At What Price?
If you’re an artist, what do you feel when a fellow artist says, “I don’t want to sell my work”? If I’m being truthful, what I feel is a subtle mix of self-loathing, guilt, and shame. Because I do want my work to sell. I really, truly want my work to sell, sell, sell.
At the same time, I don’t want to be a sellout.
How do we, as artists, prepare to exchange the truths we feel, truths that cannot be described with words, for money? What is the difference between selling our art and crass commercialism? Where is the line crossed?
I want my work out in the world, not tucked under the tables in Studio 6B at McGuffey Art Center. I want my work seen by more people than me, my dear Ben, and anyone who happens to wander into McGuffey’s north lower level.
Last week, I attended an artist talk at Second Street Gallery in Charlottesville. Franchell Mack Brown is an ebullient artist filled with joy. The vibrant fiber and mixed-media work in her exhibit, Aww, Sookie Sookie Now, explores experiences from her childhood through color and texture. We see stories about her aunt’s quilt-making skills, her mother’s love of bowling, and her father’s passion for leatherwork.
Still, Franchell Mack Brown cautioned us not to be too protective about what we create. She asked us not to grow overly attached. Even though the pieces in her show at Second Street are intensely personal, Franchell does not consider the work fragile or precious. She does not cling to it because she understands that the memories will always remain. The stories will continue to exist no matter where the work lands. She knows that if someone wants to leave the gallery with one of her pieces, then the energy she expended creating that work must be exchanged for equal financial energy.
At the end of the day, I suppose artists create to process lived experience, to understand not only themselves, but the world around them better. At least, that’s why I create. And I suppose there’s a difference between creating work to sell and creating work that resonates so deeply with another soul that leaving it in the gallery no longer feels like an option.
That happened to a friend of mine recently. She saw a painting by the encaustic and oil painter Giselle Gautreau — again, this was at Second Street. The painting, green folds of ivy and kuzo, mesmerized my friend. Nothing else mattered. That painting was going to be part of her life. And so it was.
As an artist, that’s what I want: to create work that moves someone to say, “I can’t not have this in my life.”
And I guess I shouldn’t react when someone tells me they don’t want to sell their work. That’s their story. Their process. It has nothing to do with me.