Top 10 Paintings from My Show

During my show about ten days ago I passed out to visitors a sheet with thumbnail images of all the paintings and with a small graphic beside each allowing them to easily rank the painting on a scale of 1 to 10, according to which paintings they would be likeliest to buy. This gave me some feedback about what kind of thing people like in my paintings, more than would I get from looking at which paintings ultimately sold (eleven out of forty-two sold).

Even though I have not finished the ranking, a number of preferences have emerged which will influence my future work. People prefer:

Larger-size paintings
Clothed figures over landscapes
Landscapes over still life

Folks seem not to want nude figures for their homes, and in fact even though the largest paintings in the collection were top-ranked, the exception was one large nude. Some people really liked the still life paintings but the score was brought down by those who did not like them at all. There was more consistency amongst the landscapes, with most people agreeing that they liked the best among them. I was shocked that my self portrait came in first, especially since I almost did not include it in the show, thinking it unlikely to sell (which indeed it did not).

This was an interesting exercise. Without doing this survey, but looking only at sales, I never would have known that people liked my large paintings. The larger paintings were more expensive, and that is why they went unsold.