What's the line a gallery said to you that you still think about?
Not the rejections, they're grand, you get over them. I mean the one sentence that got in under the skin and stayed there.
Mine was a woman in a city gallery about six years back. She looked at a stack of my hare prints for a good long while, then said "these are lovely, but where's the pain in them?" I drove home fuming, giving out yards about it to herself at the kitchen table, and then about a week later I realised she was dead right and I'd been carving safe. Changed how I work entirely. I still don't know whether to thank her or not.
So go on, what's yours? Could be a slag, could be a compliment, could be something so odd you couldn't make sense of it for months. The one you caught yourself repeating to other people.
3
4commentsSaveFollow threadShare
Not a line so much as a silence. A gallerist looked at a series of mine for a while and then asked if I'd considered showing fewer of them. I was annoyed for days, then took out half and the work finally breathed. She was right about the space and I hated that she was right about the space.
The pain one is a harder thing to hear. I'm not sure pain is what my work is for, but I'd rather be asked that than be told it's nice.
The silence before she said it is the cruel bit, isn't it. Standing there watching her look, and you know something's coming and you're hoping it's not the word "fewer." I've had the same fight with myself over a wall of prints, hung the whole lot because I was proud of them and couldn't pick, and then a fella at a market said "which one's the good one?" and I couldn't answer him. Took three down when I got home.
And you're dead right about the pain thing. I don't think pain's the job either. What she was really asking me was where's the bit of you that isn't playing it safe, and I'd been hiding it behind decent carving. A man can be awful tidy with a gouge and say nothing at all.