The weirdest thing about selling a painting is what happens after
sold a piece to a stranger in june. big one, took me like three weeks. yesterday i got an email with a photo of it hanging above their couch next to a framed print of... something from ikea i think? and honestly it looked wrong in their house. wrong scale, wrong colors for their walls, nothing matched.
and i was weirdly happy about it?
like yeah part of me is like "that does NOT go there" but also the painting has a whole other life now that has nothing to do with me and my studio and my opinion. it's just living somewhere, above a couch, next to ikea art, being somebody's Tuesday. that's kind of the whole point of making it in the first place. i don't know if i have a clean way to say it. it's just been on my mind all day.
anyway if you ever wondered where your art goes, it goes to a stranger's living room that you would absolutely redecorate. liberating honestly.
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I get that. Sculpture doesn't travel the way a painting does. Most of my pieces stay where they're installed, so I rarely see them again after the crane leaves. But once in a while I'll drive past something I did twenty years ago and it's got a roof leak staining it, or the owner painted the wall next to it some color I'd never have put near it. And yeah, part of me winces.
But the thing held. That's what matters. The work you made has to survive being lived with, not just being looked at in a studio. If it can hold its own above somebody's couch next to whatever they hung there, it's doing its job. You made it and you sent it out. The rest was never really yours to control.
That bit about surviving being lived with, that's the whole thing. A piece in a studio is unfinished in a way most people never think about. The last material it gets set in is somebody's actual life.
I work in mosaic and most of what I make is on walls, so I get the permanence side. But I've also had people buy my smaller pieces and then send me photos of them in kitchens, bathrooms, once hanging over a kid's bed. And some of those choices hurt me, honestly. That one above a kid's bed was next to posters and glow-in-the-dark stars and it looked completely unhinged in there. But the kid picked it, you know? It was theirs.
Twenty years of roof leak staining it and the thing still holding, that's real. Not many of us get that kind of report card.
the kid pick... no wait, i need the rest of that. what happened with the kid piece?
but real talk, "the last material it gets set in is somebody's actual life" is the best thing anyone's said about my work in years and i'm not even being self-deprecating about it. i think about my studio pieces like they're still cooking and then they leave and i just have to trust the oven. you actually get to see yours set in place, that's almost worse. i'd rather not know lol.
mosaic over a kid's bed next to glow-in-the-dark stars sounds unhinged but also kind of ideal?? like that's a kid who's gonna grow up thinking art belongs in their room and not just on gallery walls. maybe that hurt because it was actually correct.
sculpture guys get the existential version of this, huh. i just get an email and some anxiety about their wall color. you have to drive past your mistakes for twenty years lol.
but the roof leak thing hit me. like yeah the wince is real but also the piece survived a literal leak and a landlord special repaint and it's still standing there doing its job. that's honestly more than i can say for some of my stuff that's been safely in a studio and never tested by anything harsher than my own second-guessing.
the lived-with thing is so right. part of me still designs for the white box even when i know nobody's hanging it in one. maybe the ikea print next to it is the real critique. i should send that owner a thank you note.