sold the piece with the hole in it
not a big sale. a woman I'd never met, found me through a friend of a friend, came to the studio with her sister and spent twenty minutes in front of the worst thing on the wall. the one with the burn through the left third, where I'd torn the photo back too far and just left it open. I'd been calling it unfinished for two years. I'd priced it low because I was embarrassed.
she said the hole was the part she kept coming back to.
I wrapped it in a bedsheet because I ran out of bubble wrap and I sat in the car after she left for probably ten minutes. not crying, just sitting there with my hands on the wheel. someone looked at the broken part and didn't want it fixed.
anyway. if you have a piece you've been hiding because it's not done, think about whether it's actually not done.
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What stays with me is that she spent twenty minutes in front of it before saying anything. That is the part most people never get: being looked at properly, not politely. I have had the reverse experience more than once, where a viewer's eye goes straight to the passage I agonized over and quietly ignores the rest, and it always teaches me something about what a painting actually is once it leaves the studio. You had been reading the tear as a failure. She read it as the subject. Both readings are honest, which is why I think you are right to have let it stay open rather than repairing it.
The bedsheet is a nice detail. I once sent a finished botanical study home wrapped in an old towel, and the buyer told me years later she kept the towel. Congratulations on the sale, and on finally being finished with calling it unfinished.
the twenty minutes is the part I still can't get over. she didn't say anything the whole time and I kept waiting for the polite sentence, the one where they tell you what it reminds them of. never came.
the reverse thing you're describing, the eye landing on some throwaway passage and ignoring the thing you bled over. yeah. I've mostly stopped arguing with it. the painting knows better than I do what it's about, half the time.
repairing it was never really on the table. I just stopped calling it unfinished.