Twice in the last month, someone has paid my asking price for a portrait.
I mention this because I’ve written before about the opposite experience – being told the price was absurd, then spending an unreasonable amount of time building arguments in my own defence. Arguments about copies, about pigment, about jobbing decorators painting front doors with oil-based paint.
They were good arguments. I was quite pleased with them.
Nobody has ever needed to hear one.
The temptation, having named a price, is to keep talking – to explain the travel, the sketching, the reference photos, the hours afterwards, the archival paper.
All of which is true, and sounds like apologising. An explanation offered before anyone asks for one suggests that – well, that you expect to be challenged.
What actually changed had nothing to do with reasoning. I said the number, and then I didn’t say anything else.
***
Nine years ago I wrote a piece asking what anything is really worth, after spending four hundred pounds on an online course I’d previously have considered insane money.
I was fascinated by how slippery value is – how the same work can be free, or paid for, or premium, depending entirely on who’s doing the asking.
A lot has changed, in my career, when it comes to value. Great socio-economic forces have been at work too, grinding entire industries to dust and raising up new ones.
But this is also to some extent about an individual’s strength of mind, a willingness to say a number and let it stand.
Anyway. Two portraits, at the price I wanted. I don’t take that for granted.
On to the next one.