As time moves on and my piece grows, the inevitable conversation comes up over and over – am I going to sell the individual portraits at the degree show? What a great idea I’ve had, I’ll make a killing, earn loads of cash. Obviously insinuating that this is what I’d planned from the start. Hmm… When some fellow students first said this I was quite shocked. Not at the fact of the matter, more that it was really the farthest thing from my mind. Sure all work is potentially for sale at these shows, but I hadn’t really thought that my peers or their families might want to buy their portrait … as they are suggesting. Naïve? Probably. But of course there’s an obvious dilemma here. I see the piece as a whole. I don’t see each portrait as an individual piece of work and in fact feel that, looked at in isolation; they don’t have the same power as I hope/intend that they have when they’re all together. The thing is: if I refuse to sell an individual painting to eager parents/partners or the buying public at large, am I declaring that they are not worthy, are they not my intended audience…. and equally if I choose this route and sell say 1, 2, 10, 20 pieces, where does it leave the remainder? The piece is no longer whole; it can no longer work as it was originally intended. I don’t know about you, but this is going to really be my first foray into selling my work. Equally this is my degree show work, a seminal piece on which to hopefully launch my artistic career. I don’t want to get it wrong. This has to be carefully thought out. While I may not want to sell it in piece size chunks, the likelihood of selling it as a whole is pretty slim, isn’t it?! I don’t know. We may think, we’re artists, we should just create art as best we can and not go into the nasty buying and selling world that is the art market, but let’s be realistic here, we still have to eat! We still have to live.
What a rant! As you can tell I’ve been giving this some thought. It may just be irrelevant anyway, but it has to be considered in order to deal with any eventuality that may arise. Solutions to consider: (a) don’t sell (b) only sell as a whole piece (c) sell new commissions of individual portraits as required, so the original stays intact (d) sell individual portraits if interest is there and not worry about it (e) sell individual portraits and replace with a blank coloured square – the piece stays intact, albeit it morphs into a new state of being as it changes over time when/if parts are sold…..
