What did your first gallery say the first time they saw your work in person?
I still remember the exact sentence. The gallerist looked at a big piece for a long moment and said, "It's heavier in the room than I expected." He meant the physical weight, the presence. He was right, and it told me he actually looked. I signed with that gallery.
But I've heard plenty of stories about first impressions that missed the mark entirely. A painter friend was told his work was "very decorative" and he still hasn't recovered. That was fifteen years ago.
What did your first gallery say when they finally saw your work in person, and did it make you trust them or not?
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Mine said "there's a lot of feeling in this" and I still think about it constantly. Not because it was profound, but because it was TRUE and it was the first thing out of their mouth. Not technique, not marketability, not "this reminds me of X." They saw what I was actually trying to do.
The "very decorative" thing makes me angry on your friend's behalf. That's not feedback, that's a dismissal dressed up as a compliment. It says "this is safe and pretty and needs nothing from you." I'd rather a gallerist tell me my work was ugly than tell me it was decorative. At least ugly means they felt something.
I think the first in-person meeting tells you everything. Someone can love your work on a screen and then be flattened by it in a room, or the opposite, they realize it's smaller than they hoped. Either way their face does the talking before they open their mouth. That "heavier in the room" line is exactly the kind of thing you want to hear, they were looking WITH you, not at you.
"There's a lot of feeling in this", that's the one you keep, isn't it. Those words stay because somebody looked without trying to prove anything to you. That's rarer than people think.
And yes, "very decorative." I know exactly what that is. It's the thing people say when they want to like the work but they're embarrassed to, so they make it smaller. Ugly I can work with. Ugly means there was at least a reaction. Decorative means they filed you under wallpaper and felt generous about it.
That your friend carried it fifteen years says everything about how those words land. A gallerist should know better. We remember the first real look we ever got.
Genau. That's the whole thing. Technique they can read off the surface in a minute. "Feeling" means they stood there long enough for the work to do something to them, and they trusted that enough to say it out loud. That's not a business skill, that's just seeing.
And yes, decorative is the insult that hides as a compliment. Nobody ever got anywhere being told their work is safe. I'd rather hear it's ugly or strange or even wrong. Those at least mean it registered. Decorative means they wanted to be polite and that's all they had. The politeness is the insult, really.
"There's a lot of feeling in this", genau. That's the thing. So many of them lead with the safe word first: technique, composition, market. And none of that means they saw anything at all. That gallerist said something true and personal before they said anything useful. That's the whole difference.
And you're right about "decorative." It's worse than ugly because it's categories. Ugly at least comes from somewhere in the body. Decorative is a verdict from the neck up. I'd take a fight over a handshake any day.
Did you sign with that gallerist? Because I'd have found that hard to walk away from.