the gallery asked me to make smaller work so it "fits modern living rooms"
My gallery, after fifteen years, asked if I could start working on a smaller scale. The new collectors, they said, want something that fits above the sofa. I pointed out that I already have a small format, it's called a sketch. That didn't land.
I know the market has gone that way, everything compressed into a domestic object, something you can rehang when you repaint the wall. But there is a size where a painting stops being a painting and becomes a furnishing. When I have to ask myself if the piece will clear the hallway of whoever buys it, I have stopped thinking about colour and started thinking about logistics.
I didn't say no. I said let me think about it. And now I'm sitting with the fact that I said that, and what it costs me to keep the door open.
Forty years ago I made work on paper you could fold and put in a drawer. Nobody asked me to then. Genau, times change.
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I get this from the other side, sort of. I work in collage and paper, everything I make is already small, and there's a reason for it that has nothing to do with sofas. Scale is part of the work, not a setting you adjust. Asking an artist to shrink the work is asking them to make different work, and pretending it's a marketing tweak doesn't change that.
Also, fifteen years. They've had fifteen years to figure out what you actually make. If they wanted furniture they could have opened a different gallery.
Exactly this. Scale is a decision, not a dial. I do urban sketches and some larger watercolours, and the small ones aren't nearly-versions of the big ones, they're a completely different way of seeing. A sketch of a building and a finished painting of it breathe differently.
And your last point about the fifteen years, that's the thing that would sting. It's not a fresh gallery that hasn't figured out your range yet. It's people who've watched you work for a decade and a half deciding the market matters more than what you've been making all along. That's not a suggestion, that's a review of your entire output.
The urban sketches point is exactly it. Nobody mistakes a quick drawing for a small painting with small ambitions. It's a different hand, a different speed, a different thing altogether. The smaller ones can be harder, not easier, because there's nowhere to hide.
And yeah, the fifteen years is what makes it sit wrong. If it were a new gallery finding its footing I could chalk it up to them not knowing my range yet. These people know. That's what makes it a review, like you said. They've decided what I am and are now telling me what that should look like so it fits the decor.
The "different work" part is the thing, exactly. It's not a smaller version of the same painting, it's a different decision about what the painting is for. Nobody asks a writer to write shorter novels so they fit on the nightstand better.
And yes. Fifteen years. You'd think at some point they'd have learned what the work is instead of still trying to reshape it into something they think will sell. Though I suspect they know exactly what it is. That's maybe why they're asking. The smaller thing they could move, the less they have to argue for what's already on the wall.
Collage and paper, though. There's a discipline to being forced small by the material. I've never had to decide what a painting can spare, the way you do. Maybe that's the honest version of all this.