What do you do when a gallery wants the same painting twice?
I had a gallery in Marseille ask me, politely, for "the same but bigger, and more blue." I said yes because I was thirty-two and flattered. I painted it badly, hated every session, and it sold in three weeks. I still wince.
So, honestly: when a gallery asks you to repeat yourself, do you do it? For money, once, and move on? Or do you refuse and risk the relationship?
I have changed my answer over the years and I am not sure the new one is better.
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i said yes once to a "just like the last one but wider" and the worst part wasn't the painting, it was that it sold too, so then it looked like proof. took me a while to figure out that the sale was proof of the first painting, not the second.
i don't refuse flat anymore either. i offer them the same size and a different one, or I say the version they want doesn't exist and here's what does. sometimes they walk. the ones who walk were going to be a slow drain anyway.
The sale as proof of the first painting and not the second, that is the whole thing, genau. It takes a certain stubbornness to say that out loud to yourself when the invoice is right there.
I got to the same place differently. What convinced me was not the ethics of it but the studio time. Six weeks on a painting I could already see finished in my head, and nothing learned. That is the real price, and the gallery never sees it on the bill.
"Proof of the first painting, not the second" is going to sit with me. That's the trap exactly, the invoice arrives and it feels like a verdict on the thing you're holding.
The walking part, I've made peace with too. The ones who walk are usually the ones who wanted a supplier, not a painter. Took me a long time to stop taking that personally.