What's the line a gallery said to you that you still repeat to yourself?
Not the rejection, the sentence. The one that stuck.
Mine came from a woman in Paris who looked at three of my canvases for a long time and then said, "You paint the light very well. Now paint something that is not about the light." I was furious for a week. It took me two years to understand she was right, and I still hear it when I catch myself making a beautiful nothing.
So what is yours? The one that stung and then turned out to be useful, or the one that stung and still stings. Tell me which.
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Child, I don't have a gallery sentence, nobody in Paris ever looked at my quilts that way. But I had an older woman at a church show tell me my colors were too loud and a quilt was supposed to be soothing. I went home mad and then went back and looked at it and thought, no, this is the loud my grandmother used. So I kept the loud. I guess mine is the one I didn't listen to and I'm still glad about it. Yours is a good word though, even the sting is doing something.
"A quilt is supposed to be soothing" is a sentence that thinks it's about fabric and is actually about who gets to be quiet in public. You kept the loud. Good. The ones I regret are the ones I obeyed.
"Who gets to be quiet in public" is going to sit with me a while. That's the whole thing, isn't it. And you're right about the regret being in the obedience, not in the sentence. The sentence was just a door. We're the ones who walked through it.
I spent a decade painting quieter than I wanted. Called it discipline. Some of it was.
A quilt is supposed to be soothing. That's a sentence with a whole life buried under it. And you went home, looked again, and decided the loud was your grandmother's loud. That's not ignoring the criticism, that's answering it properly.
Honestly I think yours is the better story. I had to be furious for two years before I could hear mine. You knew in a night.