A couple of years ago I did a portrait of someone, and they asked to buy it. I gave them the price. They pushed back – said they wouldn’t pay a tenth as much even for an oil painting, let alone a print.
I felt a wave of shame, as if I’d asked too much.
I’ve spent two years thinking about it, which tells you something.
I don’t want to price my work by the hour. But what they seemed willing to pay was roughly what I was paid in the early 1990s for one phone-based newspaper article. Three or four hours’ work, and not even a big story. I could do those in a morning and I did, dozens of them, and they were forgotten by the following week.
That was the number I was being offered for a portrait I’d travelled out of London to make, sketching, taking reference photos and notes, then doing the work afterward.
Over the months that followed I built my arguments.
Was the problem that, with prints, it’s easy to make copies? Perhaps, but I could make copies of an oil painting too, so that distinction doesn’t hold up. At some level you have to trust an artist not to knock off their own work, whatever the medium.
Maybe there’s something in the substance of oil itself. Pigment mixed with oil has drying properties that call for real technical skill. But that same pigment is what goes onto the archival paper I use for prints. It’s the same material, even if oil behaves differently. And if oil is itself the valuable element, then any jobbing decorator who paints a front door with oil-based paint should charge a premium.
The print was made on an iPad, from looking closely at someone for a long time and making decisions: where to place the Apple Pencil, what colours to use, how thick the digital brush should be, how hard to press. The same artistic judgements I make when applying watercolour to paper, oil paint to canvas.
With other people, I’ve offered to sign the print uniquely and dedicate it to them, which makes it unrepeatable – no one else’s ownership of it would make sense. In this case, I didn’t bother offering. The distance between us was too great.
I want to make pictures that people like to look at. Nobody has to buy the pictures.
But if the price doesn’t suit them, I don’t want to be told it’s wrong. Two years on, I’m still haunted by that conversation.