Several people have asked this at Burgh House this week, and each time I said something vague and moved the conversation along.
This wasn’t (only) modesty. I didn’t know. I spent months thinking about how to make the pictures and little thinking about what happens if somebody wants to take one home. So I’d start a sentence, realise I couldn’t finish it well, and change the subject.
Answer written down below, so that I can’t do that again.
Burgh House, 19-23 August.
Two different things
There are two ways one of these pictures can exist on your wall, and they aren’t the same object.
The first is a limited edition print. Signed, numbered, printed by a specialist in Hoxton on museum-grade Hahnemuhle German Etching paper.
| Size | Edition | Price |
|---|---|---|
| A5 | 40 | £50 |
| A4 | 30 | £140 |
| A3 | 20 | £250 |
| A2 | 10 | £400 |
The bigger the print, the fewer there are. A few earlier prints in my shop were made in editions of fifty; these are the numbers from here on.
The second is an artist’s proof. There are two proofs of any picture, and they sit outside the numbered edition altogether. I keep the first. The second is signed and dedicated by name to the person it’s for. So where an edition print is one of a numbered run, a proof is the only one anybody else will own. Those are arranged one at a time – tell me which picture and I’ll tell you what’s possible.
That second thing is usually what a sitter wants of their own portrait, which makes sense – if it’s a picture of you, in your own room, being one of thirty is not really the point.
***
Why not every picture comes in every size
I drew these at different sizes, on paper sometimes and on my iPad, over about two years. Some were made large and some small, and a picture drawn at one size doesn’t always survive being printed at another.
Somebody asked recently about one of the Galley Beggar Press pictures, which (as it happens) I drew at A3. I could print it larger, and most people would never notice, but I would. A3 is where it looks like itself.
So the table above is what a size costs, not a promise that everything comes in all of them. Ask me about a particular picture and I’ll tell you what it can do.
***
Things I didn’t predict
Two of the pictures in the show are small self-portraits – me sidling up to a Sargent, and to a Van Gogh, checking out the competition. I had meant to frame them separately, couldn’t find A5 frames, and put them in one frame side by side on the afternoon of the hanging. Somebody then asked to buy them like that, as one picture, which had not occurred to me at any point. There’s more about that here.
Another visitor told me her favourite picture on the whole wall was one of a publisher in her office, because she found it calming. She doesn’t know the publisher. She wasn’t responding to the person at all, but to the light in the room and the colour of the walls.
I have been making these pictures on the assumption that what matters is who is in them. That may be less true than I thought.
***
If you’d like one
Tell me which picture you’ve been looking at and I’ll say what’s possible. jp at this domain name.
And if what you’d actually like is a portrait of your own – I come to you where you work, or we do it over Zoom from anywhere – there’s more about that here.