The Shock of the Sale
Do you know how it feels?
Just the other day I told you about a new painting I made with a new medium on a homemade rig that I constructed from material found in the garage. If you are a paid subscriber to this newsletter, you’ve seen it.
Since it’s been sold to a good home already…let me show you all.
I have mostly described process to you in the past. Often, the doing is the reward. Always, the WHY is more important than the what. Today, I want to tell you what selling one painting feels like.
We live our lives in fear of rejection. We are our worst critics. We are humble, even ashamed of ourselves, as judged by ourselves. We kill our own dreams and self-limit our capabilities through self-degradation.
Of course, this does not prove true across the breadth of our lives. Many folks have great confidence in parenthood…or…some know their job backward and forward…good piano players and great athletes…I’m good at math…etc.
I am certain, however, that in one or more aspects of your life, you are entirely sabotaging yourself. I know from experience. Sometimes is as simple as one statement from an adult during your childhood. Sometimes, it’s as pervasive as the fear of being uncomfortable. Sometimes it is generational. Often, whatever IT is, it is false or so easily remedied that upon finding the remedy it becomes comical.
I sold a painting this week. After ten years of selling paintings, the transaction still registers upon my internal Richter Scale.
Not just an elevated heart rate- a thunderous, cacophonous bolt of true joy. Bank error in your favor? Your first kiss? Your wedding? No. None of those.
It is the gravity of the matter that blasts me in the face.
There are no new plots to write in the world, but I make paintings that nobody in the world has ever seen or imagined, not even my conscious self.
The gravitas resides in the creations. The creation of me; and the creations of my toil. Nobody will ever make a painting like me. They can copy it, but they cannot replicate it. More importantly, they cannot imitate the synthesis of my body, my soul and my circumstances. More, they cannot do it because they were created as uniquely as I have been made.
Okay-so I said: we beat the living shit out of ourselves for one reason or another. Yet, I have an ability to do something you can’t do. Only I can do it. Only I would do it.
So how does it feel to sell a painting?
It feels like I put myself into a position to make an artwork that I did not know what possible, had never seen or dreamed about. I worked on it, and worked on it, and somehow I knew the steps to take along the way. Somehow I knew when it was finished. I look at it and think: where the hell did that come from? I certainly had help.
I identify with the painting like meeting a family member that you never knew about. You didn’t know of them, but you know them. You see you.
All this is a fine and good, rather imperfect, possibly trite, way to illustrate how I feel about what I produce. However, the shock comes later.
When that person comes along and says: I’ll take it.
Every time it happens, my mind hollers: “Really? Bullshit.”
Surprised elation follows. I made something that didn’t exist with some tools and some paint and now: somebody wants it in their home!!!
I can never get over it. It is not a color palette they are buying or a size, but me. They are buying my insides. They are seeing my soul. They are taking some responsibility for all the mistaken paintings I made in the past. They are buying me.
They are buying me for what they see of themselves. Connected.
I think these energies are the unseen world that we’ll see in the end of days. God made us unique. We have souls and spirits and alternating currents that connect us like a multi-dimensional power system. Like ingredients in Beef Stew.
I find joy in the process of making paintings. I find wonder in the outcome of the powers that work through me. I find God in the connection between myself, the painting and the viewer. And possibly, that is what we are both observing in the painting, maybe God is the common denominator, that we are mistakenly identifying as the similarity between us. Maybe we are recognizing the fingerprints of God in the art and on one-another.
It reminds me that all that fear and self-flagellation is an abomination upon what we actually are. Children of God, imbued in his likeness, unique in our abilities. When we take our negative thoughts away, we are capable and special…just like mom told us.
Pax
Jason