Pricing artwork can get tricky at times.  You've probably heard this familiar phrase: "It's only worth what someone is willing to pay for it!"  I usually get comments encouraging me to raise the prices on my paintings, so it catches me off guard when someone asks why one is priced so high.  

 

I remember a particularly tense negotiation at a festival that ended with me turning down a sale.  A woman had cash in hand and wanted one of my layered wet-and-dry pastel paintings.  It was a piece I had already lowered the price on for the festival-- I tend to mark things down at such events, since I don't have to pack and ship anything.  I get a lot of delightful comments on this specific piece, but it hasn't sold.  It could have sold that day.  I chose not to let it go.

 

As she was talking, I could tell that this woman was more interested in the act of bargaining itself than the painting.  She even left the booth for a period of time and returned later with the cash out and visible.  As a shopper who occasionally doesn't mind a little friendly negotiation, I know the fun of getting a deal for a low price.  It doesn't feel right to me to do this aggressively for something unique and handmade though.  It didn't feel right to be the recipient of it.  I just gave her a final "no," and let her walk away.

 

I think it came down to which of us valued that painting more.  In the end, I did.

 

How did I determine the value of that particular painting?  Often, artists will use a combination of time spent, cost of materials, and the education and experience that led up to the creation of a particular piece.  These are valid and concrete ways to determine the value of a painting, and are probably the easiest for buyers to understand.

 

I'd like to include an additional component: the personal cost of making those unique pieces.  This is something people buying artwork might not be aware of, but I feel it should be shared.

 

I'll use the teaching side of my artist experience as an example.  The amount on a check I get for a lesson might seem large for the amount of time I physically spend in front of a class.  If I broke down the costs leading up to the lesson, it would actually seem like a smaller amount for the time spent to get to the point of teaching the actual lesson.

 

The obvious costs are materials (which I bill for) and sourcing, organizing, and storing those materials, along with packing them and arranging them in a user-friendly way for the class.  There's actual setup and cleanup, the amount of time which varies with each lesson.  There's preparing the lesson itself, which takes me several hours since I make a demo piece, pace the lesson for beginners, and prepare promotional samples of the artwork.  There's travel time to and from the lesson.  All of these costs can be broken down into categories which factor into that final total.

 

The personal cost, though, is something different.  Teaching can be fun, but stressful.  Although my kids are older now, there was a time when I would have had to arrange childcare.  As a mom, coming home in the evening dead tired with sore feet often meant bringing dinner home with me as well, which can get expensive.  (I grew up with a single mom who always worked.  I know many mothers go through this daily and am thankful I don't have to).  I'm always grateful for the opportunity to teach when it works out, but I do have to factor all these costs in, which means charging more than sounds comfortable on the surface.

 

Now apply those same potential personal costs to painting: some artists pay for studios.  Maintaining websites, social media, and print-on-demand sites to promote artworks cost time and money.  Time spent painting is time spent away from other possibly income-producing activities, which turns into a material cost.  If a painting took hours of concentration, time away from a job and family, and kept an artist mentally preoccupied with completing the work, shouldn't those "silent" costs be factored in as well?

 

Like teaching, I'm grateful for the opportunity to sell a painting.  The money supports my family, and there is the added joy of knowing someone else valued my teaching experience or artwork enough to pay me for it.  If a particular painting costs more than the rest of my pieces, it's because I'm not just calculating the obvious costs: the hours it took to paint it, the cost of materials, and the size of the painting itself.  I'm including some of those less obvious, but deeply personal costs to produce that particular painting, and am overjoyed as an artist when someone values the painting enough to acknowledge those costs and purchase it to hang on their own walls.