How Artists Price Original Paintings

Pricing is the thing artists talk about least and buyers wonder about most. I would rather just tell you how it works, because the mystery around art pricing does more harm than good.

The easy part is size. Most of my pricing starts there, because a bigger painting costs more to make. More materials, more canvas, more of everything. If that were the whole story, you could price a painting with a tape measure.

It is not the whole story, and the reason is interesting.

Once a painting gets past a certain size, the costs stop rising in a straight line and start climbing fast. A large canvas that is already stretched and framed is expensive and awkward to ship, far more than twice the cost of shipping something half its size. The frames themselves get more expensive as they get bigger. Then there is everything that does not show up on a receipt. Moving a large piece from show to show is real work. It takes up serious room in a booth, space where I could otherwise hang several smaller paintings. I can usually sell three smaller works for what one large piece brings, and the small ones are easier to make, frame, ship, and carry.

So why make the large ones at all?

Because a big painting does something a small one cannot. Hung right, on the wall it was meant for, it becomes the room. It is a statement a small piece can never make, no matter how good it is. That impact is part of what you are paying for, and it is real even though it does not fit on a spreadsheet.

And then there is the part that has nothing to do with size.

Color me Briefly is one of my favorite paintings I have ever made. I started it over a year before I finished it. In the beginning it was just a background color and a few basic shapes, and I could tell it was not ready, so I rolled it up and put it away. It sat like that for at least a year. When I came back to it I was in a good place in my life, and it came together in a couple of days. To me it is perfect.

You are not paying for those couple of days. You are paying for everything that made them possible. The years of learning how color sits next to color, how layers build on each other, when to stop. A painting like that can only happen because of all the work that came before it, work you do not see on the canvas but is in there all the same. Size gets me close to a price. Everything else is judgment, and judgment is the part that took years to earn.

If you have a question about the price of a specific painting, or want to understand the thinking behind one you are considering, just reach out.