This is something I’ve been thinking about and putting off writing about for a while because it involves admitting something that I think most people had probably already figured out before I did, which is that I was charging quite a lot of money for my collage prints.

Like. A lot.

£180 for a framed one. £135 unframed. And I had all these justifications lined up in my head, the way you do, where you go: well, it’s art, and art has value, and people pay this for prints, and I spent time on it, and giclée printing isn’t cheap, and, and, and — and all of that is sort of true but also sort of beside the point, which is that I make digital collages.

Which I love. I genuinely love making them. And I think they’re good? I think they’re actually not bad. I’m not saying that in a fishing-for-compliments way, I’m saying it because it’s relevant — this isn’t me suddenly deciding the work is rubbish and slashing prices out of despair. The work is what it is, and I stand by it.

But here’s the thing I had to finally be honest with myself about: the work is pop art energy. It’s bright and it’s a bit chaotic and it’s assembled from pieces of other visual things and it has this kind of joyful scrapbook quality to it that I’m proud of, but that quality is not, like, oil-on-linen-carefully-framed fine art energy. And I was sort of pretending it was, with the pricing, and I think that was confusing for everyone including me.

So. Flat £45. Unframed giclée print, posted to your door. Done.

That’s it. That’s the whole new system. No tiers, no complicated frame-or-no-frame calculator, no quietly hoping someone will just pay £180 because the website looks serious enough.

£45 gets you a proper giclée print — which means the colours are actually right and the thing will last — of whatever piece you want, sent to wherever you live in the UK. And that puts it in line with what other artists doing similar work charge, which is where it should have been the whole time, and honestly the moment I changed it I felt this enormous relief, like I’d stopped holding my breath.

I think there’s this thing that happens where you price something high because you’re hoping the price will confer the legitimacy that you’re not quite sure the work has yet. And that’s a slightly backwards way of going about it. The work either connects with people or it doesn’t, and making it harder to buy doesn’t make it more meaningful, it just makes it harder to buy.

Anyway. The prints are at backhouse.wtf/collage and they are £45 and I hope you like them. I have also started a Fb Group so people can connect without going to this website.