I find myself in what I assume to be a regular problem for many artists. How much can I (should I) charge for one of my pieces? I guess that one version of the answer is, “What you can get away with.” While this seems to be, superficially, a sound policy, in fact it evades the question. It is still necessary to put a price on a piece of work at the point when it is exposed for sale. If it sells, does this mean that perhaps it might have been possible to ask for more? If it doesn’t sell, does this mean that prospective purchasers didn’t actually like it, and therefore a reduction in price would still not have achieved a sale?
I have operated in the past with a kind of rule-of-thumb, or slide-rule. A good point at which to begin the process, I believe, is for me to charge £1 for every square inch of the picture. Given the amount of labour that goes into a piece, and the fact that the cost of framing is subsumed in this figure, it strikes me that I am offering a bargain. Certainly, the last picture I sold was priced according to this formula, so it is evidently not wide of the mark.
Ah! But what about gallery commission? Should I add this on top of the base rate, or should I deduct this from it, and treat it as a charge that is legitimately requested in return for their services? In short: does the purchaser pay the commission, or do I? Hmmm! I’m not sure about that one. I can see an argument on both sides. It does make a very considerable difference.
Although I received a reasonably generous price for the last picture I sold, I have been frustrated for some time by the slow rate at which I can find buyers. So today I decided that I would do an experiment. A gallery not far from where I live sells work by several local artists, and I decided to check out their web-site, looking at the prices being asked for work by two colleagues, one of whom is quite a well-respected and well-known painter. I was shocked by the low prices that the gallery is asking for their work. Frankly, I would not have been surprised had the list prices been doubled. At this point I think that it is necessary to factor in the importance of locality. The Bradford area is, generally speaking, quite a low-income region. I am pretty certain that had these works been on sale in Leeds, or even more so in London, they would have been a great deal higher.
It will be interesting to see how things go with the two exhibitions of my work that will take place in April. One of them I am treating the I am treating as an auction, in effect, and asking people to bid for the work on show. The other one will follow the more common practice, in which I will declare the prices of work. Watch this space.