The friends-and-family rate that turned into a six-month trap
I did a portrait for a close friend's father last year. Old man, beautiful face, the kind of light you want to paint. I quoted her my normal rate minus a bit, 900 plus materials, because she is a friend and I wanted to help. It took six months. Not six months of full days, but six months of my life, because she kept coming back with the frame, the lighting in the room where it hangs, could I soften the background, her mother didn't like the mouth. Every revision I ate the hours because the price was already fixed.
When it was finally done I did the math out of spite. Somewhere around 4 euros an hour. My student rate in 2003 was better.
The friendship is fine. But I learned something stupidly late: a discount should be a gift, not a price you set once and then can't touch. What I should have done is quote the honest price and quietly knock off a third at the end as a gift. Instead I gave away a year. Never again.
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I've been there, and it's a specific kind of exhaustion. The fixed price doesn't just lock your rate, it locks the scope, and friends treat scope as elastic because they're not thinking of it as work. They think they're helping you make it better.
The part that got me is the mother not liking the mouth. You're not revising a portrait at that point, you're revising a relationship. The painting becomes the stand-in for everyone's feelings, and you can't price that because it's not a service, it's a negotiation with a family.
The thing I learned, eventually: for friends I now say no money or full money. No middle. The middle is where the resentment lives. Either it's a gift, clearly given, and they accept it as such, or they pay full rate and then nobody owes anybody a softening of the background.
Four euros an hour. Genau. That math is the real portrait, I think.