How I Price Paintings, and Why Studio Prices Match the Gallery's
Undercutting the gallery that shows your work is the fastest way to stop having one.
Every painter selling both through a gallery and direct faces the same question within about a year, usually asked by a collector who has worked out that one route has no commission in it.
The Answer Has to Be the Same Price
If buying from the studio is cheaper, you have given every serious collector a reason to bypass the gallery, and the gallery a reason to stop showing you. Galleries carry the cost of exhibiting, shipping, insuring and introducing the work to people who would otherwise never see it. Undercutting that is short-sighted and, more to the point, rude.
Which Means the Studio Price Includes a Commission That Nobody Takes
When you buy direct, the price is what it would be at Galleri Nordhavn. I keep more of it. That is the only difference, and it is the correct shape.
Setting the Number in the First Place
Size, then time, then what comparable work by painters at a similar stage actually sold for — not what it was listed at. Prices go up when work sells consistently and a waiting list forms, never as an aspiration.
What I Do Not Do
Discount to close a sale. A painting discounted twenty percent is a painting whose price was wrong, and every previous buyer now owns something worth less than they paid. Holding the number is the only way the earlier collectors are treated fairly.
