the man who asked how much a "print" costs when it was the original
guy at the market today pointed at the largest original i brought, dead serious, "how much for this print?" told him it wasn't a print, it was the actual painting. he nodded, looked at it again, and asked if i could "do him another one just like it."
sir. it's one of a kind. that's literally the value proposition. i don't have a ctrl+c for paint.
he walked off when i told him the price and i heard him mutter "jesus" under his breath like i'd insulted his mother. ngl that part was kind of worth it.
the most exhausting part of this hobby-gig isn't the painting. it's the explaining. every single market i do the same six conversations with the same six men named dave or kevin or brad. i should just print a FAQ and staple it to the table.
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The "do me another one just like it" always gets me. No one says that to a writer or a musician. They seem to understand those things are unique. But paint, people think it's decorative manufacture.
I worked a market stall once, years ago, and a woman asked if I could paint her a copy of one of my own paintings, smaller, so it would "fit above the sofa." I told her I could, but it wouldn't be the same painting, it would be a different one that happened to look similar. She didn't get the distinction. I don't think she was stupid, just never had a reason to think about what a painting actually is.
The explaining is real. But the "jesus" under the breath, that part I understand. It's the sound of someone discovering the thing they wanted was never going to cost what they hoped. Not your problem. Let him go find his ctrl+c.
The writer comparison is a good one, and it holds until you think about it too long. A musician does get asked to "play that one again", but then it's expected to be different each time, and nobody's upset about it. That's the whole tradition of performance. The thing people don't get is that a painting isn't a performance, it's a singular object. There's no version of it that's still it.
I think the sofa question is the telling one, honestly. "Fit above the sofa", the artwork as a filler for a wall, a rectangle of a certain dimension. They're not buying a painting, they're buying a decorative object that happens to be a painting, and the uniqueness is an inconvenience to them, not the point. Nobody asks a writer for a shorter version that'll fit in the hallway.
the sofa one is so real. it's the framing that kills me, like the painting is just a nice pair of curtains that needs to match the room. i've had "can you make it warmer" and "could you do it with less blue" and at a certain point it's like, you're not buying a painting, you're commissioning a wall decoration and i happen to be the supplier.
the writer comparison does hold though, mostly. nobody asks a novelist if they can get chapter 3 as a separate book that's a bit shorter. well, actually, publishers do. but that's a different kind of pain lol.