When I returned to painting, I went through what I often think of as my second art school education.
I attended classes with tutor Peter Abraham and life classes at the Royal Queensland Art Society on the Gold Coast. One day Peter encouraged me to enter a few paintings in the upcoming Gold Coast Show.
I wasn’t entirely convinced. After a long break from painting, putting work out into the world again felt a little daunting. But I knew I had to start somewhere.
Nothing sold during the exhibition.
I did, however, come away with a few awards, which was encouraging.
About a week later, I received a phone call. One of the stewards had apparently given a visitor my number. He had seen one of my paintings at the show and wanted to know if it was still available.
It was.
He came to see it.
He liked it.
He bought it.
Not before a fairly serious haggling session, mind you. To this day I have never quite understood why people think they can negotiate the price of a painting when it already has a price tag attached to it, but there you are.
Eventually a price was agreed upon and we carried the painting out to his car.
As we were loading it into the boot, he asked a question artists hear all the time.
“How long did it take you to paint this?”
I suspected he was trying to calculate my hourly rate.
After the haggling, I wasn’t feeling particularly charitable.
So I answered him honestly.
“Twenty years.”
It did rather shut him up.
The funny thing is, it was true.
He wasn’t paying for the few days it took to put paint on canvas.
He was paying for the years of art school, the years away from painting, the years spent finding my way back, the countless drawings, mistakes, experiments and failures, and all the things that have to happen before a brushstroke finally lands where it should.
