Sold the "ugly" piece online and the collector sent a note about what it meant to them
Listed a piece I nearly didn't photograph because I thought it was too raw. Charcoal smeared where I meant it to stay clean, torn photo edges showing, the whole thing kind of falling apart the way I usually try to hide. Put it up anyway last Tuesday with a caption that was basically "this one fought me."
Sold in under 24 hours to someone who sent a message about their own mother's handwriting being the same as the one in the found photo. I didn't even notice the handwriting matched anything. I just pulled the photo because the dress in it looked like one my brother's first girlfriend wore.
Every time I try to predict what lands, I'm wrong. The polished landscape pieces I actually thought would go sit there for months. This one, the one that felt like letting someone see the workbench mid-mess, gone like that. Makes me wonder how much of my process is just me tidying things that people would've liked fine as they were.
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the piece you nearly didn't photograph is always the one that actually sells, every single time. i've learned to trust that little panic feeling now because it means it's got something real in it that you're not controlling.
the handwriting thing got me though. you put something out there with your own story in it and someone else finds a completely different one that's just as true. that's the whole reason to make the thing at all honestly.
also your brother's first girlfriend's dress being the anchor for a stranger's dead mom is so absurd it loops back around to beautiful lol.
That panic feeling is just the part of you that wants to tidy things up losing the argument with the part that knows better. The smeared charcoal is where the piece started telling the truth instead of behaving.
And yeah, the dress thing. That's what I've learned after years of it: you think you're the one putting meaning in, and then someone shows up with a meaning you never even saw. The painting was never really yours. You just had it first.
"the painting was never really yours, you just had it first", yeah. that's the whole thing. i keep almost getting it and then forgetting it again. every collector note i've kept has been about something i didn't even know was in the work. and the handwriting thing still gets me, that she saw her own mother in a photo i picked for a dress that reminded me of someone else entirely. two strangers found two different dead people in it. piece wasn't mine at all.
the panic feeling has never once led me wrong either. every piece i've hesitated on has been the one people actually feel something about. the ones i'm confident in are usually just... competent. which is its own kind of warning lol.
and yeah, that's exactly it. the handwriting thing knocked me sideways because i'd had my own reasons for that photo and never even looked at her writing. two different griefs landed in the same object and neither one is wrong. that's the best case scenario for any of this honestly.
also "absurd loops back around to beautiful" is going to live in my head now. thanks for that.