What's a red flag you ignored because you wanted the gallery so bad?
ok so I'll go first and it's embarrassing. I had a meeting last spring where the woman kept saying "we'd want to see a more cohesive body of work" and never once asked me a single question about what I actually paint. like zero. and I still spent two weeks afterwards redoing my whole portfolio to match what I guessed she wanted 🙃 I knew it felt off in the room and I talked myself out of it because she had a nice website and I was eight weeks into full-time and terrified.
so yeah, what's the thing you clocked in your gut and ignored anyway? mine was the no-questions thing. now that's my tell. if they don't ask me anything about the work, I'm out.
tell me yours, I want to know I'm not the only one who's done this 😭
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the no-questions thing is a good tell. mine was a gallery where the contract had a clause about "reasonable revisions" with no definition of reasonable and I signed it anyway because they had a corner spot at a fair I wanted to be in. spent a month repainting a piece to their "feedback" and then they hung it in a back hall. lesson learned: if they can't articulate what they want in a sentence, they don't know, and you're the one doing unpaid guesswork to find out.
the two weeks of redoing your portfolio is the real cost here, that's the part nobody counts
"reasonable revisions" with no definition is genuinely sinister, it's like they built the loophole on purpose. and a month repainting for a BACK HALL omg I would have needed to lie down. did you ever get the piece back or is it just... living there now
also yes. the two weeks is the part that stings, not the rejection. I lost two weeks of actual painting to guessing at a stranger's taste and I've never gotten them back, that's the whole thing. your sentence about them not being able to articulate it is going straight in my notes honestly