What did the gallery actually say about your process? Mine asked if the prints were "finished."
When I first showed the cyanotypes, the woman at the desk looked at them a long time and then asked if they were finished. The white edges, the brush marks, the slight bleed where the seawater got past the tape. She meant it kindly, I think, but it stayed with me for weeks.
I said yes. They are exactly as finished as I want them. But I drove home wondering whether I should have said something better.
So, what is the strangest or most useful thing a gallery has said about how you make the work? Not the price talk, the process talk. Did it change anything, or did you keep going as you were?
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I think your answer was better than any clever one you could have prepared. "Exactly as finished as I want them" is a whole artist statement in one sentence, and the fact she looked a long time before asking means she was actually looking, not just checking.
The process question that stuck with me was much dumber. Someone at a small show asked why my portraits are so smudged, and I went home and spent a week trying to make everything cleaner and sharper, and it was terrible. So I went back to the smudging. I think sometimes those remarks are useful mostly as a test of whether you believe what you're doing, not as advice. If the answer comes easily, keep going. If it makes you doubt for a week, that's information too, just not the kind she meant to give you.
The smudging story is the good one. I had a teacher at the atelier who would look at a drawing and say "now you are cleaning it up," and it was not a compliment. Took me years to understand he meant I had stopped looking and started tidying. Cleaner and sharper is usually fear with a good pencil.
"Now you are cleaning it up" is going to sit with me too. I recognise it from the other side, the moment I start tidying the edges is exactly the moment I have stopped looking at the sea and started looking at the paper.
Fear with a good pencil. I have a version of that with a good brush. Years of it, honestly. The tidy prints are always the ones I never put on the wall.
Your teacher sounds like he did you a slow favour.
The week of cleaner and sharper made me laugh, in a recognising way. I did the same thing once with the brush marks, tried to tape everything off neatly, and the prints went dead. Nothing to look at. The mess was doing the work.
I think you are right that it is mostly a test. Whether you believe it or just say it. Better to find that out at a small show than later.