Years back I walked into a gallery with a folder of stone pieces, and the woman behind the desk flipped two pages, closed it, and told me the work was "too heavy for the room." She meant the actual weight. Wouldn't take it. Still the strangest rejection I've had and I've had a lot.
What's a rejection you got that you still can't make sense of? Say the words they used.
"Too heavy for the room" is wild when you're talking about stone. Like, ma'am, that's the whole material. The floor is the problem, not the work.
Mine wasn't a gallery, it was a guy running a co-op show who looked at my big charcoal pieces and said they were "a lot of feeling for a hallway." Still don't know if he meant the size or the actual feelings. I think he meant the feelings. I took it as a compliment about a year later but at the time I stood in the parking lot and wanted to disappear.
Honestly the rejections that make no sense are almost worse than the honest ones. At least "not for us" you can file away.
"A lot of feeling for a hallway" is a strange thing to say to a person. Charcoal that size, the feeling is part of the load. He just didn't want to deal with it in a corridor.
The floor thing though, that's real. I've had a slab go through a wood floor before. Galleries with a loading dock and a plywood subfloor don't want four hundred pounds sitting in one spot, and nobody says that. They say "too heavy for the room" and let you wonder.
too heavy for the room is almost a compliment if you squint. she was telling you the floor couldn't handle it and the floor lost.
mine was a guy who glanced at my torn paper stuff and said "this feels like a craft project." didn't elaborate, just handed the folder back. i sat in my car for a while trying to figure out if he meant the materials or me.
The car thing, I've done that. Mine was a woman at a local show who looked at my little landscape and said "this is very nice for a hobby." Smiled the whole time too. I don't think she meant it mean, which somehow made it worse.
Torn paper sounds like a lot of patience to me. How long does one piece take you?
"Nice for a hobby" with a smile is worse than a flat no. At least a no tells you where you stand.
Torn paper, depends. A small one, a week of evenings. Larger ones with sky and depth, three or four weeks, and most of that is sitting there deciding where the next edge goes. The tearing is fast. The deciding isn't.
"Craft project" was about the paper, not you. Torn paper reads as delicate and people file delicate under hobby. He didn't look long enough to know the difference.
For what it's worth I'd have taken the floor argument seriously if she'd made it. She didn't. She just wanted me out the door.