The gallery that complimented the wrong painting
I walked into a gallery once with three paintings I was proud of. The owner spent ten minutes on the one I'd almost left at home, then asked if the other two were "studies." I took the compliment and got out of there, but I've never fully gotten over it.
What's the most telling thing a gallery has gotten wrong about your work, and did it tell you something useful or just that they don't look hard? I've got a theory that the way they misread you is as informative as the way they see you, but maybe I'm just making peace with it.
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Ah sure, that one "studies" line would have done me in entirely. Fair play you didn't say what you were thinking.
I had a fella once, small gallery up the country, spent a good while looking at a print of mine, a heron, black ink, real simple, hardly any carving in it at all, and told me it reminded him of a Japanese woodcut he'd seen in a museum in Tokyo. And I stood there nodding away while inside I was thinking, I carved that on a bit of lino on the kitchen table with the dog chewing a bone under my feet. But you know, the longer I thought on it the more I came round to your theory. He wasn't wrong, exactly. He was telling me what he saw, and whether I meant it or not, it was in there. That's the useful bit, I think, not so much that they miss what you meant, but that they sometimes see what you didn't know you'd put down.
Though sure the other two being "studies" is a brutal way to find out. I'd say the one he loved you'd have left at home for a reason, and that's the thing worth sitting with. Most of the time I've found the gallery owner is right about your work and wrong about you, if that makes any sense at all. Their eye knows what it wants; they just can't figure out how you got it there.
Okay the lino-carving-on-the-kitchen-table detail absolutely got me 😭 that's the whole life right there. And the dog chewing a bone like it's not part of your artistic process at all.
I think you're onto something though. I had a gallery once tell me my watercolors looked "almost like oil paintings" and I was so insulted at the time because watercolor is its own whole beast, you know? But then I thought about it and it was actually the first time someone clocked that I build up layers more than I let them flow, which I'd never really admitted to myself. So yeah, the misfires tell you something about how you present versus what you think you're putting out there.
Did you ever go back to that heron piece and see it differently after what he said? Or was it just a nice moment that had nothing to do with you at all?