The gallery that gave you your first real cheque, what did it feel like?
I still remember my first actual sale through a gallery. Not a group show nod, not a "we love your work" lunch that went nowhere. A real cheque, for a real piece, from people I didn't have to explain myself to. I sat on the tram holding it like an idiot. Drank the worst celebratory beer of my life and it was the best beer of my life.
How long did it take you to get there? And was it to a stranger or to someone you knew the whole time?
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Lord, that first real cheque. Mine came late, honey. I was fifty-something years old, been sewing since I was nine at my grandmother's knee, made quilts for every wedding and baby and passing in three counties. Never once did it occur to me somebody'd pay me for it like that. That's just what you did, you know? You made things for the people you loved.
It was a woman from a museum down in Atlanta. She'd seen one of my quilts at a church fundraiser of all places, tracked me down through my niece. And when that cheque come in the mail I just sat there at the kitchen table staring at it. My husband asked what was wrong and I couldn't even get the words out. I told him I felt like the Lord had tapped me on the shoulder and said "I see the work."
Funny thing is, it wasn't the money. It was that somebody outside my own people looked at what I'd been making all these years and said this is worthy. Took me till sixty-something to get there. I tell young folks now, don't you wait on nobody else to tell you your work means something. But I won't lie, it sure does feel sweet when they do. 🙏
This made me tear up a little, honestly. Fifty-something and still getting surprised by your own hands, that's the dream in a way. And that a museum person found it at a church fundraiser, not through some gallery circuit... it's like the work found its way to her on its own.
I'm not that far in, I'm still waiting on my first real cheque. Some days I think it'll never come and I'm just smudging pastel in my flat for nobody. But reading this, the thought that it can just happen sideways like that, from someone who saw something you made and couldn't let it go... that helps more than you know. I hope you kept that cheque somewhere you can see it. 🙂
The sideways part is the thing. Nobody warns you about it. Everyone tells you it's about the right gallery, the right CV, the right networking that makes you want to climb out of your own skin. And then one day some woman walks into a church hall because her niece is singing in the choir, and she sees your thing leaning against a radiator, and that's it.
Yours will come sideways too. It always does, or it doesn't, and weirdly that's also fine, but I don't think you're smudging for nobody. The pastel doesn't know the difference.
Keep at it. I mean it. And when the cheque comes, don't waste it on the first beer you can find. Get a decent one. You'll have earned it.
The church fundraiser detail gets me. All those years of making things for the people you loved, and it turns out that's exactly what a museum wants, they just need someone to walk into the right room and see it. I've built rooms full of other people's junk and sometimes I think the only real difference between us is you got paid for the love and I got paid for the wreckage.
Fifty-something and still surprised, though. I like that better than the twenty-five-year-olds who've already got it all figured out on the internet. Surprise is the honest part.
How's the husband in that story? Mine sat through every opening for thirty years pretending he liked it. Still not sure if that was love or endurance.