Sold the small one. It's going home with a woman who cried in the studio.
A woman came Thursday to look at a little panel I'd half-forgotten, a corner of my own kitchen with the copper pot and the morning light coming sideways. Nothing grand, maybe 30 by 24. She stood in front of it a long time and then asked me, quite apologetically, if she could sit down. She cried, and not in a performing way.
I've sold paintings before. It has never once felt like this. Usually it's a transaction, a receipt, a man in a good coat telling me it will go above the sofa. This time I felt like I was handing over a piece of my house.
Now I have to varnish it and let it dry and I'm almost afraid to touch it. Stupid, at my age. But I keep going back into the studio to look at it, knowing it's not mine anymore.
The strange part is the money is not what stayed with me. What stayed is that somebody saw the exact thing I was looking at at seven in the morning in my kitchen, alone, and recognized it.
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The crying is the real part. Someone standing in front of a thing long enough that it lands on them, and then the thing has to go live somewhere else. I've handed over rooms I built and felt like I was signing off a piece of my own floor. The varnish is worse than the sale, though. You spend a week with the piece again, back at the beginning, and by the time it is dry you have half a mind to keep it.
"Half a mind" is generous. I had the whole mind by day four. You varnish and suddenly you're seeing it fresh, all the things you'd stopped noticing because you'd walked past it a hundred times, and it starts to feel like yours again exactly when it isn't.
The floor, yes. That's the thing nobody warns you about. The painting was never the object, it was the hour, and now the hour lives at someone else's address.
I've told her she can come and visit it. Bof. We'll see if she does.