I started out as a happy painter about 10 years ago, under the comforting and protective wing of the educational institutions in Slovenia (with tax-exemptions, free healthcare and subsidised food and even living, we probably have one of the best systems in my opinion).

Apart from the obvious misunderstanding I held on to firmly that connections and people are more or less unimportant if our work is good enough, I also thought that all it took for me to go full-time with my art after I leave the Academy, was to be good at my craft… I was in for a surprise!

I got a few shows by just applying to any open call I could find and understand without the need for Google to translate the page, and things did seem quite positive at the time — I even sold a few works to some of my friends’ families (poorly priced, but they were my friends so I never did mind).

But then I got the big news: A wealthy collector — appearing out of the blue, coming all the way from northern Germany — was interested in my work. He and his personal gallerist came to our Academy to take a look around and the news of their arrival spread throughout the whole school; he was interested to buy!

I was ecstatic. I couldn’t believe it, this was the big one and I could tell it was all uphill from hereon! The gallerist even somehow managed to get my cell number and called me to remind me of preparing a price for the work, a few days before our meeting in my atelier) and I decided to go to my trusted professor to help me figure out the price and ask him for advice on how such sales actually work.

But do you want to know what happened?

I sold the work for about 5% of what I could’ve gotten, because I had never sold anything as large  and consequently had no feeling for the price (my professor turned out to be a publicly funded artist that probably sold 30 works in his life and recommended the price to be around 200€-400€ for one work — about 1m x1m in size).

But I blame myself; the main issue was that I was used to 50€ sales and even 100€ seemed quite the deal to sell a work on canvas (usually small paintings, about 30  x30cm)  — and these collages were on custom made ply-wood constructions, took 10x the time to create (compared to my paintings) and just the adhesive I used cost me 40€ per work and that was the lowest of the expenses (the wood was about 100€)!

Because I had no plan, I relied heavily on other’s opinions and never questioned them that much, and the pricing model I used to structure the prices for my work even after I started to get a few consistent sales was winging it and hoping for the best.

Sadly, unlike birds that wing it and because of god knows what miracle of genetic memory usually learn to fly by jumping from their nests into oblivion, we humans don’t seem to have cultivated price-setting and expense-calculating genes over the millennia (or if we did, they evaded me and I got GERD instead) to become activated the second we enter a bazaar or get an interested customer inquiring about our work.

So, tomorrow we’ll focus on direct sales and the different ways we can structure our prices, so that regardless of what situation we’re in, even if we’re talking about a hypothetical commission, we can know exactly how much a work would cost to not only make us a good return, but to be in line with all the other works we have sold.