She told me my photos were too dark. That the lighting was "giving dungeon." She wanted me to show my face more, film myself working, add trending audio. I sat there in the meeting and I thought, I'm 58 years old. I build environments from scrap metal and broken furniture. I am not a content creator. I am not a brand. I am a person who makes things in a studio that looks like a bomb went off in a scrapyard. But the thing is she wasn't wrong about the engagement numbers. They're flat. They've been flat. And I don't know what to do with that information because I refuse to make the kind of content that would fix it. So I'm stuck in this weird space where I understand the game and I also refuse to play it. Anyone else just quietly accepting obscurity because the alternative looks unbearable?
I have this cardboard box under the worktable. It's been there maybe twelve years now. Inside are pieces that just didn't work -- a welded armature that collapsed under its own weight, a motor I thought would make something rotate slowly but instead just screamed, a piece of glass I spent three weeks cutting into a shape that turned out to mean nothing. I can't throw them out. Not because I'll use them someday, most of them are useless. But when something new isn't working, I go to the box. I pull something out and look at it and think -- well, at least this new thing isn't that bad yet. It's a floor, not a ceiling. Keeps me from panicking. I told a younger artist about this the other day and she looked at me like I was describing a superstition. Maybe it is. But the box stays.
I sold a piece last year through a gallery in Berlin. Big installation, months of work, shipping a truckload of steel and glass across two borders. The collector paid 18,000 euros. By the time the gallery took their 50 percent, the trucking company charged me for the special crating I couldn't do myself, the assistant I hired for the install, and the hotel I stayed in because the loading dock appointment was at 7am and I don't know anyone in Berlin who'd let me sleep on their floor at 56, I looked at the bank transfer and it was 3,400 euros. The framer who built the crate made more than I did. I know because I asked him what he charged. He told me. Nice guy. He earned it. I'm not telling this as a sob story. I agreed to the terms. I just keep thinking about how the whole system is built so that the people who touch the work for ten minutes make more than the person who spent four months making it exist. And we all nod and say that's how it works. But it's funny, no. You spend your whole career getting to a number like 18,000 and then you do the math and realise you'd have been better off framing other people's pictures.
I'll go first. Early in my career, a gallery in Vienna offered me a show. Nice space. Nice people. They just needed me to pay for shipping both ways, the opening catering, and their "promotional materials", which turned out to be a photocopied A5 flyer. I said yes because I was young and wanted the line on my CV. The show happened. Nothing sold. They asked me to cover the "storage fee" for the work that hadn't moved. I paid that too. What's the red flag you saw early, told yourself it was fine, and then it absolutely was not fine?
Group show in Berlin, 2019. Curator with a good reputation, well-known space, the whole thing sounded serious. She said there was no budget for artist fees but the exposure would be valuable. I was between shows anyway so I said yes like a fool. I built a room installation. Three weeks of work, rented a van to drive materials up from Prague, stayed in a friend's flat but still bought food and beer for two weeks, paid an assistant for two days of help mounting things. I kept receipts out of spite, I think. Total cost to me: 38,400 CZK. About 1,500 euros then. The exhibition got a mention in Artforum online. One collector came through and later commissioned a small piece. That commission paid 800 euros. So I lost 700 euros and gained a line in a newsletter nobody remembers. I tell young artists this story now and they nod and then they still do the same thing. I did it too when I was their age. Maybe you have to learn it yourself.
There's something about dismantling things other people threw away. The motor was seized, the screws were stripped, I had to drill out three of them. By the end my hands were cut up and there was grease in my hair and I realised I hadn't thought about a single thing except getting that rotor free. I'm not even sure yet what I'll do with it. Maybe nothing. Maybe it just sits on the shelf for six months. But that hour of pure mechanical problem-solving with no audience, no jury, no curator waiting for a statement, that's the part they don't put in the grant applications. Makes me wonder how many of us are secretly just hobbyists with good framing.
The glue is still tacky in places. Someone's dead grandmother's floral dining room. I can see the ghost of the table it was behind, a lighter rectangle where the sun never hit. I'm not even sure what I'll do with it yet. Probably something with the layers. Pull it apart, let the backing show through. But right now it's sitting rolled in the corner of my studio and I have to step around it and I keep sneezing. Nobody tells you how much of this life is just hauling things. Finding them, moving them, storing them, figuring out why they matter to you when they still smell like someone else's house. The making part is almost smaller than the carrying.
A consultant they hired said my feed lacked "curatorial coherence." Too much workshop mess, too many odd details, not enough of a unified aesthetic. So I posted a photo of a pigeon I found in my studio courtyard. Dead. Beautiful grey feathers, one wing slightly open, eye still clear. I put it on a piece of rusted sheet metal and photographed it in the morning light. Caption: "Studio assistant quit." It got more engagement than anything I'd posted in six months. The gallery was not amused. But two collectors messaged me asking if it was available as a print. I don't know what the moral is. Something about the polished version of ourselves being the least interesting one. Or that dead birds sell. One of those.
Not a metaphor. I mean actually glued. Cyanoacrylate, which is of course the one that sets before you can blink. Thumb, index finger, and a good solid square of tabletop bonded together like we were meant to be. I sat there for maybe forty seconds just looking at it. Not panicking. Just thinking, alright, this is where I am now. This is the situation. I have committed to this table in a way I hadn't planned. The acetone was three meters away in the other room. I could have rocked and reached. Instead I just sat. Sometimes you make a decision and the decision is: wait. Eventually I peeled myself off. Left a good bit of skin behind. The table doesn't seem to mind. I mention this only because so much of the talk about studio practice is about discipline and flow states and intention. And sometimes it's just, you glue yourself to your own table and you sit there like an idiot for a minute because that's what the moment requires.
The first real gallery that ever said yes to me, I was maybe 30, living on soup, so excited I nearly shook, turned out to be a complete disaster. Didn't pay, lost work, the whole thing collapsed in six months. The rejection I got two years before that, from a proper serious space? Best thing that happened to me. Made me work harder, think clearer, and when I finally got in somewhere right I was ready for it. Anyone else got a rejection they're secretly grateful for? Or am I romanticising failure like an old man.
Early in my career, a decent gallery in a decent city offered me a solo show. Then quietly mentioned I'd be covering the opening, drinks, food, printed invites, the whole thing. I was young and hungry so I said yes. Spent half the sale before the work sold. Told myself it was normal. It wasn't. What's the most creative expense a gallery has tried to push onto you? I'll start: someone once asked me to pay for the insurance on the venue, not the work. The venue.
Opened the studio this weekend for the open studios thing. Nothing special, just a chance for people to wander through. Middle of the afternoon a woman maybe my age comes in with her daughter, maybe twenty. Walks straight to a piece I made three years ago from an old boiler door and some broken factory gearing. Stands there. Then she says to her daughter, very quietly, I wasn't meant to hear, "Look. Someone saved this." That's it. Thats the win. Someone saved it. Not someone made art from it. Someone saved it. I've been thinking about that sentence for three days. She understood the whole thing in four words better than any critic ever has.
I was at a salvage yard outside Kladno yesterday, digging through a pile of window frames from a school they tore down in the eighties. The wood still smelled of chalk dust and coal. You can't fake that. You can't buy it. And the whole time I was thinking, this is what I miss when I walk into a brand-new residency studio with white walls and a concrete floor that's never held anything heavier than a thought. There's a kind of life that comes into the work when the materials have already lived. I'm not romanticising poverty. I'm saying the objects carry something. You handle them and your hands know what to do before your head does.
A marketing consultant reached out saying she could "systematize my audience growth." I told her I don't have an audience, I have maybe 400 people who care about industrial salvage installations in Prague. She said that's exactly the problem. So for a month I let her try. She had me post on a schedule, use certain words, track when people engaged most. I did it. Numbers went up slightly. Total new people who actually came to a studio visit or wrote something that showed they understood what I'm doing: zero. The thing is my work takes six weeks to build and you walk through it in ten minutes. You can't optimize that. You can't gamify someone standing in a room full of old factory parts and feeling something. I told her I think the disconnect was that my work is slow and her job is to make things fast. She said I was being resistant. She wasn't wrong. But neither was I. I don't know what the proper social media strategy is for work that takes months and asks for patience. Maybe there isn't one. Maybe the answer is just keep making the rooms and the people who need to find them eventually will.
I had a piece in a group show maybe five, six years ago. Collector came around, liked it, asked the gallery for my contact. Wanted it for his private collection, he said. But the price, could I do better if we went direct, no gallery cut? I was between shows, rent was due, so I said yes like an idiot. Knocked off almost forty percent. He paid in two installments, took his time on the second one. Six months later I see the same piece at a design auction in London. Estimate was three times what he paid me. Sold for above estimate. I should be angry but mostly I respect the play. Guy saw me coming from across the room. I was the one who said yes.
There's a cardboard box under my worktable. It's got failed joints, pieces that warped wrong, a glass bottle I spent three days cutting that finally just shattered. Also a few things that worked fine but I hated anyway. Before I start anything new I pull it out and go through it. Not for inspiration. More like a reminder that most of what you make is going to end up wrong or abandoned or just okay. Clears the head somehow. I don't try again with the same stuff, I just touch the failures and then I'm ready to make new ones.
Last year a museum in Germany asked me to do a talk and a small intervention in their permanent collection. Three days of work plus prep. They had a budget. I told them not to worry about it. I don't even have a good reason. I respected the institution. I liked the curator. I wanted to seem generous. So I just said don't worry about it and ate the time. My son found out and gave me this look. Not angry. Just disappointed in a way that was worse. He said you always tell me to value my work and then you do this. I sat with that for a while. I'm still sitting with it. The thing is I know exactly why I did it. There's a part of me that still thinks if I'm not being paid it means I'm doing it for the right reasons. Which is a stupid romantic holdover from the 80s when nobody had any money anyway. Now I have a studio to run and materials to buy and a grown son who watches me undermine myself. I charged them eventually. Six months later. Sent an invoice with a note saying I reconsidered. They paid it without a word. But I still feel the embarrassment of that first conversation. Not the embarrassment of asking for money. The embarrassment of being too afraid to ask for it.
I spent three weeks untangling this wire. My hands were torn to shit. My studio looked like a murder scene made of rust. My son came over and asked if I'd finally lost it completely. Hung it yesterday. It's just wire. Nothing added. The thing holds the space like it was always waiting to get out of that coop. You don't get to choose what the good material is. You just have to be awake when it shows up. I was awake this time.
Back in 2009 I had a show in a small gallery in Brno that no longer exists. The gallery put up a basic website with installation shots. When the gallery closed, the domain died but the PDF of that exhibition somehow stayed live on some forgotten server subfolder. Last year a curator from Oslo emailed me. Said she found that PDF through a deep Google search while researching a specific material I used. She'd been looking for anyone working with industrial felt and rusted steel in that particular way. The PDF was the only document online that showed it. She booked a studio visit. I got two museum shows out of it. Norway, of all places. Meanwhile I'd been stressing about Instagram, trying to shoot better video, wondering if the algorithm hated me. And the thing that worked was a dead link from 15 years ago that I didn't even know existed. I don't know what the lesson is. Leave things online and don't delete them, I suppose. The internet forgets slower than we think. Or maybe it's that the useful person is always looking in the wrong place and you can't predict where they'll dig.
Last year a German foundation commissioned a permanent installation for their new building lobby. Big civic space, lots of foot traffic. They had the budget. I quoted €28,000. I spent six months collecting material. Three months building. Two weeks installing on site with a helper. When I finally sat down and divided the total by hours, I landed just under €9 an hour. Before tax. Before the studio rent I still paid while I was working on their thing instead of my own. I knew it while I was doing it. You always know. You just don't do the division because the number is embarrassing and also you want the work to exist, you want it in that building, you want to see people walk through it. So you pretend the math doesn't apply to you. I don't regret it. The piece is good. But I keep the calculation now. I write the hours down from the start. I still ignore them sometimes but at least I'm lying to myself with full information.
I got a commission last year for a new piece at a decent European museum. 12k seemed like real money when I signed. Then I priced the steel, the timber, the electronics for the sound element, the rented van to haul it all, the two assistants I had to pay properly because I'm not an exploitative prick. By the time the thing was built and installed I'd spent about seven and a half. The rest covered four months of my life. I ate it because the work was good and I wanted it to exist and I'll probably do it again. The math never works if you count your own time. You have to not count it. That's the trick. You make art because you're compelled to and you finance it however you can and you pretend the hours don't exist. But sometimes late at night you do the math anyway and it's genuinely funny how bad it is. Like actually funny. I laughed out loud when I worked it out. Younger artists ask me how to price things. I tell them charge more than feels comfortable and then double it. Then I watch them not do that and I understand completely because I also don't do that.
I don't know when I stopped noticing the floor under my work table. But today I had to crawl under there for a hinge I dropped and I realised I've been standing on about four years of accumulated debris. Wood shavings, bent nails, wire offcuts, some screws that probably went with something I finished two years ago, a dried-up tube of something I don't even remember buying. I swept it all out. Took about twenty minutes. The linoleum underneath is the original stuff from when this building was a textile factory. Grey with little black speckles. I'd forgotten it was even grey. Now the whole room feels wrong. Too clean. I'll fix that by Friday.
I spent this morning walking around a space I was offered for a show in April. Big clean white box. Good light. Totally dead to me. Couldn't feel a thing. I need a room that already smells like something. Dust, damp, machine oil, old wood, whatever. If it smells like fresh paint and nothing else I might as well work in a hospital corridor. My studio right now smells of rust and the glue I used three years ago that never fully aired out. That's what gets me going. I turned the white box down. Found an old engine hall instead. Smells like grease and 1987. I can work there.
My first gallery meeting took place in a room with a leaky radiator and a dealer who spent most of it on the phone. I sat there thinking this was the big moment. It wasn't. It took three more years and a different city. What's your story - the first gallery that actually took you seriously, not the one that made you tea and said nice things and never called back. The real one. How did you know they meant it?
Found it this morning in the bottom of a jar of old brass fittings I'd forgotten I own. M6, 40mm, flat head. I'd already ordered four more online, of course. That's the rule: the thing turns up the day after you give up and buy replacements. I spent twenty minutes just holding it. It's a good screw. I think half my practice is this, the archaeology of my own mess. I keep everything because I learned under the old system where nothing was available and you hoarded what you could. Now I have a workshop full of objects waiting to be remembered. Sometimes I feel like the curator of a museum of my own indecision.
Spent half the morning trying to break through a particularly stubborn concrete slab for a new piece. Had the big pneumatic drill out, the good German one. Then, kaput. Just… stops. Smelled like burnt electronics. Now I have a half-demolished floor and a very expensive paperweight. The universe clearly thinks I should use fewer concrete pieces. Or maybe it just hates Tuesdays.
Just finished calculating the final tally for that massive piece made from old factory parts I showed a few months back. The raw materials were almost nothing, of course. But then there was the transport from the old Skoda factory site, the specialized welding for hours by that guy Petr who charges by the minute, the custom-built steel frame to hold it all... I looked at the invoice and my first thought was 'Is this a joke?' It came out to 85,000 CZK before I even thought about my own time. Nearly fainted. I ended up telling the buyer 120,000 CZK, and honestly, I still feel like I'm robbing myself.
I've been wrestling with a pile of oak beams salvaged from a demolished factory. They have this immense, solid feel, a density that seems to carry the history of the place. Trying to figure out how to join them for a new piece without losing that inherent gravity. Sometimes the material just sits there, stubbornly itself, and you have to listen very carefully to what it wants to become. Or, more often, what it absolutely will not become.
My gallery sold two pieces in October and I still haven't seen a dime. This is not the first time. Is this just how it is, or am I being too impatient? How do you handle these situations? Maybe a firm email template?
genuinely cannot tell anymore. been staring at this for two days. the lower half feels resolved but something about the sky is bugging me and i don't know if it's a real problem or if ive just looked at it so long my eyes broke. do i stop or keep pushing. be honest with me
