The Painting That Wouldn't Sell

 "The market corrected me."

The Painting That Wouldn't Sell

My “Winter Tree" painting had been sitting in my shop for a while. Nobody touched it. I finally put it on sale at $35 and still no one looked at it.

I had painted it during a Fort McMurray deep freeze. The kind that seeps into your bones and it physically hurts your face every time you go outside. If you ever felt anything minus thirty or below you know what I'm talking about. It's the kind of cold that makes you question the life choices you made to get there. As an artist who loves simply sitting outside and drawing or painting you can see how this could hinder my practice. But it was too cold, no chance of plein air. So I did what any cabin bound artist would do, I painted what was visible from the window. A small tree. Nothing dramatic. Just the tree that lives outside my window and the particular quality of light that a deep freeze produces, that flat, muted, slightly blue stillness that people who have never lived in the north don't fully understand.

I originally listed it at $40 because it's watercolour and I don't fully trust my watercolour skills yet. That's the honest reason. Not the production cost, not the time, not the quality of the work. My confidence in the medium set the price, not the painting. Every day it sat unsold, It reinforced that idea in my head that I was valid in my thoughts.

Most of the time I am very objective with my art. I can take a step back and give it a fair assessment unbiased by my emotion attached to the piece. Most times it is easy enough to nitpick the things we find wrong about a piece as an artist but curating your eye to also see the technical merit and good parts of a piece is a harder skill to master. I don't have this eye for watercolour yet.  

This would be a piece I brought along with me to a show and after a comment from a fellow vendor I decided to price it at $60. I was hesitant but the buyer didn't negotiate down. Their comment on the technical aspects and what it made them feel made me realize I was judging my work from my insecurities and not from its merits.They saw the value without being prompted.

I keep thinking about that. The market told me something my confidence wasn't ready to hear. The painting was worth more than I believed it was. The deep freeze light, the quiet subject, the intimacy of painting what's directly in front of you when the world outside is too cold to enter, that landed for someone at a price I hadn't given myself permission to charge.

I'm still working on the watercolour confidence. But Winter Tree taught me that the medium's limitations in my head are not the same as the medium's limitations on paper.

Sometimes the painting knows before you do.

Jackie