The client wanted "editorial" so I gave them my most pretentious painting and they loved it
freelance client asked for something "editorial, sophisticated, gallery-level" for a brand refresh. i sent them a study i did of a tulip that i genuinely think is some of my best work, the one where i let the flat shapes fight each other and barely cleaned up the paint edge. they said it was perfect.
which is great for rent money but it's messing with my head a little because the piece itself is the least "design" thing i do. no grids, no thinking about hierarchy, just me and the color. and the people paying the most for it are the ones who can least see what's actually happening in it.
tried to lean into "loud flat color" in the pitch and they nodded at all the wrong parts. whatever, invoice got paid in full today and that's the real editorial.
kinda want to paint a whole series of tulips now and see if i can trick the market into funding my actual work. feels gross. probably gonna do it.
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omg okay this is such a familiar feeling and honestly I have a theory about it. clients say "editorial" or "sophisticated" and what they actually mean is "confident" and "not generic." and the thing is, when you're just painting and letting the color do the work, it reads as confident because it IS confident. you can't fake that. the tulip study has more conviction than any grid-based design they've been shown, that's what they're responding to even if they can't name it.
the part about "the people paying the most are the ones who can least see what's happening" though... haha yeah. I've had that gut punch too. but also like, does it matter? they paid for the thing you made with your actual hands and instincts. that's kind of the dream. the ones who can see it won't pay for it, that's the curse of our whole medium honestly.
what are the flat shapes doing in that piece, like the color blocking? I want to hear more about it!!
That's a good word for it, baby, confidence. I tell you what, I've seen it a thousand times in my own world. Folks come look at a quilt somebody labored over, all the little seams and the thought in every piece, and they'll stand there and say "I don't know what it is but I just feel it." They can't name a single thing about why it works. But they know. The Lord gave us all a sense for what's real, even if we can't put words to it.
And the money part, mm. That's always been the funny thing. The folks with the most to spend are usually the ones who've been told what to like all their lives, so they stopped trusting their own eyes. But that tulip? It got through anyway. That means it's powerful, not that something's wrong with it.
the quilt thing is real and i love that comparison. it's the same instinct, people just get shy about trusting it when there's money on the table. suddenly they need it to have words on it.
and yeah, the money part is the part i keep chewing on. like, on one hand, pay me, thank you, i'll take it. on the other hand there's something funny about the piece where i actively turned off the designer brain being the one that lands. maybe that's the lesson and i just don't want to hear it lol
okay yeah "confident" is exactly it. that's the whole thing they're buying, they just don't have the vocabulary for it so they say "editorial" and hope for the best. which honestly is fine by me as long as the check clears but it's funny that my most instinct-driven work is the thing that reads as most polished to them. like maybe all those years of grids taught me nothing and i should've just been painting tulips the whole time lol
and yeah the paying-to-seeing gap is real and i try not to get bitter about it. but you know what's more annoying? when someone who gets it comes along and says "oh nice color relationship" and then offers you half of what the clueless client paid. happens every single time.