Standing in Streets Sketching Doors

Last week I wrote about how I price my work. The formula, the hourly rates, the honest data behind the numbers. That blog is about what I can put a price on.

This one is about what I can't.

There is a door in Santo Spirito that took me forty minutes.

I was waiting for someone who doesn't know what on time is. I had an airbnb in the village, alone in it for the first time that trip, and I went outside for a smoke and propped myself against the wall with a cigarette in one hand and my sketchbook balanced in the other and drew the door across from me.

It was old and beat up, sea blue paint worn from the salt air, flaking off to show the grey broken slats underneath. The kind of door that has been there long enough to stop caring whether anyone notices it. It wasn't trying to be beautiful. It just was, in the way things are beautiful when they've been through enough to stop pretending otherwise.

There is no price for that afternoon.

Not for the specific quality of Italian light on flaking blue paint. Not for the forty minutes of being fully inside my body and my hand and my eye at once. Not for standing in a village that felt like Whoville and letting the salt air do what it does to skin that has been up north too long. Not for the way a stranger nodded at me as she passed, understanding what I was doing without asking.

These are the things that live outside the formula. They do not cash out at the door. They do not become line items. They do not raise or lower the price of the eventual paintings that come from them.

They just build the artist quietly, one afternoon at a time.

Buyers do not read a price tag and calculate my hours. They stand in front of the work and feel something, and either that feeling moves them to bring it home or it does not. What I hope they feel, when it lands, is some of what I felt standing in Santo Spirito that afternoon, drawing a door that was not asking to be drawn.

That is the unpriced part. It comes out later, in the work, when it is ready.

The door is still there in Santo Spirito. Still flaking. Still blue underneath the grey, worn from the sea air, not apologizing for any of it.

Some things you cannot put a price on.

Jackie