copies of it. But each one of those copies took my hands on it. That logic is from an old world where printmaking was a reproduction tool, not a primary medium. I keep selling work on a pricing model that was built for something printmaking no longer is, and I don't know if I'm too scared to break it or just can't figure out what the new number should be.
I raised the price on the next edition by €300 and I'm already scared nobody takes it.
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The €6 an hour thing is what keeps me from ever doing editions, honestly. I admire that you pushed through four months of it. I think the part that hurts most isn't the gallery cut or even the materials, it's that the collector will hang one of those and never once wonder what went into making it. That's the number nobody sees.
For what it's worth, I don't think the mistake was the price. The mistake was the gallery taking half when you ate the plates. Those plates are yours whether they sold or not. Next time maybe you price so the gallery eats some of the real cost with you, or you keep more of the edition for yourself. But I know saying that is easy from here.
I hope the next one at least gets you closer to minimum wage. You deserve that much.
You have said the truth of it, ji. In our Mithila work we have the same. Someone buys a painting for a price that barely covers the handmade paper and the natural colour, and they hang it and never know the hours, never know it comes from an old line of women and men before them. The value nobody sees is the part that stays with the maker.
But I will say one thing, gently. The collector not knowing is not their fault only. We are the ones who do not tell. We price shy, we keep the real number in our own head, and then we feel hurt that no one saw it. Maybe we should say the number out loud. The price is the telling. When we ask too little, we teach them it is worth too little.
The plates, yes, that also. Good that you kept them. That is your labour and it does not end with that one edition.
"The collector not knowing is not their fault only", that stopped me. Because you're right, and I think part of me keeps the real number in my own head because saying it out loud makes the whole thing less romantic. I can tell myself I'm making art for art's sake, and the moment I say "this cost me four months and I netted six euros an hour" I have to look at it as what it is, which is labour.
The Mithila line you mentioned, that's the thing that gets me. There's a whole lineage behind your work that nobody is paying for either. The hours are one thing, but the history is the part you truly can't invoice.
I don't know if I have the answer to the telling. I tried it once, being transparent about costs to a gallery, and they looked at me like I'd asked them to do the emotional labour with me. But you're right that silence is a choice too, and we're the ones making it.
You're right about the plates, and that's the bit I keep coming back to. I priced it like the plate was a cost of goods, like it gets used up. But it doesn't. It sits in a drawer and I can pull from it again, which is partly why both of us got comfortable with the number. Except no, because I can't reprint it, once the edition is sold, it's sold. So I ate the cost AND the scarcity. That's the real error.
The collector not knowing is its own thing though. Part of me almost likes it. That it stays invisible, that the object carries all that labor and nobody has to carry the weight of it. But then I think, no, that's just me being a martyr about it. I should want them to know. I should want it to cost what it cost, and not just in money.