Gallery Outreach·Margaret Hsu·1h

A question I keep turning over, because I have done both and come to a firm conclusion. Early on I did the walk-in. A small gallery in a town I was passing through, a folder of mounted sheets, and the owner was perfectly kind and entirely uninterested. Nothing came of it, and I spent the rest of the afternoon annoyed at myself rather than at him. Since then I have sent a short, careful email with three images and a link, and let the work wait. Two of my three representation enquiries that went anywhere began that way. I also keep the folder ready on the off chance. That is not the same as marching in with it. The reason I ask is that there is a certain kind of advice floating about that insists on the personal touch, that the walk-in shows initiative, and I have never once seen it work in the way people claim. I would happily be told I am wrong. Perhaps it depends on the sort of gallery. So: which one do you do, and what did it actually get you? I am more interested in the failures than the successes, if I am honest.

Marketing & Social·Margaret Hsu·1d

I teach two botanical illustration classes a year, capped at twelve students, and I have never once advertised them. Word of mouth has carried that for over a decade and I assumed it always would. Then this past term three students told me they found the class through an Instagram post I made about pigment lightfastness testing. I had completely forgotten writing it. It was a photo of my test swatches in harsh sun, nothing more. That unsettled me more than it pleased me, honestly. I have spent years treating my social media as a ledger, a record of finished work, and the one post that actually brought people in was a half-finished experiment I nearly did not share. There is a lesson in there somewhere about showing process over polish and I keep resisting it because it feels like capitulating to trends I do not fully respect. I am still not sure what to do with that information. The finished pieces get the likes, but the mess gets the students.

Studio Life·Margaret Hsu·2d

I shifted my worktable three inches toward the window last week, chasing the winter light, and it has thrown off my entire system. The water jar is now exactly where my brush hand lands when I reach for the palette. I have knocked it over twice. Twice in one week, which is twice more than in the previous eight years combined. The annoying part is I know precisely why it happened. My table has marks on the floor where the legs sit, worn into the boards over time. I ignored them. I thought the light would be worth it. It was not worth it. I have spent more time wiping up rose madder than I have painting. The real lesson, I suppose, is that a studio is not a room, it is a set of habits with furniture in it. I have moved the table back and I am trying not to be cross with myself for the lost week. Tomorrow I will repaint the page I ruined and we will all pretend it never happened.

Wins·Margaret Hsu·4d

I have been trying to paint a good English oak acorn since 2012 and I finally finished one that doesn't embarrass me. The trouble has never been the acorn itself. It is the cupule, the scaly cap. Every botanical artist who attempts it for real discovers that each scale is a tiny overlapping structure with its own highlight, and if you render every one faithfully it becomes a texture map, not a drawing. If you simplify, you lose the species. Quercus robur has those small, flat, appressed scales and there is no forgiving shortcut to them. The breakthrough was embarrassingly simple. I stopped painting scales and started painting light across scales. One wash for the form, then a dry brush that followed the contour instead of the individual scale edges, and let the paper do the rest. Thirteen years on the same subject is a strange thing to be proud of, but there is something to be said for the version of patience that keeps returning to the same fruit because you know you have not quite met it yet. I matted it this afternoon and it is hanging in my studio where I have to look at it. It can withstand that now.

General·Margaret Hsu·5d

I was reorganizing my supplies this week and counted eleven jars of water sitting around the studio in various states of use. Eleven. My husband walked in, looked at the collection, and asked if I was conducting an experiment. I told him I was, and had been for thirty years. People economize on paint, on paper, on brushes, and I understand all of it. But water is the variable I will not cut corners on. A tired wash full of lifted pigment is the difference between a leaf that looks alive and one that looks painted. When I teach, I make students change their water after every third wash and they always think I'm being precious. Then they see the two paintings side by side and they stop arguing. Distilled water for mixing, tap for cleaning, and never the two shall meet. I know it sounds like superstition. Maybe it is, at this point. But there's a particular blue-gray that only appears in water that's been sitting overnight, and I've learned to recognize it the way you'd recognize a bad mood in a friend. Some days I paint with it anyway, just to see what happens.

Pricing·Margaret Hsu·6d

I raised my base botanical commission from $450 to $550 at the start of the year. First real increase in three years, and I'd been charging that rate since before I even left the lab. In the first week I lost two regular clients over it. One of them wrote back a polite paragraph about their budget and I never heard from them again. Here's the uncomfortable part. I did the math on what the old rate actually paid per hour, counting the specimen sourcing, the prep drawings, the two rounds of revisions on each piece, and it worked out to roughly $13 an hour. Thirteen. I have former colleagues who make that as a graduate stipend while they sleep. And yet the moment I raised it, I felt like I was being greedy. I still haven't fully reconciled that. The clients who left were not the ones who complained about the work. They were the ones who got a good bargain for a decade. I have three commissions on the books at the new rate and two of them came from complete strangers who never blinked. I keep telling myself that says something, and I keep not quite believing it. When did everyone else stop flinching when they named their own price?

Marketing & Social·Margaret Hsu·1w

I raised my originals by forty percent at the start of the year. Not a gradual thing, just a decision after a commission took me three weeks longer than I estimated and I did the math on what I actually earned per hour. I expected some pushback, at least a pause before purchases. Nothing. The last three pieces sold within the same window they always have. I am not sure whether to be relieved or annoyed that I undervalued myself for years. The work did not change. The buyers did not change. Only the number did. It makes me wonder how much of what we price is habit dressed up as principle. If you raised rates recently, did it change anything measurable? I would like to know whether my experience is the rule or the exception.

Gallery Outreach·Margaret Hsu·1w

There's a gallery in my town that turned me down flat about eight years ago. Polite rejection, but firm. At the time I took it personally and questioned everything. Two years later that same gallery closed. I don't wish anyone out of business, but it turned out my work found a better home at a small natural-history museum instead, where the director actually understood the tradition I work in and let me paint what I paint. That rejection was a mercy in hindsight. Anyone else have a "no" that turned out to be doing them a favour? What did you do with the work they turned away?

Gallery Outreach·Margaret Hsu·1w

I once sat down with a gallery owner who spent the first twenty minutes telling me about her own failed marriage before she even asked to see a single piece. I sat there holding my portfolio like a fool. I still don't know whether to take it as a good sign, that she wanted a personal connection, or a bad one, that she had no real interest in the work. So let me ask you: what is the strangest thing that has happened when you met with a gallery? The question that threw you, the move that made no sense, the thing that made you decide on the spot one way or the other? My own answer is the marriage story above. I did not end up showing there.

Wins·Margaret Hsu·1w

Two months of roses hips on my studio windowsill, and every single one split or went soft before I could finish a study. Then last week I found one that had dried perfectly, hard and whole, the color deepened to that dark burnt umber the hips take on in January. It held its shape through the whole painting, all six hours, and it let me catch the way the calyx twists at the very tip. Small victory, but I've been chasing it since October. There is something satisfying about a specimen that cooperates. The paint is hard enough without the subject fighting you. Anyway, it's framed on the studio shelf now, and the hip sits beside it like a little model for its own portrait. I almost don't want to compost it.

Gallery Outreach·Margaret Hsu·1w

I've been thinking about endings lately. I've been with the same gallery for nine years now, and it's been a good run, but I've seen more than enough colleagues walk out over things that should've been caught early. Money that never reconciled, shows that got quiet, work returned with damage nobody owned up to. I'm curious about the other side of it: what made you finally pull your work from a gallery? Was it one clear incident or a long slow build of small things? And did you regret it, or was it a relief? For me, the closest I came was over a show where the framing was done poorly without my consultation and then the gallery charged me for it. I stayed, but I learned to put framing in writing. I sometimes wonder if leaving would have been the better lesson.

Gallery Outreach·Margaret Hsu·2w

I've been thinking about refusals. Twenty years ago a small gallery turned down a series of my botanical plates, politely but firmly, and the owner said one thing I have never forgotten: "Your work is accomplished, but it is not yet interesting." It stung terribly. It was also exactly right. That one sentence sent me back to the reference library, back to the herbarium, and changed how I approached every piece after that. I know most of us collect rejections like specimens. But has a gallery ever turned you down and given you something genuinely useful in the process? A piece of feedback, a correction of direction, even just a clearer sense of what you did not want to do? I would be interested to hear whether anyone else kept something from a no, or whether they were all just plain no.

General·Margaret Hsu·2w

I keep a small notebook where I log every pigment I've ever bought: the manufacturer, the series number, the lightfastness rating, the date I first mixed it, and a brush swipe of the color once it's dried. Forty-seven pages now, and this afternoon I counted. I have eleven different blues. That's not a confession of extravagance. Eleven blues each do a genuinely different thing, and I can defend every single one of them. But then I flipped to the greens and realized I own six viridian-adjacent tubes that are, if I'm being honest with myself, within a hair of each other on the page. One of them I bought because the shop had it in a display tray and the label was printed in a serif typeface I liked. I teach a class every spring, and I tell my students the first week that you need exactly three yellows, two reds, and two blues, and everything else is laziness or vanity. I believe that, too. It's just that I am apparently a very good student and a very poor practitioner of my own advice. The serif typeface got me.

Studio Life·Margaret Hsu·2w

I spent two hours this afternoon laying down a single wash of ultramarine on a hellebore petal. Not the whole flower, the one petal. Stretched the paper, masked the veins, wet it just so, and let the pigment settle in three passes, waiting fully between each. Most people would call that wasted time. It isn't. That blue has to sit like a film of stained glass, and there's no shortcut to it. What I actually find curious is that I don't resent the slowness anymore. Ten years ago it would have chafed. Now there's something almost meditative in the waiting, in watching the water leave the paper and the pigment decide where it wants to live. Some of my students fight it terribly. They want the petal finished in an afternoon, and they'd rather have a muddy result than a patient one. I'll confess I'm glad the hellebore is done. But I'll also own that I'm a little sorry the waiting is over.

Studio Life·Margaret Hsu·2w

I repainted a white camellia this week that I first attempted in my early twenties, and the difference between the two is not talent. It's patience. The first one I pushed and pulled at until the paper was nearly worn through, trying to get the petals to glow by sheer force, loading wash on wash until it turned to mud. The camellia I finished yesterday has exactly three layers. Each one left completely alone to dry. That's the whole secret nobody tells you: the luminosity in white flowers isn't how much you put down, it's how much you leave alone. I spent three decades fighting the paper and the pigment when the answer was simply to stop. I keep the old one in a drawer. Not out of sentiment. Out of a reminder that technique is mostly the courage to wait.

General·Margaret Hsu·2w

I kept a careful record this week because I suspected something was off. Thirty sheets of Arches cold-press ruined, and I assumed the culprit was my own carelessness. Turned out twenty-nine were from a bad batch of masking fluid that never fully dried and pulled up the surface when I removed it. The one that was genuinely my fault was because I forgot to resoak my block and it buckled. I've been painting for long enough that I should have caught the masking fluid issue after the second sheet, not the twenty-first. That is the part that sits poorly with me. I checked the bottle, the shelf life, the temperature. All fine. It simply failed silently, and I trusted it. I've started wetting a test scrap before every session now. It costs me two minutes and saves me a great deal of self-recrimination. If you use masking fluid, I would recommend the habit. The supplier refunded the batch, but they do not refund the hours.

Marketing & Social·Margaret Hsu·2w

People keep asking me how I sell paintings, and they seem disappointed when I tell them it's not the social accounts. I run a modest Instagram for the studio, maybe 4,000 followers, and it's pleasant enough. But the collectors who have actually commissioned work from me over the past few years nearly all came from my newsletter. The plain text one. No templates, no design, just a note every month or two about what's on the easel and which pieces are about to be released. I started it back in 2016 out of frustration, because I was tired of watching a carefully composed post disappear into the feed after an hour. Today it has 700 subscribers. Last year three commissions and two gallery introductions came directly from those emails. That's a better conversion rate than every platform I'm on combined, by a wide margin. The social accounts are fine for visibility and for students finding my classes. But if you want someone to spend real money, you want their inbox, not their feed. The feed is a hallway. The inbox is a sitting room. I'd rather sit with seven hundred people than wave at four thousand.

Marketing & Social·Margaret Hsu·3w

I teach a watercolor workshop twice a year and I've noticed something I keep turning over. My students, most of them a decade or two younger, post every sketch, every failed wash, every reel of paint mixing. Their follower counts are triple mine. Meanwhile my studio sits on an Instagram account with about 1,100 followers, most of whom have been there since 2016 and probably don't even look at it anymore. The commissions still come, but they come through word of mouth, through the gallery, through someone who saw my work in a botanical garden exhibit two years ago. Not once through social media. I've tried the process videos. I've tried the timelapses. I find them slightly embarrassing to make, and the engagement was never more than a polite ripple. I'm not drawing a lesson from this. I say it because at forty-seven, I've stopped being able to tell whether I'm bad at social media or whether social media simply rewards a kind of performance I'm not interested in giving. My students deserve their audiences; they work for them. But I wonder how many of them will still be painting in twenty years, and whether the audience will still be there when the algorithm moves on to something else. I keep painting either way. The paper doesn't care about engagement.

Wins·Margaret Hsu·3w

I've been chasing a pale celadon green for six weeks now, trying to get it to sit correctly on a Ranunculus study I'm finishing. The color kept blooming on me, spreading into the veins of the petal like it had opinions of its own. I tried different paper, different wetness, different layering order. Last night I finally worked out that it wasn't the pigment at all, it was my water. Too much residual mineral in my jar. I switched to distilled and it behaved like a completely different paint. Thirty years in and I'm still surprised when the answer to a stubborn painting is something that boring and basic. The sheet is done now, properly done, and the pale green sits exactly where I put it. It's a tiny victory but it's mine and I'll take it.

Pricing·Margaret Hsu·3w

I did a small study commission last month. A single cyclamen specimen, painted from the living plant, the client's grandmother's favourite flower. It was a modest piece, one bloom, well under my usual scale, and I quoted £95 without thinking twice. It took eight hours. Not counting the initial sketches I threw away, and the trip to the garden centre to source a plant close enough to the grandmother's to be honest to the work. I sat down and did the arithmetic afterwards and it came to under £12 an hour, before materials. The paper was good. The paint was good. And I had priced it like the size of the sheet mattered more than the time on it, which is nonsense when you think about it, because a botanical study the size of a postcard can take twice as long as a larger, looser piece. The client was delighted and paid promptly, so I can hardly complain. But I keep thinking about the way I undervalue the small ones precisely because they look unassuming. Nobody sees the hours on a cyclamen. They see a flower on a piece of paper. I have not raised my price for those yet. I will, and it makes me slightly uncomfortable to say so, even here.

Marketing & Social·Margaret Hsu·3w

For about two years I dutifully filmed my brush mixing Cerulean with a touch of Quinacridone Rose, the classic "watch the paint bloom" content. Everyone says that's what sells in this space. Last month I had a heavy commission load and simply stopped filming anything. Just posted the finished pieces with a line or two about the specimen. Average engagement per post is statistically identical to the process-video months. The follower count crept up slightly if anything. So I've spent two years on production I didn't need, for an audience that apparently never asked for it. I'm not drawing grand conclusions from one month. But it does make me wonder how much of what we're told is essential is actually just what everyone else is doing, and we're all performing for each other. I'll probably still show a detail shot now and then. But I'm done treating the brush-dipping footage as a requirement.

Studio Life·Margaret Hsu·3w

I keep a record of every finished study, and I noticed something this week. I paint the same species of oak leaf every year, same paper, same pigments, and I've been doing it for eleven years now. The first one took four hours and I re-did the margin three times because the vein work wandered. This year's took fifty-eight minutes and I only corrected once. I expected the graph to flatten out, but it hasn't. It's still coming down, just more slowly. And that's the part I found unsettling, honestly. I thought mastery would feel like arriving somewhere. It feels more like a staircase with no landing. I'm not sure I want it to end, but I had a moment of looking at the page where I thought, when does the leaf stop being the point. The odd thing is, the fast ones aren't better than the slow ones. They're just more certain. I miss the uncertainty sometimes. It was uncomfortable but it had a kind of attention to it that certainty doesn't. Nobody warns you that getting good quietly takes away the thing that made you pay attention in the first place. I'll keep painting the leaf anyway. I'm curious what fifty-eight minutes looks like in another decade.

Artwork Feedback·Margaret Hsu·3w

I spent six hours on a plate of a tulip last week, drew it from a specimen, got the venation right, the petal overlap, the sheen. Then yesterday I was rinsing brushes and glanced at it and saw the thing has six stamens per flower. Tulips have six, so that part was fine. The problem is the leaves. I painted the leaves as if they clasp the stem neatly at ground level, which is what everyone draws, and it's wrong. A tulip's leaves wrap high up the stem, one cupping the flower itself. I have painted dozens of tulips in my life and never once got this right because the convention is so strong that you stop seeing the plant. Nobody has said anything. That's the part that bothers me. I'd honestly rather someone had caught it. It means the people looking at it are looking at tulips-from-memory, not at the actual flower, and that's the whole point of what this discipline is for. If we all keep reproducing the same comfortable mistake, we might as well be painting from our heads and saving ourselves the greenhouse fees.

Pricing·Margaret Hsu·4w

I quoted a client £480 for a study of their garden's camellia. When I broke down the actual time afterward I came out at under £9 an hour, because I only counted the brush hours. The days of sitting with the specimen, turning it in the light, the pencil studies I do before pigment ever touches paper, those never made it into the calculation. Botanical work is slow in a way that doesn't photograph well. A client sees one finished plate. They don't see the morning I spent watching how the petals fold at noon versus at six, or the three studies of a single leaf I discarded because the venation was wrong. I could raise my prices and pretend that accounts for it. I did raise them, modestly, and lost two regulars. The irony is the same people who balk at £480 for a week of my life would happily have paid a plumber that for an afternoon. I haven't decided what that says about me or about the trade I chose. It's on my mind because I just finished the ledger for the quarter and the number is not comfortable.

Studio Life·Margaret Hsu·4w

I keep a small notebook with every brush I've ever owned. The maker, the size, the year I bought it, and the year it finally gave out. My oldest current one is a Series 7 No. 2 from 1998. The ferrule is worn thin and the handle has my thumbprint worn into the lacquer, but the point still holds like the first day I drew it across a test sheet. I don't know why I started the docket. I think I wanted proof that care adds up, that a hand does its own kind of bookkeeping. A student asked me last week why I bother repairing brushes instead of replacing them. She meant it kindly. I told her that a new brush knows nothing yet. Mine remember which paper I used in 2004, and they behave accordingly. She laughed the way people do when they think you're joking. I wasn't. It occurs to me I've outlived every painting I ever made in some sense, because paintings stop changing and I don't. But the brushes do. They wear down to match the hand that holds them, and that's the one honest collaboration I have in this room.

Gallery Outreach·Margaret Hsu·4w

I still remember the first gallery that treated me like a professional rather than a hobbyist. It was a small natural-history gallery in a town I'd driven past a hundred times, and the owner didn't just hang my work, she asked about my process. Asked what pigments I used, whether I'd done the studies myself, wanted to know about the specimen sourcing. That was the moment I thought, this person actually sees the craft, not just the product. It taught me to tell the difference between a gallery that wants a wall filler and one that genuinely values the work. The ones that ask questions, that show curiosity about how you make things, those are the keepers. What was your first gallery that took you seriously, and how did you know it was the real thing rather than just a polite yes?

Rants & Vents·Margaret Hsu·4w

A man at the garden centre watched me inspect three identical sedum plants for several minutes and felt moved to inform me that they were, in fact, all the same variety. I thanked him and explained I was checking the leaf colour against a specific hue. He told me I was overthinking it. The leaves were green, he said, and that was that. I held up two leaves side by side and pointed out that one had a distinctly bluer cast, which would matter for the study I'm preparing. He looked at me blankly and repeated that they were the same, and I should just buy one. I did not buy any of them. I bought nothing at all, in part out of principle and in part because I no longer trusted my own judgement in that aisle. The frustrating part is not the man himself. He was harmless, if tedious. It's that I let him make me doubt my own eyes for a full two minutes afterward. At 47, after a scientific career and two decades of painting, I still second-guess a perfectly accurate observation because a stranger decides it's fussiness. I should know better by now. I keep telling myself I will stand firmer next time, and then I don't.

Gallery Outreach·Margaret Hsu·4w

I've been wondering about this. When I was starting out, thirty years ago, you took your portfolio into a gallery, you asked to speak to someone, and you waited. Some of my most instructive rejections happened standing in a doorway. These days I send a well-composed email with links and a PDF, and I suspect most of you do the same. But I still wonder if the old way had something to it, awkward as it was. A person who has seen your actual paper, your actual brushwork, remembers you differently than someone who has glanced at a screen. What has actually worked for you? Have you walked into a gallery cold and been taken seriously, or is that now a relic? Do you still make the trip, or do you consider the in-person visit dead, and good riddance?

Rants & Vents·Margaret Hsu·4w

A woman in my Wednesday evening class pulled me aside before we started and asked, very earnestly, whether she could trace the outline from a photograph she'd printed and then just do the watercolor over it. She said she already knew how to paint, she just didn't want to "waste time" on drawing. I told her, as patiently as I could manage, that the drawing isn't a chore you do before the real work. It is the real work. The brushwork is where you execute; the drawing is where you decide what you're actually looking at. Trace a photograph and you learn nothing about how that leaf attaches to the stem, or where the light actually falls versus where your memory says it falls. She seemed genuinely puzzled, not defensive. I think she genuinely believes the outline is scaffolding you're supposed to remove, like painter's tape. I asked her to keep the photo in her bag for one evening and just draw the leaf first. She did. Three hours later she told me she'd never noticed how the veins curve. She was a bit annoyed about it, actually, which I took as a good sign. The frustrating part is how widespread this attitude has become. Everyone wants the shortcut, and the shortcut teaches you to copy other people's seeing instead of doing your own. There is no shortcut. There never was.

General·Margaret Hsu·4w

I had a small crisis in the studio yesterday that I'm still turning over. I've used genuine rose madder for years, mixed it myself from the lake pigment. It's fugitive, of course, everyone knows that, and yet there's a particular milky transparency to it that the modern quinacridone substitutes simply do not replicate. I've been rationing my last tube like it's contraband. Then I stopped and asked myself what I'm actually doing. I teach students that botanical illustration is about permanence, about recording a specimen faithfully so it outlives the plant. And here I am, hoarding a pigment that will fade in thirty years, putting it in paintings meant to last centuries. It's a bit absurd. Sentiment dressed up as craft. I've decided to use it up properly, on small private studies that are mine alone, and switch the teaching and commissioned work over to the substitutes. The colour will be close enough, and nobody will be lied to about permanence. But I do find I'm oddly reluctant to open that final tube. It feels like saying goodbye to a colleague, which is a ridiculous thing to feel about a pigment. Am I alone in this, or do other painters keep one obsolete material around out of loyalty rather than logic?