20 results for “salvage”
Had a gallery once that loved the work but wanted me to put it all in boxes, under glass, properly framed. As if the whole point was to make it look expensive. I kept saying no, this stuff is supposed to stay dirty. They kept saying buyers want clean. We parted ways. No hard feelings, I think we were both right about our own crowds. What's the thing you refused to change and it cost you the show? Or did you ever give in and regret it?
Built a shadowbox for a guy last spring using his late father's things. Old army patches, a ration book, a pair of worn gloves. He gave me a box of the stuff and said do whatever felt right. It was genuinely moving work, took me two and a half weeks because I kept stopping to just sit with the material. I quoted €350. He didn't even blink. That should've been my first sign. A month later he listed it on one of those auction sites and it went for €1,100. I only know because a friend sent me the listing. Same box, my signature on the back, photographed badly in his kitchen. I'm not even mad, exactly. More embarrassed at myself. The materials were basically free, sure. But the time, the care, the fact that I handled his father's stuff like it mattered. That had a price and I picked the wrong one. He didn't do anything wrong really, he priced the piece at what it was. I just undervalued it first. Still haven't figured out what the lesson is supposed to be. Charge more? Charge less and get out of the resale game entirely? Both feel true. Neither feels like a plan.
A museum in Brno asked for a piece built from scrap. Fine, my medium. I spent three weeks hauling steel from a yard outside the city, cutting, grinding, welding, four days just cleaning rust off plates so the walls of the room didn't look like a crime scene. Materials cost me maybe 4,000 crowns. They were going to pay me 60,000 for the whole thing. I did the math the night before the install and it came out to about 180 crowns an hour before taxes. That's under seven euros. The scrap was free, which means what I was actually charging for was the part the museum thinks is the easy bit. I sent the invoice anyway. Signed it, drove home, opened a beer. The room is good. I'll forget the arithmetic before the room comes down.
Just finished calculating the final tally for that massive piece made from old factory parts I showed a few months back. The raw materials were almost nothing, of course. But then there was the transport from the old Skoda factory site, the specialized welding for hours by that guy Petr who charges by the minute, the custom-built steel frame to hold it all... I looked at the invoice and my first thought was 'Is this a joke?' It came out to 85,000 CZK before I even thought about my own time. Nearly fainted. I ended up telling the buyer 120,000 CZK, and honestly, I still feel like I'm robbing myself.
I've started judging found material by smell before I even look at it. Wood that's been in a damp cellar for twenty years has a particular must that nothing cleans off and nothing fakes. When I walk into a demolition site and catch that, I know the rest of the haul is worth my afternoon. Today a guy in Žižkov called me about an old workshop being torn out. Rotten oak workbench, some lathe parts, a drawer full of bent screwdrivers. I went because the stairwell smelled like my grandfather's garage. Brought home more than I can fit in the studio. The screwdrivers I'll use for years, the bench becomes part of the next room. People think I'm picky about aesthetics. No. I'm picky about history that you can breathe in. You can't fake that with new material, no matter how you treat the surface. The grime has to have earned itself.
My cordless drill has been dead for three years. Not the battery, the drill itself. I keep it on the shelf above the workbench anyway because it was the last thing my father gave me before he died, and also because it makes a good paperweight when the studio window is open and the studio is a wind tunnel. Some mornings I look at it and think I should finally throw it in the pile with the rest of the salvage. Then I remember it's not salvage, it's a relic, and the whole difference between what I make and what I hoard is just whether you call it that. Also it survived the flood in 2002. The flood did not survive the flood. That feels like it should mean something but I haven't figured out what yet.
I was at a salvage yard outside Kladno yesterday, digging through a pile of window frames from a school they tore down in the eighties. The wood still smelled of chalk dust and coal. You can't fake that. You can't buy it. And the whole time I was thinking, this is what I miss when I walk into a brand-new residency studio with white walls and a concrete floor that's never held anything heavier than a thought. There's a kind of life that comes into the work when the materials have already lived. I'm not romanticising poverty. I'm saying the objects carry something. You handle them and your hands know what to do before your head does.
Finished and installed a 60 by 80 cm panel last month, a small olive tree, smalti and salvaged marble. I quoted 2,400 euros for it. That is materials, six weeks of setting, and the cement board, and I did the install myself with a hired van. The client paid without a word. Then, at the end, standing in the doorway with her coat on, she asked if she could have the leftover smalti. The offcuts. The bag of bits. I said yes because it is a bag of bits to anyone who does not cut stone. But those bits are 90 euros of material I already bought, and some of them are colours I will use again in March. I stood there holding a plastic bag of my own stock and feeling stupid about it. I have been thinking since about what I actually sold her. She thinks she bought the object. I think I sold six weeks and a bag of material and the bag got left on my floor. Nobody is wrong here, that is the annoying part. I am not going to start invoicing for offcuts. But I am going to start keeping them in a closed box before the client arrives, because apparently I need to organise my own generosity.
Signed the contract today for a room at the old tram depot in Holešovice. Four hundred kilos of salvaged cast-iron radiators, all of them from one demolished panelák block out in Ďáblice, they let me take the lot before the excavator came. I have been chasing this space for two years. Two years of emails that turned into one coffee that turned into nothing, and then out of nowhere the director calls me on a Tuesday and says the spring slot opened up. I am too old to be this nervous about a signature. My hand was steady, only my handwriting was bad, which is normal. I keep thinking about the man who let me in the building. He was maybe seventy, wore a tracksuit, did not care at all what I do. I told him I make art from discarded things. He looked at the radiators, looked at me, and asked if I wanted the sinks too. I said yes. Now I have to deal with the sinks. The whole thing will probably not work. That is the part nobody says out loud. But today it is a yes on paper, and I will take it.
Spent three days welding a knee joint for a figure and only noticed when I went to grind the seam that I'd built it mirror-image. Left leg where the right belonged. Two hundred pounds of steel and I stood there looking at it like it was someone else's work, because it was. Shaped wrong by a man who's done this for thirty years. Cut it apart this morning. Salvaged maybe sixty percent. The rest is scrap. What bothers me isn't the wasted steel, it's that I looked at that thing off and on for three days and my eye told me it was fine. You trust the eye or you don't, and mine lied to me until my hands finally caught it. Makes me wonder what else I've shipped out that I never caught.
A panel, 20 by 30 cm. A little olive tree, smalti and salvaged stone, the kind of thing I can hold in two hands. I quoted 340 euros to a woman who found me through a friend of a friend, and she came back with "but it's only small, can you do 150?" Here is the thing about small. Small is not less work. Small is the same hands, the same cutting, the same three kilos of tesserae sorted by tone before I set one of them down. The size of the finished piece has almost nothing to do with the hours. If anything I lose money on small work because the setup eats a bigger share of it. I said no, and I said it kindly, and I explained the hours once. Not a lecture, just the arithmetic. She went quiet for two days and then wrote back and took it at 340. I am not posting this to be praised for holding the line. I am posting it because I nearly said yes. I stood in my kitchen at eleven at night doing sums in my head and thinking, well, 150 is 150. That is the actual danger. The number is small enough that you can talk yourself into it and then you have taught someone what your work costs. What I want to know is how the rest of you answer the size argument, because mine is getting tired and I would like a better one.
Small floor, about six square metres, a vine and two birds, smalti and salvaged tile from a demolished house in Ano Poli. I gave them 4,800 and I could see it land wrong in the owner's face, that half-second of relief before he shook my hand. He would have paid 7. I know it because he started talking about the chairs he already ordered, which cost more than my floor. I did the whole job. It took me five weeks, and between the cutting and the setting and two trips back because the grout colour was wrong in daylight, my hourly came out under 11 euros. Less than I paid the boy who carried the sand up. Here is the part people don't want to say out loud. It was not his fault. He said yes to the number I said. The number was mine. I priced the fear of hearing no, not the work. Since then I write the number, then I sit with it one full day. If nobody has fainted, I raise it. Next floor is 8,000 and I already feel sick about saying it. I will say it anyway.
Three years ago I built a walk-through room for a small Kunsthalle in Germany. Roughly 200 square meters, everything salvage: 400 kilos of scrap steel, a broken piano from a flooded school in Ústí, about nine hundred used books nobody wanted. Six weeks of work, two helpers paid properly. I asked for 11,000 euros. All in. Materials, wages, my time. They said yes so fast I heard it before the last syllable left my mouth. That sound is the worst sound in this business. Not the money, the speed. It means I was wrong by a lot. I have thought about this for three years and I still cannot decide if I regret it. The piece was good. It existed. People walked through it. If I had asked 30,000 they would also have said yes, probably, and the piece would be the same piece. But I asked 11,000 because 11,000 felt like a fortune to a man who grew up being told what things cost and never being allowed to say a bigger number out loud. The part that annoys me is not the loss. It is that I knew, standing there listening to them agree, and I did nothing. Just nodded like an idiot with a forklift. I have a quote going out on Thursday for something similar in Brno. I have written 34,000 on it twice and deleted it twice. Thursday I will find out which version of me is sending the email.
switched to painting on a sheet of tempered glass like 4 years ago, salvaged from a coffee table someone left on the curb on my block. still not sure it's tempered but nothing has exploded yet. the trick is you let the acrylic dry on it and then you peel it off in one sheet. i've got a stack of these paint skins under my flat files, probably 30 of them by now, each one a full record of a week. some of them are genuinely better than the paintings they came from and i refuse to think about what that means. also you scrape it clean with a razor blade and the whole thing is fresh in 20 seconds. plastic palettes stain and hold onto old color and i spent years convinced that was somehow part of the process. it wasn't. it was just dirty. the downside is i've dropped it twice and both times i aged about a decade. currently propped against the wall behind my desk because i still haven't figured out where to actually store a 3 foot sheet of glass in a room this size. anyway if you're still on plastic just know i'm not judging you i'm just quietly right about this one thing
For years I did the dance. "DM for pricing." Which means a week of polite emails with someone who was never going to buy anything, while I pretend the number is a secret worth protecting. Nonsense. The number is the number. So in March I started putting it in the caption. This panel, 40x60, smalti and salvaged marble, 1.900 euro, four to six weeks. That simple. No "investment" language, no "collections start at." Two people unfollowed. Fine, they were never my people. What I did not expect: three inquiries in the first month, and one of them bought. A woman in Kalamaria who said she had been following me for a year and always assumed my work was "for museums or hotels." She thought the mystery meant expensive. It was the vagueness that scared her off, not the price. The other thing nobody warns you about, the asking is the exhausting part. I have spent years answering "how much for something like this" with nothing to look at, and the whole time we both knew I was guessing at a wall. I am not going to pretend it fixed everything. Some people see the number and go quiet, and that is information too, it saves us both a month. And yes there is a small guilt, like saying money out loud in a room where nobody else has. Greek thing maybe. Anyway. If you have been hiding your prices to seem more serious, I would look at that. The hiding is usually doing the opposite of what you think.
The room is for a mid-size Kunsthalle, opens in November. I gave them a budget in the spring: 40 000 CZK for materials. That is the number they wrote down and that is the number everyone has been repeating in meetings for four months, so it has become true in the way these numbers do. Actual materials bill so far is 118 000. That is before I pay anyone to help me weld the frame, and the frame is not welded. Where it goes: 9 000 for the cable and turnbuckles, 14 000 for the plywood I had to buy new because the salvage stuff warped in the studio over winter like a wet book, about 22 000 so far in screws, bolts and a specific matte black paint I have grown to resent. The rest is transport, because the pieces come from a demolition yard in Kladno and a yard in Kladno is not a yard in Prague. Each trip is a van and a person and a day. So the 118 000 is coming out of my fee, which was already the fee of a man who is bad at this. Nobody at the institution has asked me a question. Not the curator, not the director, not the woman who does the contracts. I think they assume I know what I am doing. I am 58 and I still do this, so I suppose the assumption is reasonable and completely wrong. The funniest part, if you want it funny: I have done this exact thing before. Probably four times. Each time I tell myself the budget is the budget and each time the room gets bigger than the budget because a room that is too small looks cheap and a room that is too big looks like a decision. I have never once gone back and said the number was wrong. I do not know what that conversation sounds like. I am going to have it this month, I think, and I am not looking forward to learning the language. If you have ever successfully said "the number I gave you was fiction," I would like to hear how you opened the sentence.
Okay so I'm working on the fourth version of the window piece, the one with the fire escape, and I just made the exact same mistake I made on version two, which is that I stopped to answer a text. My phone buzzed, I put the brush down, I picked my phone up for maybe ninety seconds, and by the time I got back the top wash had already gone past the point where you can lift anything out of it. Watercolor does not care that you were being polite to your mom. The whole upper corner where the light comes through is now this flat dead grey, and I know it's dead because the bottom half, which I did without stopping, is still glowing. Here's the thing I actually want to ask about, and I'm not being cute: how do you all handle the working window on a big flat wash? Because I KNOW the trick is to keep it wet, I learned that in year one of my BFA from a professor who said it like it was obvious, and yet the second something interrupts me my brain decides the paper will wait. I've tried spraying, I've tried doing the whole thing in one held breath, and neither is working. Is the answer just that you don't answer your phone during a wash, like a monk? Because if so I need to hear it from someone who isn't me. Also the grey might be salvageable if I go back in with some white gouache over the top for the glint on the railing. I'm half convinced. I'm also half convinced I'm just going to do it again tomorrow and call it a study.
The commission was real. 3 metres, smalti and salvaged marble, over the reception desk of a small boutique hotel here in Kalamaria. Two months of work minimum, probably closer to three, plus materials. 2.400 euros. I said no, and then I spent a week wondering if I was being proud for no good reason. Because that money would have paid the rent for a while, and I am not in a position where 2.400 is nothing. Nobody in my business is. What killed it was the invoice. They wanted it all declared, clean, taxes paid, which is fair, that is their position. But then you take out EFKA and the tax and what is left is closer to 1.300, and the smalti alone for that size is over 600. So I would have been setting small stones by hand for three months at about the rate of a person who stands at a till. The till at least ends at 3. The galling part is that nobody there would look at a marble floor and ask for a discount. They know what stone costs. But the hours? The hours are invisible, so they get negotiated. I am not asking if I was right. I know I was right. I am asking what the rest of you do when the number is insulting but the money is real. Because I don't have a good answer for that yet.
I've had galleries treat me like a genius and like furniture, sometimes in the same visit. The one that still gets me: a director in Berlin who spent an hour talking about my work, then asked if I could "deliver something more commercial" for the next show. And separately, I once walked out of a space in Vienna because the owner kept introducing me to people as "the salvage guy" like it was a party trick. So what's yours? The red flag you almost signed anyway, or the moment you just stood up and left? Mine: the Berlin one. I almost said yes because I needed the room. Didn't. No regrets. What's your story?
End of last year a scrappie I've known since the nineties calls me, says come get these tram parts or they go to melt. Old Škoda 8Tr stuff, brake valves, couplers, chassis brackets. Beautifully worn, that smooth worn metal you get from forty years of use. So I went. Paid him in coffee and a bottle of something. Three months now the crate sits in the corner of the studio and I have not touched a single piece. I walk past it every day. My son came by last week and asked what I'm making with it and I told him honestly nothing yet, and he said so why'd you take it, and I said because it existed. That's a lousy answer but I think it's the real one. There's a difference between collecting and hoarding and I've never been fully sure which side of the line I'm on. I tell younger artists salvage is about deciding what gets to be remembered and then I go and rescue things with no plan because I can't stand the thought of them being melted into somebody's new washing machine. One day I'll know what they're for. Or I won't and they'll go to my son, who will also not know, and then it's his problem. That's how the good stuff moves through the world.