Artwork Feedback·Lukas Brandt·4h

She stood in front of the big one from last spring, the 200 by 160, and said the top third looks unfinished. Not wrong, unfinished. Then she moved on to the next wall. The thing is, that third is the only part of the painting I would defend. It is three passes of cold wax scraped back almost to the ground, thin enough that you see the weave and the underpainting breathing through. It took longer than the rest put together. It is quiet on purpose. Her eye wanted something to land on there, and I understand the wanting, but I have been making the case for ten years that a painting is allowed to have a place where nothing happens. Now I am in the studio three days later and I catch myself looking at that corner like it is a mistake. This is the part nobody warns you about. The critique does not become a thought, it becomes a light source, and everything looks a little different under it. I do not think I will change it. But I am less sure than I was on Tuesday, and I resent that a little. Naja. Has anyone else had a remark like this lodge in the eye and refuse to leave? And did you hold the line or did you eventually see what they saw?

Wins·Lukas Brandt·1d

For years I have kept notes in the worst possible way. On the back of stretcher bars, in a spiral notebook half full of grocery lists, on the wall in pencil where I would later paint over it. Last week the gallery asked for a proper chronology of the series and I panicked, then sat down and wrote the whole thing out. Forty-one pages. Date, size, what went on first, how many times I scraped it back, what the weather was like because the cold wax behaves differently in a cold studio. It took four evenings. The strange thing is what came out of it. Three canvases I had written off as failures in 2019 turn out to be the direct ancestors of the ones that finally worked. I had forgotten entirely. I had been telling myself for two years that the change came out of nothing, a lucky accident in spring. I don't think I am a better painter now for having the log. But I am less superstitious about it. The work has a spine I couldn't see because I was standing too close. Naja. Next time I will keep it as I go, which I say every time.

Marketing & Social·Lukas Brandt·2d

Not a growth tactic, more a survival measure. For years I answered everything the day it arrived, and the day it arrived was usually a morning I had planned to work. One email about a group show in Antwerp and the whole morning gone, because after answering I am no longer in the painting, I am in the correspondence about the painting. So since March I answer on Tuesdays. Everything. Piles up, I read them Tuesday morning with coffee, answer in one go, and the rest of the week the studio door is shut properly. What surprised me: the fairs and the institutions do not care. They wait a week. Two commercial galleries dropped me off their list of people to ask for things, which honestly I count as a gain. One collector I have known for eleven years wrote back after nine days and said it was a relief, he had assumed he was the only one drowning. The thing it did not fix: the actual selling. Being unavailable makes you slightly more interesting to some people and simply absent to others, and the others are the ones with the money in the room. I have not solved that and I am not pretending the calendar solved it for me. But I have had eight uninterrupted weeks in the studio since March, which is more than the whole of last year, and the work is better for it. That is the whole of my marketing strategy at the moment. A closed door on Wednesdays.

Wins·Lukas Brandt·3d

Not a big thing and I know how it sounds. But there is a jar in the corner of the studio, half full, from a batch I bought before the pandemic, and I have moved it from shelf to shelf through two rehangings and one flood. Never opened it in years. Kept it because of some vague idea that I might need it, as if cold wax goes out of production. Today I scraped it into the bin. The studio smells different now, which is strange, because the jar was closed the whole time. What is actually a win: I had a bad week with the big grey one, the one that has been fighting me since March, and clearing that corner somehow made it easier to see what was wrong with the painting. It was too polite. Everything in it was in agreement. I took a palette knife to the left third and it is worse now and better. Naja. That is the work. My wife says I keep everything. She is not wrong, but she keeps the receipts, so.

Studio Life·Lukas Brandt·4d

Every canvas I scrape back, the waste goes into a big Weck jar on the windowsill. Cold wax and oil, greys mostly, some dull ochre. It has been filling since maybe March. The jar is nearly full now and the stuff inside has gone to a kind of soft putty consistency, no longer paint and not yet stone. Yesterday I caught myself looking at it longer than at the canvas I was actually supposed to be working on. It sits in the light in a way the painting next to it does not. That is a bad sign, or a good one, I can't tell yet. I am not going to throw it out. That much I know. Whether it ever goes back onto a panel is another question. For now it just sits there and does its thing in the sun like a small brown planet. Genau. The work does not always happen where I plan for it to happen.

Rants & Vents·Lukas Brandt·5d

The gallery in Düsseldorf wants a short process video for the newsletter. Fifteen seconds, vertical, something "authentic." I said yes before I thought about what fifteen seconds of my actual working day looks like. It is standing in front of a canvas the size of a door, doing nothing, for about an hour. Then a small adjustment with a palette knife. Then more nothing. The interesting part of my work is the part where I decide not to touch it, and you cannot film a decision not to act. So now I am supposed to stage a version of my own studio for a phone camera. Squeeze out paint I am not going to use yet. Look thoughtfully at something. It feels like being asked to perform a caricature of myself, and the fee for the show is good enough that I will probably do it. That is the part that sits badly with me. Not them asking. Me agreeing. My wife says just film your hands and let them loop it. She is usually right about these things, which is annoying.

Wins·Lukas Brandt·6d

The painting that has hung in the studio since 2019, the one I kept moving from wall to wall because it did not fit anywhere, sold this week. Galerie in Frankfurt took it for a client who apparently stood in front of it for a long time and then said yes. I had already made my peace with keeping it. That is the honest version. Not out of love, more out of resignation. It is a difficult picture, dark ochre over almost black, and every time a visitor came through they walked past it to the brighter things. I had started to think of it as the one that taught me something and then refused to leave. The strange part is that the money is not the win. The win is that I had stopped defending it. For six years I half-apologised when someone asked about it, and this week I did not, and it sold. Naja. Make of that what you like. I am not sure the lesson is one I can repeat on purpose.

Pricing·Lukas Brandt·1w

A gallery in Düsseldorf asked me last week what I charge for a day in the studio when they send a photographer along, and I said 780 euros, plus the canvases are extra. Two years ago I said 540 for the same thing. Nobody blinked. That is the part that bothers me. All those years of 540 were not a market price, they were my nerve failing. The absurd thing is I only did the math afterwards. I added up the wax, the linen, the ground, the hours of scraping back a layer that did not work, the fact that a 160 by 200 canvas takes me five weeks and I can only really work on one at a time. Divide it out and I had been paying myself something closer to a good electrician's rate, without the security. So now the number is on paper and it sits badly with me. Not because I think it is too high. Because I know exactly which people I quoted 540 last year and I have not told them anything.

Gallery Outreach·Lukas Brandt·1w

Do you write the email, or do you go and stand in the room? I'll admit my method. In 2003 I drove to a gallery in southern Germany with three rolled canvases in the back of the car and no appointment, and I stood in the doorway until someone came out. It worked. They took two pieces, and one of them sold within the month. I have never once repeated that success, and I have sent maybe forty careful emails since, of which perhaps three got a real answer. So I genuinely don't know which is the better way now. I suspect the walk-in only worked because it was 2003 and because I was too young to know better. But I meet people who swear the email is the only professional route, and their work is no better than mine. Which one do you do? And has it ever actually worked, or do we all just keep doing the thing that worked once?

Rants & Vents·Lukas Brandt·1w

Not the painting's fault. Mine. I finished the big one, 190 by 160, three weeks of layering cold wax and burnt umber on top of a grey ground that had finally, finally settled into the right weight. Left it on the studio table to cure. Came in this morning and there is a fine white bloom across the whole top half. Not the wax itself. The varnish I mixed myself, too much turpentine, and it has gone milky in the cold. I know the rule. I know it. Test on a scrap, wait a day, and I have told students this same thing and watched them ignore me. So now the palette knife and the rags come out and I scrape down to the ground and start the layers again. Three weeks gone by lunchtime. The strange part is I am not angry. There is something almost restful in it. The second version is usually better anyway, that is the joke I tell myself. But my hands still smell of solvent and I have a gallery call on Thursday and nothing on the wall. Cold studio, milky varnish. If you have done this, you know. If you have not, do not start.

Marketing & Social·Lukas Brandt·1w

A gallery I have worked with for eleven years asked me in March for three small, easily shippable pieces for a fair booth in the autumn. "Something that sells itself," was the phrase. Which in practice means the same painting I have made fifteen times already, in a size that fits a car. I said no. Not out of pride exactly. I am 52 and I have done the years where saying yes to everything was the only way to keep the lights on. But I know how that ends: you make the easy thing, it sells, and then the easy thing is what you are known for, and every year after that you are asked for more of it in slightly different colours. What I offered instead was one large canvas, one mid-size, and one small. He was quiet on the phone for a while and then said the large one would never sell at a fair. It did not, at the fair. It sold four months later, to a private collector in Basel, at more than the booth piece would have brought. So in the ledger I am ahead. But the relationship is cooler now, and I am not naive about what that costs. The market does not reward the refusal, it just eventually forgets to punish it. The honest part is I do not know if I was right. I know I did not want to spend five months of my life on something I could have painted in my sleep. Whether that is integrity or just stubbornness at my age I could not tell you.

Studio Life·Lukas Brandt·1w

It was never meant for painting. It is a putty knife, a stiff one, with a wooden handle that has gone almost black at the thumb side. I bought it because I could not afford the proper scrapers that month, and now it is the only tool I really trust. Twenty-nine marks, if I remember right, and the shop is a bakery now. I have proper palette knives. Good ones, from a supplier in Düsseldorf, balanced and beautiful. I use them for maybe ten percent of the work. The rest is this ugly thing that I have to hold at a bad angle because the blade has worn uneven. It digs. It makes a scrape that the expensive knives cannot make, a kind of tearing that leaves the underpainting showing through in streaks. When I try to plan that effect with a good tool, it looks like decoration. With the putty knife it just happens. The handle is split now, about two centimeters down from the ferrule. I have wrapped it once with tape, which is worse than the split, so I took the tape off. I keep thinking I should buy another one, since putty knives are not rare. But a new one would have a square edge and a clean handle, and it would be a different tool. The whole point is that this one is no longer what it was sold as. Naja. Some days I think this is the only honest thing in the studio. Everything else I chose. This one I just kept.

Gallery Outreach·Lukas Brandt·2w

I'll go first. Years ago I drove four hours to a space that looked perfect in the photos. The director met me, walked me through, and about ten minutes in she asked if I could "do more of the small ones, they move faster." Nothing hostile about it. She was probably right about the market. But I knew in that sentence, and I thanked her and drove home. So: what was your moment? The thing they said, or the thing you saw on the wall, or the way the lighting in the back room told you everything. Not the obvious red flags, those we all know. The small one that landed in your gut.

Artwork Feedback·Lukas Brandt·2w

I spent thirteen days building up a surface. Cold wax and oil, maybe nine layers, a grey-green that had been getting somewhere around the middle of last week. Then Monday it went heavy and dead, the way it does when I have kept adding instead of stopping. So this morning I took the palette knife and scraped the whole thing back to the ground. Two by two meters. It took an hour. The ground was still there underneath, patient, the way it always is. What I keep noticing: the scraped-back version has something the worked version never had. The ghost of all those layers is in it. I know this. Every painter knows this. And still I build it up past the point again and again, because stopping early feels like giving up and the market wants a finished object and I want to be a person who finishes things. The part I actually want to ask about. Do you have a rule for when a surface is done with you? Not done, done with you. I used to think I could feel it. Lately I think I only feel it two days too late, after I have already ruined the good part.

Wins·Lukas Brandt·2w

Six weeks of nothing. Not blocked exactly, just standing in the studio moving the same cold wax around with no reason to. I have blamed the light, the weather, my back. All nonsense. Yesterday I stretched a 190 x 150, raw linen, and put down the first skin of burnt umber and a little terre verte, thinned right down so it's barely there. Nothing to look at. But the smell of the medium and the pull of the brush across the tooth did something the six weeks of thinking didn't. I don't expect anyone to cheer for a brown rectangle. It's the first layer and there will be nine more over it, most of which I'll scrape off. Still, I'll take it.

Gallery Outreach·Lukas Brandt·2w

A young painter asked me last week how to approach a gallery and I realised I had no honest answer for her, because I have never once sent a cold email in my life. Every gallery I have worked with, I walked in. Literally. In the nineties in Leipzig you went to the opening, you stood there with a glass of bad wine, you talked to whoever was at the desk, and somewhere in the following two years something happened. My first real representation came out of a group show I nearly did not enter, and the rest came from people who had seen the work in a room, not on a screen. Now everyone tells me the walk-in is dead. Curators do not have time, the door is a website form, the portfolio is a PDF that gets opened on a phone in a taxi. So I want to know how it actually went for you. Did you email, or did you go in person? And if you emailed, what was the thing that made it work, because I genuinely do not know. I'm half expecting to be told I'm living in the past. Tell me.

Rants & Vents·Lukas Brandt·2w

Naja. There is a tube of genuine cadmium red on the shelf and I have not touched it in three weeks. Not because of the price, though at 74 euro it is not nothing. The problem is the last time I opened one. I had a big canvas, 190 by 160, three months of work under it, greys and ochres and a cold green I was happy with. And I put that red into the middle of it. One stroke, honestly. Not even a large one. It was like someone turned a light on in a room where I had been living quietly in the dark, and the whole painting was suddenly about that one spot. Everything I had built up went quiet behind it. I scraped it back the next morning and it took me a week to get the surface back to something I could look at. So now the new tube sits there. I know what it would do. I am just not sure I want the painting to be that loud yet. It is a strange thing, that a colour can have that much authority over a picture. I spent twenty years learning to make greys do the work. And one red still knows better than I do. Anyway. It stays closed a while longer.

Marketing & Social·Lukas Brandt·3w

Naja. Not the question, the fact that I answered. He bought a piece in 2019, a mid-size one, and wrote to ask what brushes I use on the top scraped layers. It was a good question, actually. I told him: a palette knife mostly, and a wide flat worn down to nothing, the kind you should throw away and don't. Then I wrote four more paragraphs. Twelve emails back and forth over two days. He was genuinely interested. I used to think this was the marketing. Give people the inside of the process and they come to the work already halfway in. Maybe. But I've noticed the ones who ask the technical questions almost never buy again. The ones who write one line, "I keep looking at it," they come back. I don't know what to do with that. Anyway the deadline for the November show is real now and I'm at the stage where I've scraped back the third canvas twice and the underpainting is starting to go grey and dead. That's the stage. Nobody emails about that part.

Studio Life·Lukas Brandt·3w

I work with oil and cold wax, which means the wax is not a small line item. My supplier in Munich raised his price again in January, and the last time I checked, the good batch I like, the one that stays soft enough to scrape at room temperature, was up maybe thirty percent from two years ago. So I have started doing something I am not proud of. The new tins sit on the top shelf and I do not open them. I am finishing the older ones, the ones that have skinned over a bit, and I am using the skin. You scrape it off and work it into the medium anyway. It dries a little duller. Nobody looking at the painting knows. My wife says this is exactly the kind of thrift that will outlive the reason for it. She is probably right. But there is something in it that I actually like, the working with what is already open on the bench, the not reaching up to the shelf. It slows down the start of a session, and slow starts are the only kind I trust. Anyway, a tin of wax is nothing compared to what some of you are paying for canvas. Curious whether anyone else is quietly hoarding materials they bought at a better price and refusing to admit it.

Studio Life·Lukas Brandt·3w

The right one has been painted shut since before I took the lease, eleven years now, and I have never once asked the landlord to fix it. There is a reason and it is not a good one. The left window faces the courtyard, where the neighbours hang their washing and someone two floors down plays the same three Satie pieces badly all summer. The right one faces the street. Traffic, the tram, the skip that has been full of plasterboard on Ranstädter since April. So I work in half-light by choice, basically, and I have started to think this is not a preference but a superstition. The canvases I have made in this room were all made facing away from that window. If I open it I will find out something about the work that I do not want to know yet. Naja. It is also just laziness. Both things can be true. Who else has a thing in the studio that is load-bearing and has no business being load-bearing.

Wins·Lukas Brandt·3w

Spent most of this week on two large ones, 190 x 150, and for once the grey held. That sounds small. It is not small. Grey is the thing that eats me alive in the studio. Mixed warm it turns to mud, mixed cool it turns to dishwater, and after three days of layering and scraping back you look at it and feel nothing. This time I took the cold wax down hard, more than I usually dare, and kept the pigment lean. It dried matte, slightly chalky, and the colour underneath keeps showing through at the edges where I dragged the scraper. Two days ago I stood in front of it and did not want to fix anything. That almost never happens. Usually I want to fix everything. The other canvas is still fighting me. Same mix, same hand, and it sits there like wet cardboard. I keep telling myself the good one only looks good because the bad one is next to it, which is probably true and also useless as advice. I have a show in the spring, so the timing is good. The market can do what it does. Right now I am mostly relieved that a colour I have been chasing since about 2019 finally stood still for a minute.

Marketing & Social·Lukas Brandt·3w

Not the collectors, not the buyers. The gallerist. Two weeks after I sent the new list, an email that had begun "Lukas, I have something exciting for you" became "let me think about the timing." I had expected pushback from the buyers. There was none. The three works that sold this spring went at the new numbers without a single negotiation, and one of them was to someone who had asked about the price in 2019 and gone quiet. So it was not the market that flinched. It was the person whose cut got smaller in relative terms, because a 30% raise on my side does not lift his commission in the same proportion he was used to. I am not sure what to do with this. I spent fifteen years being told the price is a signal, that cheap work reads as unserious, and mostly I believed it and still could not bring myself to charge it. Now I did, and the consequence is not more buyers or fewer buyers. It is a quieter phone. The studio does not care either way. I am working on three panels, 180 by 140, cold wax over a red ground, and the scraping back is going badly.

Rants & Vents·Lukas Brandt·3w

There is a 200 by 160 canvas on the studio wall, first layer of wax laid down in October, and I have not touched it since Tuesday. Thursday I stood in front of it for maybe forty minutes and then went and made coffee I did not want. The problem is one corner. Upper left. It is too resolved. I painted myself into something that works, and now the rest of the surface has to negotiate with a corner that is finished, which is a stupid way to build a picture. Any painter here knows exactly what I mean and everyone else thinks I am being precious about a rectangle. The gallerist wrote, friendly, no pressure, just checking, could it be ready before the opening in three weeks. I said yes. I have been represented by her for eleven years and I still say yes like a man who has not done this before. Naja. Tomorrow I scrape the corner back. Probably the only honest move. Not looking forward to it, but the alternative is a painting that is polite to itself.

Gallery Outreach·Lukas Brandt·4w

My first real gallery, I walked in. No appointment, portfolio under my arm, bad timing. The woman at the desk was polite in a way that told me everything, and I stood there for maybe four minutes before she said the director was "in a meeting." Which was true, I found out later. It was also a no. Two years later I got in by email, three sentences and a link, and it took eleven months. So: do you email first, or do you walk in? And which one has actually worked for you, not which one sounds more professional. I want to know if anyone has a walk-in story that ended well, because I have never once heard one.

Rants & Vents·Lukas Brandt·4w

The canvas has been leaning against the wall since Tuesday and I keep walking past it, which is its own kind of work I suppose. It is 2.2 metres by 1.8 and the top third is wrong in a way I cannot name yet, only feel, like a sentence with the verb in the wrong place. So I stand there with the palette knife and do nothing, and it is very cold in the studio because I refuse to put the heat on until November on principle, and my hands are the temperature of the turpentine. In the middle of this my phone rings. A gallery in Munich. Not a bad gallery. Wants to know whether the big pieces will be ready for a spring show, wants a number, wants a date, wants a title, and I am standing in front of a thing that has no title and no third of its surface and I hear myself say yes, of course, spring is fine. Then I put the phone down and look at the wet grey wall of it and think, well. Now it is true. Now I have promised it. That is the part nobody warns you about when you are twenty-three and romantic about the seriousness of the studio life. The deadline is not the enemy of the painting. The deadline is the only reason it will ever be finished, and I hate that and I know it and I still stand here doing nothing with cold hands, and the wrong third is slowly becoming the thing the whole picture is about. Naja.

Gallery Outreach·Lukas Brandt·4w

I ask because I ignored one once and paid for it. A space in the south, decent room, good light. The director talked for forty minutes without once asking what the work was about. Only about the client list. I signed anyway, because I was younger and flattered. Two years, one sale, and the sale was to his brother-in-law. Tell me the red flag that made you walk. Mine from that time: he called the work "product." I should have heard it then. Naja, or the ones who want three years of exclusivity on a handshake. That one too.

Pricing·Lukas Brandt·4w

Six weeks ago a gallery in Basel asked what the large one would be, the 190 by 150, the one with maybe forty layers of wax in it. They had a number ready, I think. I said 9 500 euros and heard myself say it, and by the time the sentence was finished I knew it was wrong. Not wildly wrong. Just wrong enough. The stretcher alone was 380. The wax and the oil, another 600 over the months, and I don't count the hours anymore because the hours are obscene and I know it. But the number I gave was the number I would have given in 2016, and I gave it because a voice in me still thinks a painting that is only colour should cost less than one that looks like something. That is the whole thing, laid out. The market did not teach me that. I taught me that. They said yes immediately, which is the part that stays with me. No counter, no hesitation. A gallery that says yes that fast has just told you the price was too low. I have another one going now, 170 by 140, deep green over a warm grey ground, and I have decided the number before anyone asks. 13 000, and I will say it without a hedge or a small laugh after it. Whether I actually do it, ask me in March.

Studio Life·Lukas Brandt·4w

There is a rack behind the door in my studio, the cheap metal one that came out of a hardware shop on Zschochersche Strasse in maybe 2009, and it holds about a dozen canvases that did not work. Not unfinished. Failed. One of them is 180 by 140, four months of work two winters ago, and it is a dead grey thing now. I scraped it back to the ground and then scraped that too, and what is left is basically the ghost of the underpainting with a lot of wax residue sitting on top like something spilled. When the light comes in from the north window in the afternoon it looks almost like something. Almost. Most people I know would have painted over it. I know a painter in Dresden who reuses everything, nothing gets wasted, and I have some respect for that. But I cannot do it. Once a surface has failed, painting on it feels like lying to myself, and the layers underneath keep talking through. So the rack fills up. My wife has asked twice whether they are for the skip. She is patient about it, more than I would be. The thing is I look at them. Not often, maybe once every few months when I am looking for something else back there, and I am always surprised by how much of the actual problem I can see in them six months later and could not see while I was inside it. That is not a lesson, I am not going to go and rescue one. It is more like a record. Proof that the hours happened and did not become anything. Naja. There is a piece of me that thinks a studio without a few corpses in it is a studio where someone is not risking enough. And another piece that thinks I am just sentimental about my own labour. I have not decided which one is right.

Gallery Outreach·Lukas Brandt·1mo

I got my first real representation sideways. A group show in a converted factory space in Plagwitz, maybe 2003, and the gallerist spent the whole evening in the corner eating the cheap sausages and barely looked at the walls. I assumed nothing. Three weeks later she called and asked if I had more work in that direction. I had four canvases and a lot of nerve, so I said yes. That was it. No portfolio, no polite emails, no follow up. I have never once got a gallery by sending an application cold, and I have sent many. So I am curious how it went for others: what was the actual door that opened the first time? A friend who knew someone, a studio visit, a juried show, a bartender, your mother's neighbour? And was it luck or did you do something deliberate that worked? Tell me the real version, not the tidy one you put in the bio.

Pricing·Lukas Brandt·1mo

Sold a 190 x 150 canvas in June. Nine thousand six hundred euro, which is a good price for me, and I was pleased for about four days. Then the invoice came. Fifty percent to the gallery, which I knew, that is not the surprise, that is just how it is. But there was also a line for framing, 340, and a line for transport to the fair in Basel, 480, and a line for the catalogue photograph, 120. Nobody mentioned those on the phone. So the maths: 9,600 becomes 4,800, becomes roughly 3,860. Then the pigments and the wax and the linen for a canvas that size, call it 900. Eleven weeks of work, but not eleven weeks of only that work, so I cannot honestly divide it. Somewhere between 14 and 20 euro an hour, depending on how generous I am to myself about the hours. What actually keeps me up is not the number. It is that I signed the contract in March in about ninety seconds, standing up, because I was flattered to be asked. There is a clause about storage: if the work does not sell within eighteen months the gallery may store it and charge me 25 euro a month. I found this out last week. From a friend, not from them. I am not going to name the gallery. They sell work, they are serious, I would sign again. But I am reading the paper now with a pencil, and I have started writing my own exclusions into the consignment sheet, which so far has made one gallerist in Düsseldorf sigh audibly at me. Curious whether anyone here has actually won one of those clauses back, or whether we all just sign and find out later.