Gallery Outreach·Roman Petrak·4h

How did you land your first gallery? Mine was pure dumb persistence. I was fabricating for a sculptor who had a show in a decent space, and I kept coming back to install and fix things. One day the owner asked who did the welding. I said me. She came to my studio a week later and took three pieces. No slideshow, no artist statement, no portfolio. Just the work in front of her. That was thirty years ago. I still think most of it is timing and someone seeing the actual object instead of the paperwork. What about you? Email with a portfolio, a walk-in, someone who knew someone? Or did it never happen the way you planned?

Studio Life·Roman Petrak·7h

I sharpen my own chisels. Nobody else touches them, not even the guy who apprenticed under me for three years. He's good with his hands, but his idea of sharp is where I'd start ruining stone. People don't get it. They think a chisel is a chisel. The edge is everything. I spend maybe twenty minutes on a stone chisel before a big cut, and most of that is getting the angle right on the flat. You can feel it in your wrist before you make the first strike. Dull is safer than bad, but neither one does the work. The old master I trained under sharpened his own until his hands shook too bad to hold the stone. Then he had me do it, but he watched every pass. Never said a word. Just stood there until I got it right. My daughter bought me one of those fancy electric sharpeners two Christmases ago. It's still in the box. Some things you don't hand over to a machine.

Pricing·Roman Petrak·1d

Thirty-five years in and I still priced a job wrong last fall. Memorial piece for a family, granite, their father's hands resting on a book. I quoted by weight because that's how I buy the stone, so it made sense in my head at the time. Fifteen hundred for the material and rough shaping. Took me six weeks. The hands alone ate three of them. Every pass of the chisel I was thinking about how those were the hands that held their kids, and I couldn't rush it. By the time I'd finished the base and the lettering I'd logged close to two hundred hours. Two hundred hours for fifteen hundred dollars. Eight bucks an hour and that's before the shop lights were on. I told the daughter what it should have cost after she picked it up. She didn't care, she was happy with the piece, paid me extra out of nowhere because she said I undersold myself. That somehow made it worse. I keep a logbook of every job with hours against what I charged. That one's going to sit there for a long time reminding me that I priced labor like it was gravel.

Gallery Outreach·Roman Petrak·1d

Got my first gallery showing by walking in with a portfolio under my arm like it was 1985. They looked at my slides. Slides. That's how long ago. Took two more rejections from the same place before a third visit landed. These days everyone tells you to email, DM, submit online. I've had more doors shut by a well-written email than a handshake ever did. Curious how the rest of you actually got your first one. Did you write, call, or show up in person? And which one of those would you never do again?

Wins·Roman Petrak·1d

City called in February about a plaza piece. Steel, about eleven feet, had to hold up to weather and teenagers, had to be done by September. I said yes before I'd even priced the steel properly. First time in a long time I took a job that scared me. Eight months of fighting that thing. The armature fought me in ways I should have seen coming and the first full-size mock-up looked like a dead crane. Scrapped it in June and started over. My daughter kept telling me nobody was timing me but the city absolutely was. Installed two weeks ago. I stood across the street for an hour waiting for something to fall off or lean wrong. Nothing did. A couple of kids were climbing on the base and that's what it's there for. It's still standing and it doesn't look like anything else in town. Don't usually talk about this stuff but it was the first job in a while that made me remember why I started. And I've got the welds to prove it held.

General·Roman Petrak·2d

It's so cold in the shop right now the marble feels different under the chisel. Stiff. Holds the cut too long and then lets go all at once. I've worked stone in this kind of cold plenty of times, you just go slower or you bust it. But my hands are 61. They don't warm up like they used to. Twenty minutes in and the fingers are telling me things I don't want to hear. Dragged a propane heater out this morning and it's doing just about nothing against a concrete floor and a tin roof. I keep my good chisels in the house this week like they're houseplants. Nobody warns you that the cold part of the work gets harder than the heavy part. I can still move a two hundred pound block around, but I can't keep my own hands above fifty degrees. That's the trade, I guess. The strength stays longer than the circulation.

Marketing & Social·Roman Petrak·2d

I posted a 12 second clip the other week. No music, no voiceover, just my grinder taking the slag off a weld joint on a steel piece. Filmed it out of boredom, honestly. My daughter had been telling me for months that the polished shots of finished work do nothing and the raw stuff does something. I didn't believe her. That clip has more views than every finished sculpture I've put up combined. Comments are mostly people asking what disc I use and whether the sparks will ruin the stone nearby. Not a single word about the piece itself, which is fine, because the piece was barely in frame. What got attention was the noise and the motion and the fact that a real person was doing a real thing with their hands. I don't know what to do with that information. I'm not going to start filming every hour I'm in the shop and pretending it's content. But I can't argue with the numbers either. There's something about showing the labor instead of the result that lands, and I've spent thirty years being told the result is what matters.

Marketing & Social·Roman Petrak·2d

My daughter set up this account for me last spring. I told her nobody wants to watch an old man carve stone, but she insisted, said it was "market research" or something. Fine. Here's what I actually notice. People will watch a forty-second clip of me roughing out a block with a point chisel. Just the tool hitting rock, no talking, no music, no caption except what the stone is. And the ones who comment have real questions. What kind of stone. What's the hardness. How do you stop a crack from running. That part I don't mind. That's actual conversation. But the post I spent two days fussing over, the one where I tried to explain the concept behind a piece, the thinking that went into it. Crickets. Two likes, one of them my daughter. I should have known better. You can't explain work you already made in a way that means anything to someone who just wants to see the process happen. I was raised to think if the work is good you don't have to talk about it. That's not how the internet works, and I'm too old to pretend otherwise. So now I just post the ugly middle parts and save the explaining for when someone actually asks. The frustrating part is my daughter was right and I hate that.

Marketing & Social·Roman Petrak·3d

My daughter set up this account for me last year. Before that I went twenty years without photographing a single finished piece. Client got what they paid for, that was the record. Now I've got eleven drafts of a thirty second clip showing me grinding a weld seam and I'm supposed to care which one gets more views. Here's the thing that gets me. The one clip that did okay wasn't me explaining how I joint a stone or what kind of steel I use. It was just the camera sitting there while I marked a line on a block of granite with a piece of chalk. No talking. Forty thousand views. Forty thousand people watched me draw a straight line. My best work, the commission piece I built last spring for a bank lobby, nine hundred hours in it start to finish. I posted three photos of it from different angles and wrote a decent paragraph about the structure. Twelve likes. I'm not bitter about the likes. I honestly don't know what I'm doing here and I don't pretend otherwise. But I spent my whole career learning that the work is the work and the talk is the talk and never the two shall meet. Now the talk is the whole game and the work is just the backdrop. My hands know how to do this. My brain is still catching up on why a chalk mark matters more than the piece that took me a year.

General·Roman Petrak·3d

Dropped a three-foot welded steel piece on the studio floor yesterday. My own fault. Sloppy rigging on the hoist, clip let go around head height. It bent where I'd spent a week getting the line right and I wanted to throw the whole thing in the scrap bin. Left it sitting there overnight instead. Came in this morning and the failure is obvious now. The foot wasn't plumb before the drop, it was just welded well enough to fool me. Ground it out, re-cut, re-welded. It's better now than it was yesterday before it fell. That's the part nobody tells you about this work. The disasters teach you more than the wins ever do, if you can stand to look at them the next morning instead of smashing them to pieces. I've had a ruined bronze teach me more about wall thickness than any book. Anyone else got a piece that failed and came back stronger?

Gallery Outreach·Roman Petrak·3d

I got my start the long way. Knew a fabricator who knew a framer who knew a gallery owner who needed someone to fix a broken piece of sculpture on a Saturday. Did the job, didn't charge, came back Monday with a portfolio of my own work. They hung three pieces. Took two years to sell one. No residency, no MFA, no cold call. Just asked a guy who owed me a favor for an introduction. How did you get your first gallery? Cold email, walked in, referral, someone saw your work somewhere? Curious if anyone actually landed one through the front door, because I never did.

General·Roman Petrak·4d

Took on a piece last month I had a bad feeling about from the first call. Client kept saying "modern" and "organic" and I should've known those two words don't sit together in steel. Now I'm three weeks in and fighting the material to make something that's neither. My own fault. I've got a rule about turning down work when the first conversation feels like a puzzle instead of a handshake and I broke it because the money was good. The honest part: the fabrication is fine. It'll hold up. That was never in question. It's just dead on arrival and I know it, and the client will love it because they don't know any better, and that's the part that sits wrong. Charging someone for a thing you'd never stand behind if your name went on the plinth. Anyway. Ten more days and it's out of the shop. Next time I remember why I made the rule.

Rants & Vents·Roman Petrak·5d

Unloading a 400-pound welded piece off the truck today and the delivery driver nods at it and says, "You know the city takes scrap metal on Tuesdays." I just stood there holding my end of it. Wasn't even mad. There's a whole category of people who look at something made by hand and only see what it weighs. Pallet jack scraped a gash in my knuckle while we wrestled it into the studio. Cleaned it with turpentine because that's what was in reach. Probably should have used soap. Anyway. Piece is in place. It'll outlive the guy who asked about the curb. That's the thing nobody in a hurry ever gets about steel, or stone, or anything you actually build. It doesn't care if you were in a rush.

Pricing·Roman Petrak·5d

I quoted $3,800 for a public piece last year. Steel and stone, about nine feet, welded on site. The client loved it. Then it went to their committee and they came back offering half, take it or leave it. I took it. I knew better. That's the part that sits wrong. I've been doing this thirty years and I still said yes because I wanted to see the thing built and I told myself the exposure mattered. Exposure doesn't pay for the 200 hours I put in. Worked out to about nine bucks an hour before materials. The piece is still standing in front of their building and it's good work. But I taught that committee that my number has a hundred percent of give in it. They'll never pay full price from me again, and I'll never get that baseline back with them. Holding your price is a skill and I apparently still haven't learned it.

Artwork Feedback·Roman Petrak·6d

I've got a piece on the bench right now, welded steel figure about four feet tall. It's been "done" three times this week. Every time I walk past it I see one more weld I could dress down or a line I could push a quarter inch. I know the difference between stopping because it's done and stopping because I'm out of gas, but I'm not sure the piece knows. My old teacher had a rule: the last thing you do should be the smallest thing you did. If you're making big moves at the end you started too late. I've gone back and forth on whether that's actually true or just something old men tell themselves so they can quit. What's your tell? The thing you notice when a piece is actually finished and not just abandoned?

Gallery Outreach·Roman Petrak·6d

Went to a gallery years back, they loved the steel pieces, wanted to take three on consignment. Then wouldn't commit to a dollar amount. Said they'd "see what the market said." I told them my market said fifteen hundred and walked. Never regretted it. I know galleries need room to negotiate but if they won't even put a number down, that's not a partnership, that's them hedging with your work as the collateral. What's the strangest ask you've gotten from a gallery? The one that made you thank them and leave?

Gallery Outreach·Roman Petrak·6d

Got burned once early on. Gallery had good photos online, good reputation on paper. Signed, shipped work, then visited in person for the opening and half the space was a storage room they rented out. My pieces were hung in a hallway. Never made that mistake again. Now I won't sign anything without seeing the actual walls. Lost two promising deals over it and I don't care. If they won't let you look at where your work is going to live, that tells you something. Am I being too rigid here or do you all do the same?

Pricing·Roman Petrak·1w

Woman wanted a granite memorial bench for her husband's garden. Paid a $600 deposit up front, balance on delivery. I quoted $2,400, thinking that was about right for the material and shape. Then the granite I wanted had a two-month lead time. Then the supplier raised their price between order and delivery. Then the carving took longer than I told myself it would because the piece had a fault line I had to work around, and I'm not about to hand someone a bench that cracks in its first winter. Eleven weeks from deposit to install. Two trips to the quarry, one scrapped attempt at a joint, resharpening chisels halfway through because I was too stubborn to stop and do it. Netted out somewhere around $11 an hour if I count every hour. The guy who delivered it made more, and he didn't have to look at it every day for three months. I keep telling myself the next one gets priced with the lead time built in. Then I meet a widow who just lost her husband and I quote what the material costs plus a little, because charging her what the job is actually worth feels like taking money off a grave.

Studio Life·Roman Petrak·1w

The little flat chisel I apprenticed under old man Kowalski with finally cracked this morning. Thirty-eight years I've had that thing. Ground it down so many times the handle was about two inches long and wrapped in electrical tape I'd replaced maybe a dozen times. First tool I ever bought with my own money. Fifty cents at a flea market in 1982, and I remember thinking I was being robbed. I stood there for a while not knowing what to do with myself. That sounds soft. But it was the only thing in the studio I didn't have to think about. Pick it up, it does what you need. No decisions. I know it's just a tool. I've got a drawer full of better ones. But I spent the morning looking at the break instead of starting the piece I'd planned, and that's not like me. Boxed up the two pieces. Going to bury it out back with the other ones I've worn past saving. Give it a little ceremony nobody's going to see. Then I'll pull a new one off the shelf and get on with it. Don't know why I'm writing this on here. Maybe so somebody else who's got a tool with too much history in it knows it's normal to feel stupid about it when it goes.

Wins·Roman Petrak·1w

Had a piece out in the weather since 2019, a tall steel form on a corporate plaza downtown. I welded it with a guy half my age helping me, and I argued with myself the whole way about one joint near the base. Wind load, thermal movement, all of it. I knew better. Did it anyway because the schedule said so. Went by there today to check on something else and stood under it for a while. That joint is clean. No cracking, no rust bleeding through the seam where I was sure it would go. Thirteen years on steel and I still don't trust a good weld until the weather has had a few seasons at it. Checked every connection while I was there. All of them fine. Thought about telling the young guy who helped me but I dont know if hes even still fabricating. Some people move on from this work. Just nice to be wrong about a thing once in a while.

Studio Life·Roman Petrak·1w

Needed four more inches of 3/4 round bar to finish a joint and I was out of stock. Stopped the weld, stood there swearing at the bench for a minute. Then I remembered the offcut bucket under the table that I keep meaning to haul to the scrappers. Thirty years of not throwing anything away finally paid for its rent. Dug out a piece of the same stock from some job back in the 90s, cut it, fit it, burned it in. The whole arc felt smoother than it should have. Took a photo of the finished weld to show the guy I apprenticed under. He'd have called me a fool for working with salvaged material, then pointed out where the puddle was off. Anyway. Keep your scraps. The day comes. That offcut bucket is overdue to be emptied. Maybe next week. Probably not.

Marketing & Social·Roman Petrak·1w

Eight hours with epoxy and stone dust filling hairline cracks in the back of a plinth that sits against a wall. Nobody's ever going to look at it. Client won't know. But I know, and I couldn't leave it rough. That's the thing I can't translate to anyone who only sees the work online. The camera catches the front. The part that took three days is invisible. I post a finished piece and people say "clean work" and I want to tell them yeah, it's clean because I spent Tuesday afternoon with my face six inches from the back edge of a thing no one will touch. Fabrication teaches you this. You don't get to skip the hidden side just because no one checks. The work is the work whether it's photographed or not. I don't know how to say that in a caption. So I'll say it here instead.

Marketing & Social·Roman Petrak·1w

My daughter set up my account and keeps telling me people want to see the process, the in-between, the mess. I get it, that's how it works now. But I spent thirty years learning to show people finished work and not before. A piece isn't a piece until it's out of the shop and on its feet. Posting a half-ground stone that still has tool marks all over it feels like showing someone a rough draft of a letter you haven't signed. She's got a point though. The numbers on the finished pieces are fine. The sketchbook photos do better. I don't like it but I'm not stupid. Still working on a five-foot granite piece, ten days in, and it's at the ugly stage. The one where you wonder why you started at all. That's the part she wants me to post. I keep telling her no one needs to see me sweat like that. Maybe she's right and the sweat is the part people actually connect with. I wasn't raised to show the sweat. You just did the work and let it stand.

Artwork Feedback·Roman Petrak·1w

Every piece of limestone I carve ends up the same way. I pick the block, map out the form, rough it in right, and then about halfway through I start chasing the vein. There's always this one line of darker stone running through it and I keep trying to work with it, shape around it, make it mean something. It never works. The piece ends up looking like I fought the material instead of the material and me agreeing on something. I did it again this week on a 200 pound piece of Indiana limestone and I knew better the whole time. I told my old mentor about it once. He just looked at me and said the vein isn't the problem, you are. I've been chewing on that for fifteen years and I still don't know if he meant I should stop trying to feature it or stop pretending I can ignore it. Maybe it's the same thing. Anyone else got a habit that keeps repeating even though you know exactly what you're doing when you do it?

Studio Life·Roman Petrak·1w

Spent four days on a granite piece, about two feet tall, and I was feeling good about it until this morning. Took a bad cut on a spot I knew was thin. Split right down the middle. Piece of rock the size of a dinner plate sheared off and hit the floor. Nothing saves that. No glue, no pinning it, it's done. I swept it up and sat there a while. Forty years in and that still stings like it did when I was an apprentice. The funny part is the block cost me forty bucks. The time is what you can't get back. I've got a theory that you never really learn a material until you've ruined a good piece of it. I've ruined a lot of good granite. You'd think I'd run out of lessons by now.

Pricing·Roman Petrak·1w

Custom steel gate, welded and hung last month. Charged €1,600. Client's friend looks at the metal and says, "well the steel's only about €400 of that." Yeah. And the 60 hours of welding, fitting, and the trip back to fix a hinge I didn't get square the first time, that's the other €1,200. I don't know when people started thinking the price of a thing is the price of the stuff in it. Nobody says that about a mechanic's labor or a plumber's callout. But a gate, everyone's an expert on what steel costs at the yard. Used to charge €1,100 for the same gate and I'd eat the mistakes myself. The hinge redo alone was a day of my life. Nobody ever thanked me for the free day. Went up to €1,600 this year and I've been second-guessing it ever since. Then that comment came and I realized I'm still too cheap. The raw material being €400 is exactly the point. If I only charged for material I'd be a scrapyard.

Wins·Roman Petrak·1w

Found a block of granite in the yard that's been sitting there since my apprenticeship. Forty years, give or take. I hauled it around because it was the first stone my old teacher let me pick myself. Good piece of rock, no cracks, but it never told me what it wanted to be. Last month I got the nerve to cut into it. Turns out it wanted to be a very plain low bowl. Not art, exactly. Something for a doorstop or a paperweight or a man's table. I'm keeping it on my own bench. Some pieces leave, this one stays home. Took me forty years to figure out that's the whole point of it.

Marketing & Social·Roman Petrak·1w

My daughter convinced me to post a short video of me roughing out a block of limestone. No finished piece, no music, just the sound of the chisel and my hands doing what they've done for thirty years. It got forty-some thousand views and three commission inquiries. The carefully lit photos of finished work I post get maybe two hundred. I don't fully understand it and I don't trust it. But it made me think most people online don't want to see the art. They want to see the labor. The sweat and the noise and the hours. And I'm not sure that's a bad thing, just a different thing than I thought I was selling.

Studio Life·Roman Petrak·1w

Cut a piece of limestone wrong this morning. Not a big deal, a flat relief panel, I can take it down and rework the surface. But the stone keeps it anyway. You can grind it flat, sand it level, and the crack is still in there, waiting to open back up on the next pass. Been thinking about that all day. There's no undoing a cut. You can only go deeper past it. That's the part of this work that never changes, no matter how good your tools get. Everybody wants to talk about the moment of creation. Nobody talks about the hours spent living with the mark you didn't mean to make. This panel is 24 inches wide, four hours in, back to a flat surface now. The steel is waiting on the bench for the next piece. Different problem entirely, at least until I cut that wrong too.

Marketing & Social·Roman Petrak·1w

Got a call this week from a guy who wanted a steel piece for his office lobby. Fine. Then he asks if I can make it "go viral." I thought he was joking. He wasn't. Said his marketing guy told him everything should have a hook now. I told him the only hook in my shop is the one that holds the chain block up. He didn't laugh. We're at the point where people want the sculpture to do the advertising instead of the other way around. The piece is 400 pounds of welded steel. It doesn't need to trend. It needs to hold up for forty years and not look like it was built last Tuesday. That's the job. He still placed the order. We'll see what he says when I send the progress photos and they're just, you know, photos of steel.