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I got my first one because a woman who ran a framing shop liked a piece I'd left there to be framed and asked if I had more. That was it. No submission, no email, no walking in with a portfolio. Just a stranger being nosy about my stuff. Meanwhile I've cold emailed maybe a dozen galleries since and gotten one reply, which was "we'll keep you on file." so tell me how yours actually happened. the messy version, not the advice version.

Finished a big piece today, got it photographed, sent it off. Felt good for about four hours. Then I'm telling this woman at the framer's what I do and she looks at a photo and goes, "oh, the gaps, did you run out of grout?" No. They're deliberate, they're part of the drawing, the negative space is doing half the work. But I just said "no, it's a choice" and smiled and paid for my frame. It's the ones who think they're being kind that get me. Nobody walks up to a painter and asks if the brushstrokes were a mistake. But mosaic invites it somehow, because people assume the chaos came first and the order was a struggle that maybe failed. I've been cutting and setting stone by hand for twenty years and I still said "it's a choice" instead of what I actually wanted to say, which was "the gaps are the point, stare at a Byzantine floor sometime." I know I should let it slide. I'm still annoyed at myself for the soft answer more than at her. No question, just needed that said out loud where someone might get it. 🙂

Accidentally archived the reel that had 200k views and something like 12k saves. Panicked for an hour. Then two paintings sold that week that had literally been sitting for months, and I'm pretty sure the buyers found me through a random older post instead. I'm not saying the algorithm is fake or whatever. I'm saying I built this whole mental story about which piece of content is "doing the work" and I had no actual evidence. The reel was king, I decided. It was not king. It was just loud. Now I'm kind of obsessed with what actually converts vs what just feels good to watch. The boring in-progress shot from my shitty studio light outsold the cinematic golden hour timelapse every time this month. Every time. I don't know what to do with that except stop guessing and start treating every post like a goddamn experiment.

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

My first real gallery came out of nothing I did well. I was sharing a studio in Berlin, and a woman who had the space next to mine was curating a small group show about the copy. She needed one more printmaker because someone dropped out two weeks before. She asked me, I said yes, that was it. No portfolio, no email, no strategy. Total accident. I have been trying to reverse-engineer that accident for eight years now and I still don't know how to do it on purpose. So the question: how did your first one actually happen? Not the version you put in the bio, the real one. I want to know if anyone got in by anything resembling a plan, because everyone I know seems to have got in sideways. And a second thing, since I am curious: who did the asking? Did you approach them, or did someone hand you the door already open? I think the second happens more than we admit and we pretend it was all our hustle. I will say mine: nobody handed me anything, a curator needed a warm body with a press. Tell me yours is better.

A collector bought a piece this spring and when I asked what caught their eye they didn't mention the studio work, the process shots, the exhibition photos the gallery put out. They said it was a story I posted at nine in the morning of my coffee on the bench next to an unfinished canvas, mostly out of frame, half the image out of focus because the phone was still waking up. The painting was two years old by then. It had been in two group shows. Nobody bought it. And the thing that sold it was basically an accident, a photo I took without thinking so my wife would know I was still alive in the studio. I've spent twenty-five years learning how to make the work and maybe five learning how to show it. And the showing still defeats me, daily. But I notice the accidental stuff does more than the deliberate stuff, and I don't know what to do with that information. I can't manufacture accidents on purpose. I tried. It shows.

Second colour on the riso edition today, 40 sheets of a warm grey over the black. The drum pulls slightly to the left no matter what I do to the paper guides, so the second layer sits about half a millimetre off. It's visible if you look for it. You can see the ghost of the black under the grey along one edge, like a shadow that shouldn't be there. First pull I was furious. By sheet twelve I had decided it was fine. By sheet thirty I had genuinely started to like it, which is the part that bothers me. I know the argument. Riso misregistration is a signature, people build whole practices on it, the wobble is the point. But I've spent years arguing that the multiple is not a lesser object, that the print is not a copy of a drawing but a thing in its own right, and a big part of that argument rests on the fact that I control the matrix. The plate is deliberate. The registration is deliberate. If I let the machine decide, then what am I defending exactly? Something has shifted from "I chose this" to "this happened and I made peace with it," and those are not the same object, even if they look identical on the wall. The other possibility, which I don't like more: maybe I'm just tired and forty sheets is a lot and the difference between a considered decision and an accommodation is only ever visible from the outside. So I'm leaving them to sit until Monday before I decide anything. Curious whether other people here have a firm line between the accident you keep and the accident you've stopped fighting.

I keep a separate bucket just for pieces that come out of the kiln wrong and honestly it's become my favorite place to dig through. Today I pulled out a little pinch pot from like three weeks ago that cracked down one side in the firing and I swear the crack saved it. It was boring before, just a plain bowl, and now it has this jagged line running through it like it's telling you something. I glazed over the edge of the break and it looks intentional. It might have been the best piece I made all month and it was a failure. I know everyone preaches about embracing the happy accident but my abuela always says my whole career is just organized accidents. She's not wrong. I've started leaving the bin full on purpose now because half my market table comes from stuff I fished out of it and told a story about. The kiln does what it wants. You just have to be paying attention when it happens.

Alright. So the way I got my first show was basically an accident. A guy saw one of my charcoal pieces sitting in the back of my truck outside a coffee shop, asked if it was for sale, turned out he knew a gallery owner. That is the entire story. Zero strategy, pure dumb luck, and I still feel weirdly guilty about it like I skipped a line. So now I'm trying to do it the actual way, on purpose, and I have no idea what I'm doing. There's a space near me I really want to show in. I sent an email with like 40 images attached (was that too many? probably too many) and I've heard NOTHING for three weeks. Meanwhile a friend keeps telling me to just walk in with a piece under my arm and ask to talk to someone, which sounds insane to me but also kind of right? So tell me how you actually do it. Email with a link first? Walk in cold? Instagram DM? Show up to openings and wait for someone to talk to you? And how long do you wait before you follow up, because I'm at the point where I'm refreshing my sent folder like a lunatic. Bonus points if you tell me the one thing you did that actually worked, vs the thing everyone tells you to do that did nothing.

Sold a little vase at the market on Saturday that I thought was one of my worst pieces. The glaze came out cloudy and the lip slumped to one side when I was being lazy with the wire. I almost didn't even put it out. Some woman picked it up, turned it around for like five minutes, and said it was her favorite thing on the table. Paid full price without asking for a discount, which never happens here. And look. I took the money. I smiled and wrapped it up. But I've been thinking about it all week. Either my taste is completely broken or people genuinely see something in the wonk that I write off as failure. Maybe both. Because the pieces I actually love, the ones I photograph and post and get excited about, those sit. It's the accidents that sell. My grandma always said the kiln knows better than the maker. Maybe she's right and I'm just too close to see it. Anyway, tonight I pulled the one I was convince was ruined and I'm leaving it out on the shelf. Not hiding it in the back. We'll see who's wrong.

Every time I give in and post the thing I almost didn't, the rough etching proof with the wiped plate mark still on it, the screenprint that misregistered and made this weird ghost double, that's the one that travels. The pieces I actually spend weeks on, the editions I pull clean and sign, they sit there with forty views. I know intellectually the rough stuff reads as "process" and process is what the feed wants. We're all supposed to be celebrating the handmade and the imperfect now. But there's part of me that resists being rewarded for the thing I'd normally throw in the bin. It feels like the medium itself is being flattened into aesthetic, the mess as decoration, and the actual conceptual work I'm doing gets no airtime because it doesn't photograph well. Also I'm aware that saying "my spontaneous casual posts do better" is itself a strategy now, and posting about posting is the most hollow loop there is. I tried leaning into it. Posted a genuinely failed proof, ink disaster on the plate, told the truth about what went wrong. It did numbers. And I felt weirdly used, like I'd sold the accident instead of the labour. Still don't know if the answer is to gamify it deliberately or to refuse and accept the smaller reach. Anyone else caught in that particular trap?

So I quoted a piece last week, 16x20, four figures, real time on it, and the person goes "that feels steep for watercolor, no?" and I just sat there typing and deleting for like ten minutes. Because here's the thing, that's the exact sentence watercolor gets. Gouache never gets it. Oil never gets it. But watercolor is "just" the medium that comes in a little pan for kids. Which is insane because watercolor is the least forgiving thing I do. There is no covering up. No scraping back to a happy accident. You make one wrong wash at hour nine and you're starting the whole sheet over. I have a stack of failures in my closet that would make you cry. I didn't say any of that, obviously. I wrote something very polite about materials and process and how many hours it takes and how the paper alone is like $40 a sheet before I even touch it. And you know what, they said yes?? They just wanted to understand it. Which I guess is the actual lesson and I hate that the lesson is "explain yourself more." But also I'm kind of tired of explaining myself more. Does anyone else get the "feels steep" thing and how do you answer it without turning into a lecture. Because I keep doing the lecture and then apologizing for the lecture and then giving a discount, haha. The discount is the real problem. I know the discount is the real problem. 🙃

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.

Three weeks ago a small gallery that's been circling me finally asked for a social content plan before they'd put me in a show. Not the work. The plan. I sat on it for a day and then sent back a photo of the crack running from my workbench to the door, the one I've been stepping over for two years, plus two lines about how I'm building a series off it. No grid, no posting schedule, no "pillars." They said yes. Show opens in October. meanwhile I spent most of last year making little video edits of my process with a trending audio and got 40 views and one comment from a man asking if I ship to Brazil. I don't ship to Brazil. I'm not saying the crack was strategy. It wasn't, I just couldn't make myself write the plan. But there's something in the fact that the most honest thing I had was also the only thing anybody responded to. Maybe the whole "content" thing only works when it's an accident. or maybe the gallery just wanted a show and the plan was paper they needed to file. still taking the win.

I had a small show open at a library in Majorna in March, six pieces, and I did the sensible thing for once: no announcements, no countdown, no "link in bio". Posted nothing at all for the six weeks around it. Partly stubbornness, partly I was in the conservation studio four days a week and just did not have it in me. Result: eleven people came. Two of them were staff. One bought a small piece for 1,200 kronor, which for me is a good sale, not a great one. The thing that did anything was a photo I took on the table by accident, half the work cropped out, just a torn edge and a bit of old ledger paper with the light across it. Put it up at nine in the evening with no caption. Four people asked about the paper. One of them is now coming to the studio in May. I have no idea what that means and I am not going to build a method out of it. What I keep turning over is that the photo was worse as a photo and better as a thing to look at. The proper shots, the ones my partner took with the good lens, did nothing. Flat, correct, dead. I think people could tell there was a person behind the bad one. Not advice. I am not going to start posting bad photos on purpose, that would be a tactic and it would show.

Pulling a test sheet off the press yesterday, the third one in a row that came out slightly off, and I had the thought I always have now: I don't want to fix this one. For those who don't print: registration is the alignment of the layers. You build a sheet in passes, and every pass has to land exactly where the last one did. There is a whole apparatus of crosses, pins, mylar, tape. It exists so the reproduction is faithful to the matrix. So the copy disappears into the original. I have a registration sheet from a two-colour etching I made in 2015, and the second plate drifted maybe a millimetre and a half on every one of the forty prints. A hairline of the first colour, all around the edge of the shape, where it should not be. I kept the sheet. Not as a memento, more as an argument I was having with myself. Because a perfect multiple has no author. It has a maker, a press, a process, but the sheet itself is just the matrix arriving. The misalignment is the one thing the plate cannot reproduce. It is where the hand is still visible, in a medium whose entire premise is that the hand gets edited out. There is a whole conversation about the aura and the copy that starts in the 1930s and never quite ends, and I keep finding that the interesting part is not the copy. It is the error. The copy is the system working. The error is the system admitting someone was standing there. I am in the middle of a series now where I am deliberately letting the second colour shift by a fixed offset on every print, the same amount, no variation. Which is its own trap, I know. I have turned the accident into a rule. A rule is reproducible. So I am back to no hand, just a more interesting system. I don't have a neat place to land this. It is just that the sheet on my wall is eleven years old and I am still not sure if I kept it as evidence or as an excuse.

Something I noticed this winter and I'm still not sure what to do with it. I started photographing my palette at the end of a session, before I clean it. Cadmium orange smeared into raw umber, a ridge of lead white, the whole thing looking like an accident. I put those up because they cost me nothing. Thirty seconds against the north window and voilà. They get roughly four times the engagement of the finished work. Every time. The finished painting is the thing I spent three weeks on. The palette is the residue. And people want the residue. My first reaction was irritation, obviously. But I think I understand it. A finished painting is closed. There is nothing to say about it except "beautiful," and then the conversation is over. A dirty palette is open. People can see the decision in it, they can imagine the hand, they can ask what that green is. It invites them in instead of presenting them with a verdict. Which is uncomfortable for me, because I was trained to believe the painting is the point and everything else is noise. And commercially, the noise sells. I have had two commissions this year that came directly from palette photos. I'm not going to stop posting the work. But I've started painting a little bit for the middle of the process, the ugly stage, the part where it looks like a mistake. That seems to be what people actually want to see. Curious whether this is only my corner of the internet or if it's everywhere.

so i posted a finished piece last week, 12 hours of work, layered flat color, the whole thing. caption about process. it did fine, like 40 likes, some "so good" comments from other painters and my aunt. then yesterday i'm about to scrape down my palette and i take a photo of it first, dumb reason, just liked the colors sitting there. unwashed, dried up ultramarine next to a muddy pile of something that used to be vermilion. no caption, no hashtags, posted it at like 1am. it's sitting at 3x the engagement and two people asked if it was for sale. i don't think the audience wants the painting. i think they want proof a person was there. which is annoying because the painting IS the proof, but fine, i'll go take pictures of my trash now. the part that stings: i've been painting worse for the camera for a month. arranging the easel, wiping the edges, pretending i don't clean up. all of it did less than a photo i took by accident because i was too tired to wash a tray.

Not a critique anyone gave me. Just something I have been sitting with all week. I have a photogram of a piece of fishing net I picked off the sand at Foz in October. The net is right. The edges are right. Twenty-two minutes under the sun, seawater wash, and every knot reads clean against the paper. Technically it is the best exposure I have made this year. And I feel nothing in front of it. It looks like a diagram of a net. The ones I keep pinned to the wall are all failures. A print from last winter where the wind moved the paper and the whole lower half smeared into a soft gray, and there, right at the smear, is something I have never been able to make on purpose. I have tried to reproduce it maybe forty times since. No luck. I am starting to think the accident is not a mistake I should be learning to control. It is the actual thing. I know some of you will say ruin it deliberately, and I have tried that too, and deliberate ruin looks exactly like what it is. There is a difference between a thing going wrong and a thing being let go of. Anyway. I am not looking for a fix exactly. Maybe just someone to tell me they have the same drawer of technically correct, spiritually empty work and what they did with it.

Pulled out a batch of test pieces from last winter, the ones where the paper buckled or the wash went muddy, and honestly. They're better than the finished stuff on the wall. There's one where the charcoal went down over wet glue and feathered out into this grey bloom, and I've been trying to reproduce it for 2 months with no luck. The accident knew something I didn't. Anyway. Stopped fighting it and started an actual pile, no fixing, just keeping them. Feels like cheating a little.