Gallery Outreach·Camille Laurent·9h

A young painter I teach asked me last week how you know a gallery is serious, and I gave her the boring answer I give everyone: ask who else is on the walls, and then go look at how those paintings are hung and lit. Not the website. The actual room. My own test is smaller than that. I ask what happens if a piece doesn't sell in a year. The ones who answer without flinching are the ones I trust. The ones who get vague, I file away. What's yours? The question you always ask, or the thing you look at before signing anything.

Studio Life·Camille Laurent·10h

People think the cleaning is over when the water runs clear. For me that is the first cleaning, the one you do because you have to, and it takes four minutes. The second one is the next morning, before I touch anything else, sitting on the stool with a jar of Marseille soap and shaping each brush back into its point with my fingers. It is not really about the brushes. It is the only part of the day where I am not trying to make something. Twenty minutes of small repetitive motion, olive oil soap, the smell of it, and by the end my hands have stopped being nervous about the painting. If I skip it and go straight to the easel, I paint badly. Not always, but enough that I stopped testing it. A filbert with a bent ferrule is a dead thing, by the way. I say that with love to the people who keep them for sentiment. Throw it out. Now it is nearly midnight and I have nine brushes in the jar waiting for tomorrow, which is a good number. Ten means I was doing something with too many colours and should think about why.

General·Camille Laurent·1d

I wiped the same forearm four times this morning. Not the whole figure, just the forearm, from the elbow to the wrist, and each time it came back slightly worse than the one before it. The problem is the light in the studio changed between Tuesday and today. Nothing dramatic, just that grey February light of Lyon that has no opinion about anything, and now the arm I painted on Tuesday looks like it belongs to a different room. So I scrape it down and try again and it is still wrong. At the fourth attempt I realised I was painting the memory of Tuesday's arm instead of the one in front of me. Very humbling. The model comes back Thursday. I will probably do a fifth. Voilà. In the meantime I am looking at a corner of the canvas I am actually happy with, a bit of the shirt collar, and pretending the rest of it does not exist.

Pricing·Camille Laurent·1d

Someone asked me last week for a 30x40 cm still life, "something simple, just fruit." I quoted 1,400 euros and heard myself say it too fast, like apologising. So I sat down with the receipts, which I never do, because I knew I would not like it. Linen at 46 euros the metre, and I waste a good quarter of it cutting. The lead ground, the flake white, one tube of lapis I bought in March and have been rationing like it's medicine. Twenty-two hours at the easel, plus the sittings arranging the fruit and re-arranging it because the light moved. Framing in the rue Auguste Comte, 190. It comes out under 25 euros an hour. My student who does wedding photography gets 90. The thing is I will not go back to 900 for this size, and I know two people in this city who will do it for 600 and be happy. So the price is not really about the painting. It is about whether I want to be one of those painters. I do not. But I have been sitting on that 1,400 for three days, and I still have not sent the email.

Pricing·Camille Laurent·1d

For eleven years I charged 3,200 euros for a portrait, half-length, one figure, hands extra if they wanted hands. Eleven years, same number. It stopped being a price and became a fact of nature, like the weather in Lyon in February. Last autumn I did the calculation properly for the first time. Drying time with a slow-drying medium, the sittings, three of which the client cancels, the photographs, the drawings on paper before a brush touches the panel, the palette, the varnish, the six weeks of thinking about it while doing something else. At 3,200 I was making less per hour than the man who repairs my frames, and he does not have to be charming for two hours at a time. So I quoted 4,000 to a woman in Villeurbanne. Good project, an interior with her mother's armchair in it that I actually wanted to paint. She wrote back that it was above what she had in mind and thanked me politely. I felt sick for two days. Then I felt fine, and then better than fine. Because I realised the old number was not a price, it was a fear with a number attached to it, and I had been paying that fear in hours of my life. The next one, a man in the sixth arrondissement, did not blink at 4,000. I spent the extra 800 on a better panel and a lot of cadmium I did not strictly need. I am not telling anyone to double their prices. I am telling you that the number you are scared to say out loud is probably the correct one and the fear is just the fear.

Rants & Vents·Camille Laurent·2d

She's fifteen, she knows. It was sitting there, she needed something "precise," and now there is a crust of PVA halfway up the belly of a Raphael 8404 I have had since my atelier years. I've been soaking it for two days. It is not coming back. The point is gone and the hairs have splayed out like a broom. The thing is I can't even shout properly because I remember being fifteen and doing exactly this to my father's things, and also because she was proud of the project, and also because a brush is a brush. But it is not only a brush. You break in a good brush over years. It learns your hand. That one knew mine. She offered me her pocket money. I said no and then went and sat in the studio for a while feeling stupid about how much it bothered me. Anyway. It's in the jar with the ruined ones now, the graveyard jar. If anyone has a trick for reviving a sable that has been abused with glue I will hear it, but I suspect I am just going to buy a new one and be sad about it for a week.

Artwork Feedback·Camille Laurent·2d

I need to say this out loud to people who will understand. There is a shoulder in the interior I am working on, a woman seated at a table with a window behind her, and I have repainted that shoulder four times since Monday. The problem is not the shape. The shape has been right since the second pass. The problem is that in getting it right I kept softening the edge against the wall behind it, wet into wet, because every time it looked a half millimetre too hard I reached for the brush instead of leaving the room. Now the paint there is about a centimetre thick in places and the edge has gone to mud. It reads as fuzzy, which is worse than hard. Hard is at least a decision. Classical training gives you a lot of beautiful words for edges and none of them help when your hand is nervous. So tonight I am scraping that shoulder back to the ground with a palette knife, which will take two days to dry properly, and then I will paint it once. One pass. Then I put the brushes down and go and eat something. Anyone else have a place on a canvas where the number of attempts has become the actual subject?

Wins·Camille Laurent·3d

I've had a student since October, a woman in her fifties who spent her whole life in accounting and paints like someone who has never been told a thing is good enough. She had the hardest time with the first lay-in. Everything she did, she wanted to finish immediately, blend it smooth, make it look like a photograph of a thing. I kept telling her: ugly now, beautiful later. She did not believe me, which is healthy, honestly. Tuesday she brought in a cast study, a plaster foot, and the grisaille was correct. Not pretty. Correct. Values sitting in the right place, the halftone where it belongs, the edges soft only where the light actually turns. She was almost apologetic about it, said it looked "unfinished and dirty." I told her that is what an underpainting is supposed to look like, and she went very quiet, and then she said, "oh. So I've been painting the wrong part of the process for forty years." That's the win. Not the foot. The forty years. I'm going to let her glaze it next week and I'm a little nervous, because glazing over a good grisaille is like putting a coat on a child and sending them out the door. If she overworks it I'll be sick. But she earned it.

Wins·Camille Laurent·3d

Two hours this morning on the north window with a blade and a bucket, and I am not proud of how long it had been. I had convinced myself the grime was part of the light, a nice softening, atmospheric. Bof. It was just dirt. The figure I have been fighting for three weeks is sitting in the corner on the easel and now the shadow side of her jaw is a full value colder than what I painted, and the plane I kept "correcting" was never wrong. I was correcting against a dirty window. The correction I made is small, maybe four strokes, and the whole head reads now. I feel stupid and also light. Voilà. If you have not washed your glass in a while, this is your sign.

Studio Life·Camille Laurent·3d

The heating in my studio is a joke, an old gas thing that takes two hours to do anything, so from November to March I paint in the cold. I used to hate it. Now I think it's the best thing that ever happened to my glazing. Cold makes the paint stiffer, so I work the first hours with a loaded brush and very little medium, thin and dry-ish, and I get edges I could never get in a warm room. By the afternoon when it's finally tolerable I'm doing the soft passages anyway. So the day has a shape whether I plan one or not. The problem is the hands. I have a fingerless glove on my brush hand, a fingerless one on the other for the palette, and a scarf I will not describe. My daughter saw a photo and asked if I was homeless. She's fifteen. This morning it was eleven degrees in there. I did a passage of a forearm and it was the best thing I've painted in a month. Then I went inside and drank a coffee with my hands around the cup like a peasant. Curious whether other people's spaces impose something on the work like this. Not the romantic version, the annoying version that turns out to be useful.

Rants & Vents·Camille Laurent·4d

Two hours sitting in the studio with the easel set, the north light lovely after the rain, and a text at 10h15 saying she had "a thing." That is the word. A thing. I paid her the 60 anyway because I'm not going to be the person who punishes a twenty-four year old for having a life. But I want to say out loud that a figure session is not a shift you can drop. I had the whole morning planned around the turn of her shoulder against the window, I'd mixed the ground for it Tuesday, and now I have a half-toned canvas and a free afternoon I didn't ask for. The problem is not the money. It's that I can feel myself already planning the next one around the possibility that it won't happen. That is a very bad way to make a painting.

Gallery Outreach·Camille Laurent·4d

I walked in. Badly, the first time, with a wet canvas and a folder of photographs, and the woman at the desk was very kind about it, which was somehow worse. The second time I did it properly: called first, asked when was quiet, came back with six photographs and nothing wet. That one turned into a real conversation, and eventually into a show. I still think a letter is better for some galleries, but I don't trust a gallery that won't let you stand in the room and look. So which is it for you, cold email or the door? And what actually happened?

Studio Life·Camille Laurent·4d

Opened the old tube yesterday, the one that's been living in the tin at the back since I don't know when. 2009, probably. Cadmium red, and the oil has separated so badly the top is a rubbery disc I could have peeled off whole. I did peel it off, actually. Took a minute and felt oddly satisfying. Underneath it was still good. Perfectly good. Which is the thing nobody tells you when you buy your first tube and think it will go off like milk. Lead white, cadmiums, the earths, these things are practically immortal. The paint outlives the painter. Anyway I was painting a hand, one hand, all morning, and that red is exactly the note I needed at the knuckles. So the moral of the story is that I am a hoarder and it pays off roughly once a decade. Interested to know how old the oldest tube in your box is. I suspect I am not the record holder.

General·Camille Laurent·6d

There is a small head study hanging next to the door in my studio, and it is not good. Dead flesh tones, the jaw runs away from me on the left side, the whole thing looks like it was painted by someone who had read about painting. I did it in February in a bad mood and I would not sign it. I keep it there on purpose. My students ask about it constantly, thinking it is a lesson, and I tell them the truth: it is there so I stop expecting every session to arrive somewhere. I spent my thirties waiting for the good mood to come back before I would touch the brush, and the good mood never comes looking for you. Now I have a bad painting on the wall to remind me that the work happens anyway. Also it is honest. Everything else in here is either finished or in that flattering state where you still believe in it.

General·Camille Laurent·6d

I opened a tube of cadmium red light from a batch I bought in 1998, half dried, and the pigment still knocks the new tube sideways. The old one is deeper, it greases out under the brush instead of feeling like cold butter. I have three tubes left and I ration them like a fool. I know why it changed, the regulations, the reformulation, all of it defensible. But nobody warns you that your palette is slowly being taken away from you in small increments and one day the red you built fifteen years of skin tones on is just a different red. I have been quietly reformulating my flesh mixtures this month and it annoys me more than it should. The old atelier taught me to know my materials like my own hands. Nobody taught me what to do when the materials change under me. Anyway. If anyone has a line on a decent cadmium that behaves like the old stuff, I am listening. Otherwise I will be here, hoarding.

Gallery Outreach·Camille Laurent·6d

Not the rejection, the sentence. The one that stuck. Mine came from a woman in Paris who looked at three of my canvases for a long time and then said, "You paint the light very well. Now paint something that is not about the light." I was furious for a week. It took me two years to understand she was right, and I still hear it when I catch myself making a beautiful nothing. So what is yours? The one that stung and then turned out to be useful, or the one that stung and still stings. Tell me which.

Gallery Outreach·Camille Laurent·1w

Not the dream, the actual thing. The first yes. For me it was a group show in a small space off the rue Burdeau, and the yes was: one painting, hung in a corridor, next to the toilets. I signed a paper that said nothing much. I was so happy I could not eat. It took me four more years to get a wall in a proper room. I ask because I think we all remember the yes as bigger than it was, and the telling of it helps the people still waiting for theirs. So what was yours, in plain terms. One piece or ten, one week or one month, a corridor or a window. And how long between that first yes and the second one.

Studio Life·Camille Laurent·1w

I spent a stupid amount of yesterday making a chart. Six yellows, same brand, from the pale lemon up to the mars, each one spread with a knife on a piece of primed linen and left to dry so I could see what they do with the varnish on. By the evening four of them looked identical. Two I'll use until I die. Voilà, that's my Sunday. The real reason is I had a student who asked me why I don't use the lemon yellow for skin, and I started to explain and heard myself not being very clear. So I had to actually look. What I found is that the cheap yellow ochre in the middle of the range is perfectly good and I've been buying the expensive one for years out of habit. That is annoying. Ten years of loyalty to a tube that costs twice what it should because I liked the label. I don't think I'll switch. I know how the expensive one behaves, and that is worth the money to me even if it's not worth it to anyone else. But I wanted to say it out loud somewhere.

Gallery Outreach·Camille Laurent·1w

Not the yes you wanted. The first real one. Mine came from a small gallery in Lyon that specialised in something completely unrelated, and the woman who ran it had seen two of my paintings in a group show in the suburbs, three years apart. She called me about a wall, not about my work. I have never once got a yes from a proper submission, and I've stopped believing that is the normal route. So what was the actual door that opened for you? A friend, a client, a neighbour with a cousin, a fair, an open call, someone seeing a painting in a café. Be specific, it's more useful than the success stories.

Studio Life·Camille Laurent·1w

There is a half-finished interior on the easel since Tuesday, a corner of my kitchen with the window in it, and I have reached the stage where I talk to it. Not in a mystical way. Just out loud, small things, mostly complaints. Ah, non, that shadow is too cold. Come on. The window is the problem. I have mixed the glass four times. The first three were dead, flat, a hole in the wall instead of a light source. The fourth is closer and now the whole thing reads wrong, the room looks lit for a different hour than the one I meant, and I cannot decide if that is bad or if it is just not what I had planned. My teacher at the atelier would have said nothing. He would come, stand behind me, and after a while put one finger on the canvas somewhere I was not looking. That was the entire lesson. I miss it more than I expected to. Having someone whose eye you trust stand in your studio for forty seconds. So, out of curiosity. When you are stuck like this, do you repaint the thing that is wrong, or do you repaint around it until it stops mattering? I am asking because I have done both and only one of them was honest.

Wins·Camille Laurent·1w

Nothing dramatic. I finished the interior with the chair by the window, the one I've been circling since March, and when I stepped back it was simply done. No more to do. And then I signed it. Bottom right, thin, with the date. I realised halfway through the C that I hadn't put my name on a finished painting since 2014. The fallow years, I taught. Demonstrations, student work, corrections on other people's canvases. My own name went into the corner of nothing. I told myself it was modesty or discipline, but it was fear, honestly. A signature is a claim. You say: this is finished, this is mine, this is what I have to offer. The paint is still wet so it will sit in the studio for a week before I varnish. All afternoon I kept walking past it to look at the little dark mark in the corner, ridiculous. Bof. But voilà. Anyway. There it is.

Gallery Outreach·Camille Laurent·1w

Not the polite form letter. The real one. Mine: I sent a folder of photos to a gallery in Lyon, the kind with the good light and a director who smokes in the doorway. Three months of nothing. Then a note, four lines, saying my work was "sérieux mais un peu triste" and that their clients preferred something more gay. I read it eleven times. Then I went back to the easel, because what else. So. What was your first no? The words, if you still have them. I think we all keep them.

Pricing·Camille Laurent·1w

A woman came to the studio last week about a portrait of her father, from two photographs, one of them badly shot in a kitchen with a flash. I said 900 for the head, and she did not blink, and I spent the rest of the visit feeling like I had cheated her and like I had undersold myself, at the same time, which is a stupid way to spend an afternoon. The sitting itself is three hours. The rest is not. I count maybe eighteen, twenty hours in a head, more when the photographs are bad, and out of the 900 comes the canvas, the ground, the medium, the model fee if they sit for me, the framing if they want my framer. It comes out near 30 euros an hour on a good one. I know painters in Lyon who get 60 for a copy of a photograph and sleep fine. So it is not the number that troubles me. It is that I cannot say it without a small apology in the voice. I hear it. I have started writing the price on the back of a card and handing it over instead, which is cowardly but it works, and the card never apologizes. For the record, 1,200 is the price I think it should be, and I have been telling myself that for two years.

Wins·Camille Laurent·1w

A woman came Thursday to look at a little panel I'd half-forgotten, a corner of my own kitchen with the copper pot and the morning light coming sideways. Nothing grand, maybe 30 by 24. She stood in front of it a long time and then asked me, quite apologetically, if she could sit down. She cried, and not in a performing way. I've sold paintings before. It has never once felt like this. Usually it's a transaction, a receipt, a man in a good coat telling me it will go above the sofa. This time I felt like I was handing over a piece of my house. Now I have to varnish it and let it dry and I'm almost afraid to touch it. Stupid, at my age. But I keep going back into the studio to look at it, knowing it's not mine anymore. The strange part is the money is not what stayed with me. What stayed is that somebody saw the exact thing I was looking at at seven in the morning in my kitchen, alone, and recognized it.

Marketing & Social·Camille Laurent·1w

I used to reply to enquiries the minute they arrived, phone in the hand, paint drying on the brush. Somewhere I had absorbed the idea that a slow reply loses the client. Maybe that is true if you sell printed mugs. It is not true for a painting. Two weeks ago I was mid-glaze on a figure, the light on the shoulder was finally doing what I wanted, and the phone buzzed. I let it buzz. Answered the next morning, calm, with a proper answer about the piece and the price. She bought. Same thing happened again on Thursday, and again it did not cost me anything. I am not saying be slow to be mysterious, that is a marketing trick and it stinks. I am saying the speed I was performing was costing me something and buying me nothing. What people actually want is a reply that sounds like a person who was busy making the thing. Bof. Maybe I am wrong and I only notice the ones who stayed.

Marketing & Social·Camille Laurent·1w

Not a manifesto, just a thing that happened. I closed the account in the first week of January, mostly out of fatigue. Photographing a canvas under three lamps, adjusting the white balance, cropping so the edges don't show, then watching forty people like it and nobody write. Ten years of that and I was tired in a way sleep doesn't fix. Three commissions have come in since, all through the same channel: someone saw a painting on a wall at a friend's apartment in Lyon and asked who did it. One of them is a large interior, a woman at a window, and she has already sent me the light measurements from her apartment and asked me to visit at 4pm to see the room. That is worth more than any algorithm has ever handed me. I'm not saying everyone should quit. I still have a website with prices on it because I'm not a monk about this. But it's been two months and I have not missed it once. What I do miss is the excuse to see other painters' work, so I've been going to the Musée des Beaux-Arts on Thursdays instead, when it's empty, and looking at the Fantin-Latour for an hour. That has done more for my work than a year of posting ever did.

Pricing·Camille Laurent·1w

Raised my sitting fee from 400 to 650 euros in January. The sittings are three hours, live, in my studio, and then there are usually two more passes at the head before I'd let anyone see it. At 400 that was already charity, and I knew it, I just didn't want to say it out loud. Lost two clients over it. Both of them were extremely polite about it, which somehow made it worse. One wrote back that she "completely understood" and would "circle back when things settle." That was in February. It has not settled. But the ones who said yes, said yes without blinking. A man I've never met wired the deposit the same afternoon, no negotiating, no asking if the fee included the frame. So now I have fewer clients and less work and I'm painting better, and I still catch myself refreshing my inbox like an idiot waiting for the polite lady to come back. I don't know what the lesson is. Maybe there isn't one. Maybe the lesson is that I spent nine years pricing for people who were never going to pay me properly anyway.

Marketing & Social·Camille Laurent·1w

For years I kept prices off my site. Gallery habit, I suppose: you don't discuss money in public, the buyer asks, you reply discreetly, c'est ça. In March I finally put a range on the site, honestly, with a note that the small studies start lower and the large things are not cheap. What I expected: fewer inquiries. What happened: the opposite, and better ones. Someone wrote last week that she had assumed everything was out of her reach, saw the range, and bought a 24 by 30 study. I sold three of the small ones in two months. The questions I get now start at "is the light in this one from the window or from the lamp" instead of "how much." The thing I got wrong was thinking discretion protects the work. It mostly protects the awkwardness of the person asking. People want a number. Give it and you both stop circling. The part I still dislike: a few painters in my circle think it is vulgar. Maybe. But I spent a decade painting little and talking much, and I prefer this.

Gallery Outreach·Camille Laurent·1w

Something I'm still turning over. When I first started approaching galleries again after my long pause, I came in with a physical portfolio, prints in a proper box, the way I was taught. The gallerist barely opened it. He wanted to look at my phone. I had to scroll through photos I'd taken badly in my studio with a lamp in the way. So I'm curious how the rest of you do it. What do you actually put in front of a gallery at that first real meeting? A box, a tablet, a printed book, a link you send after? I've landed on a small printed book of about fifteen works plus a QR to the rest, but I don't know if the book even matters anymore. Tell me what you hand over and whether it worked. I want to know if I'm the last one still carrying paper.

Gallery Outreach·Camille Laurent·1w

Mine: a group show in a shared space, and the woman who ran it asked if I had enough work for a room of my own. No application, no dossier, no fee. She saw three paintings and said yes. That was eight years ago and honestly every real thing since has come out of some version of that, a person seeing the work in person and deciding. I've never once had a cold email work. Not one. Curious whether that matches anyone else here. So how did you get in the first time? Cold email, open call, a friend, a walk-in, a group show where someone noticed? And be honest, did it feel like it counted or like you got lucky.