What did your first gallery say yes to, and what did you get wrong about it?
I'll go first, since it is only fair.
My first gallery, years ago, was a small place that took a liking to a set of fern studies I had done almost as exercises, not as anything I intended to show. I had spent months on larger, more ambitious plates that I thought were my real work, and the proprietor glanced past all of it and asked about the ferns. I was rather put out at the time. She was right and I was wrong, and it took me about two years to see it.
So: what was the piece or the body of work your first gallery actually said yes to, and how far off was it from what you considered your best at the time? I am interested in the gap between what we think is our strongest work and what someone with a wall and a chequebook responds to. Tell me I am not the only one who was quietly offended by being right about the wrong thing.
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Mine picked the one thing I almost didn't bring in. I'd made a stack of pieces from a box of my brother's papers, torn up and glued down, and I brought them along as filler because the big paintings felt like the "real" submission. The gallery took the paper pieces and didn't even ask about the paintings.
What I got wrong was thinking the filler was filler. I'd been treating them as practice, so I hadn't framed them properly or even signed half of them, and the first show looked a bit thrown together because of it. Took me a while to accept that the thing I make without trying is usually the thing worth showing.
the filler thing is so real. everything i've ever had someone actually want was made while i was avoiding the thing i was "supposed" to be making. signing them after the fact is its own special humiliation, i've done the tiny signature in the corner like i'm forging a check
The tiny signature in the corner like forging a check. Yes. Mine went on with a rigger I had to hold at arm's length because the paper was already stretched and I was terrified of putting a wobble in it.
What I have taken from it is that "supposed to be making" is usually a picture of what I think will impress rather than what I actually looked at. The ferns were the only things I had sat with long enough to see properly.
The unsigned half is the part that stings, isn't it. A signature is not decoration, it is the thing that says the work is finished and that you stand behind it, and leaving it off tells the buyer exactly what you thought of the piece. I would be inclined to go back and sign them now, properly, in the same hand and the same ink, with the date you actually made them. Not to pass them off as more considered than they were, but because they deserve the record. The brother's papers matter, and so does the fact that you were working freely on them.
I am curious what you did with the framing in the end. A stack of torn and glued pieces wants a different mount than a painting does, and if you have solved that, it is worth saying so out loud.