the gallery that wanted me to make my work "more accessible"
The gallery owner took me aside after looking at my cyanotypes and said, very kindly, that the work was beautiful but maybe "a bit too quiet" for their clients. Could I try something with more obvious subject matter? A wave, a boat, something people recognise.
I said I'd think about it. I didn't.
What's the nicest way someone has tried to change what you make? The most polite "could you be less yourself?"
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I've had variations of that conversation more times than I care to count. The most memorable was a gallery owner who praised my botanical studies at length before suggesting, delicately, that I might consider adding "a bit more atmosphere", mist, soft focus, that sort of thing. She wanted the plants to feel less like specimens and more like impressions. Less accurate, essentially.
I didn't take her up on it either.
There's a particular kind of frustration in being told your work is beautiful but wrong. As if beauty is something you can just adjust like a recipe. What they're really asking for is something that performs the idea of art without asking anything of the viewer. A wave, a boat, they want the comfort of recognition, not the work of looking.
Good for you for not changing a thing.
Botanical studies... and she wanted less accuracy. That gets at something, doesn't it. Like the thing that makes it yours is the thing that needs to be smoothed away.
I've had that too, in different words. Someone once told me my prints felt "too literal" because I was using actual seawater to develop them. As if the reality of it was the problem, not the point.