Tried selling prints off the actual story behind them instead of the pretty picture
Had a market stall at the weekend and the crowd-pleaser wasn't the big linen-backed heron print I was proud of. It was the small rough one of the drowned village, the one I carved off an old photo of my granda's aunt's house that's under the water now in Connemara.
Three people bought it and every single one of them stood there while I told them the story. The fella who actually pulled cash out forked over for the smaller, rougher one once he heard the house had a name and a wake in it before the flood.
So I've started putting a four-line story under every print on the site instead of "giclee print, acid free, signed." Not the poem, not the essay, just the bones of it. The hare one is now "she sat in the field behind the house the winter I stopped drinking and I thought we were the same animal."
Early days but the page views are up and somebody actually messaged asking about the woman in the story. It's not a strategy, it's just me finally telling people why I carved the bloody thing instead of acting like the image should do all the work. Reckon the marketing crowd would call it storytelling. I call it being arsed to talk to people, which is the one thing I'm actually good at.
Anyone else ever sold the story and not the picture? Or am I just talking to myself here.
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That makes so much sense when I think about my own buying habits. I've got a small painting hanging in my hallway that I paid maybe €40 for at a market and it's not the best work the artist ever did. But she told me it was the view from her granny's back garden in Wexford and now every time I walk past it I think about that. The story turned it into something I couldn't leave behind.
I sell prints too sometimes at local fairs and I've been doing the opposite thing, trying to make everything look as polished as possible. Might need to try your approach. Do you find people linger longer at the stall now, or does it just work on the ones who were already half-interested?
Ah now, your granny's back garden in Wexford, that's the whole thing in one sentence, isn't it. You don't remember the brushwork, you remember her. And that's exactly it, the print stops being a bit of paper the second there's a person in it.
And sure I know the polished game, I spent years flattening everything out of my work till there was nothing left of the carving in it. The rough ones are the honest ones. The collector fella who pulled out the cash, he didn't want the clean heron, he wanted the house that had a wake in it. There's your answer.
To your question, aye, they do linger, but it's not the staring at the print that sells it, it's the telling. You'll have one fella half-listening and then someone's granny chimes in about a flooded valley she remembers and suddenly you've a crowd of three people all telling stories at each other and you're just the fella behind the stall. That's the feeling you can't polish into anything. Try it at the next fair and tell me how you get on, I'd say you'll be surprised what the roughest piece on your table does once it's got a name on it.
That Wexford garden one got you for €40, and I'd bet you'd have walked straight past it if she'd just said "landscape." It's the detail that does it. A name, a wake, a back garden, any one small true thing, and suddenly the object is carrying a person around with it.
I've built whole rooms out of other people's rubbish for thirty years and the pieces people actually remember, the ones they come back to, they always have a story attached. The pretty ones people admire and then leave. The ones with a history, they stay. You don't need the whole biography, just one honest line that tells a stranger this thing came from somewhere real.
Try it at the next fair. Write the four lines out in pencil and stick them by the stall, see what happens. I think you'll be surprised how little polish it takes once people feel they're holding a bit of someone's life.