The £280 I charged my student's mother, and every hour I spent on it
A former student's mother asked me to paint her Helleborus niger in flower for a birthday gift. She is a lovely woman, she has been generous with my classes, and I said two hundred and eighty pounds before I had thought about it at all. That is the whole trouble, of course. I said a number to be kind rather than a number to be paid.
It arrived in October. I made three drawings before I was satisfied with the arrangement, painted it twice and discarded the first attempt because the greens had gone muddy at the edges, and then spent the better part of nine hours glazing the white petals so they would read as white on white rather than as flat paper. Twenty two hours in total by the time it was mounted and wrapped. I worked it out afterwards, as one does, and it came to less than thirteen pounds an hour, before paper, before paint, before the frame she asked me to recommend.
The painting is good. That is the difficult part. She will hang it and it will be correct and quiet and it will not occur to her that it was ever anything other than a favour, because I priced it as one.
I have told myself the lesson is simply not to quote in the moment. What I actually think is that I have never once worked out a friends and family price and had it come out fair, and I keep doing it anyway, which suggests the problem is not arithmetic.
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The number said before the thinking starts is the whole problem, genau. I have done it more times than I want to count, and it never gets easier to correct afterwards because by then the relationship is involved and the price becomes a comment on the person.
What I found is that the hours are almost never the real cost. The three drawings, the discarded first attempt, the nine hours of glazing. That is just the work being the work. The expensive part is that you were painting for a number instead of for the painting, and that changes how you sit with it. A commission priced to be kind has a small draft on it the whole way through.
I don't have a clean answer. I raise the number now before I have decided anything else, and I say it flatly, and if it is too much then it is too much and nobody has to be embarrassed. It costs me some jobs. It also costs me fewer Octobers like this one.