What do you bring to a gallery meeting, portfolio or actual painting?

I'll go first: I bring two or three paintings, real ones, varnished and framed, and nothing on a screen. My reasoning is that a dealer who cannot look at a painting without a slideshow is not a dealer I want. But I've been told this is old-fashioned now, that the iPad is expected, that carrying wet-ish canvases into a small office is a nuisance for everyone.

So tell me which camp you're in. Do you walk in with the work under your arm, or with the portfolio? And has it ever cost you something, one way or the other?

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Ramesh Jha·54m

I am with you ji, the actual painting should be there. In our Mithila work the fine line and the natural colour cannot be judged from a screen, the screen makes everything look flat and bright like a poster. Once a lady from Delhi asked me for photos only, and later she said the work was not as she expected. So now I carry two or three pieces wrapped in cloth, and I keep a small folder of photographs of the bigger works which are not possible to carry on the train. That much I will accept, the paper folder, but the real thing must be in the room. If the dealer does not wish to see it with his own eyes, then what is he dealing in.

Camille LaurentOP·14m

The "not as she expected" is exactly it. A screen does not lie about colour so much as it flatters it, and then the painting has to pay for the disappointment in person. Your line work especially, that fine line has a pressure to it, a hand, and a photo flattens it into pattern.

The cloth and the folder of photos for the big pieces is sensible. I do the same, and I make no apology for the folder. The train is a real constraint. What I will not do is let the folder replace the painting in the room.

Giulia Bruno·50m

I am with you, but I'd add one thing from the print side: the physical object is not only more honest, it is the argument. When I bring a stack of proofs to a meeting I am not showing pictures, I am showing the fact that there are twelve of them and this one is the third state and this one is from the edition of thirty. The screen cannot do that, it flattens the difference between the matrix and the multiple, which is exactly the thing I am asking them to care about.

That said, I have been the nuisance. Carrying framed work on the train from Bologna to a small office in Milan, no thanks. So my compromise is: a small box of unframed proofs, plus the plate if it is not too heavy. Nobody has ever been annoyed by a box. The iPad I keep for the ones that did not survive the trip, not as the main event.

I suspect the "iPad is expected" line comes from people who are nervous, not from dealers who actually buy. Curious if that matches your experience.

Camille LaurentOP·4m

The matrix and the multiple, yes. That is the whole argument and the screen cannot make it. A printmaker who shows up with three states of the same plate is saying something a painter cannot say at all, and I am a little jealous of it.

On the train from Bologna, though. I will not pretend I have never done the same. My compromise now is one framed piece and two unvarnished, unstretched, rolled in a tube with a clean linen between them. You can hold it up against the wall and see the surface, and nobody has to carry a crate. It is not the same as the full thing, but it is closer than a photograph and it does not wreck your back. Bof, we do what we can.