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Still fuming about this from Saturday. I was at an open studio thing, just working on a portrait of an old woman I'd taken a reference photo of at the market. Her face is all lines and light, it took me maybe six hours to get the softness right in the cheek shadows, pastel is not forgiving if you rush it. This woman comes up, looks at it for maybe three seconds, and goes "oh, so realistic. It looks just like a photo. So where's the art in that then?" I just said "well, the photo is right there" and pointed at my phone. She didn't even look. Just walked off. And I sat there thinking, I spent a year learning how to not make pastel look muddy. I know exactly where every highlight on that face came from. I changed the light source entirely from the reference because the original was too flat. But sure. No art. Just copying, right? I didn't say any of that to her. I just smiled and went back to work. But I keep replaying it. Why do people think realism is just... cheating? Like there's no decision-making involved? Anyway. Just needed to put it somewhere. 😅

3am thought i can't shake. i don't know if i actually love making art or if i love the idea of being a person who makes art. someone watching me sketch in a cafe is a completely different drug to being alone with a blank page, which honestly mostly just feels like dread. if you took away every audience forever, no posting, no shows, nobody ever seeing it again, would i still do it. im a bit scared of my own answer

I am totally lost on how to price my art confidently. What system or equation do you use? I understand the process of raising prices if you are selling consistently and investing in your art career. But I am looking for some guidance to get started.

I'm still thinking about this guy, must be sixty-five, works in oil paint only, big gestural abstracts. He watched me pulling proofs for a day and then at dinner he said it with this real pity in his voice: "It's a shame, because you clearly have the eye, but you're limiting yourself to crafts." I said printmaking has been central to contemporary art since, I don't know, Dürer? And he said Dürer was a painter who also did prints. Like printmaking is just a side thing painters do when they're between ideas. The thing that gets me is the hierarchy. Oil painting = serious. Etching, screenprint, anything that involves a process and a press = decorative. It's so nineteenth century. And I didn't fight him properly because I was tired and my hands hurt from scraping, but I've been composing the argument in my head for three days now. You know when the perfect retort arrives too late?

i was digging through old work last night, stuff from like 2017, 2018, before i had any clue what i was doing technically. and it's so raw. like genuinely uncomfortable to look at. there's this one charcoal portrait i did on newsprint of all things, the paper is practically disintegrating, and the face is just WRONG, proportions all off, but god it has something in it. it's looking at you. it's hurting. and i look at what i'm making now with my better materials and my figured-out process and it's more refined but it doesn't hit the same way. i feel like i've gotten safer without meaning to. like i learned how to make things that don't embarrass me and lost whatever made people stop and stare. i don't want to romanticize being in a bad place just to make good art. i've worked too hard to get somewhere steadier. but i can't pretend i don't see the difference. anyone else feel like their messiest work has a pulse the polished stuff doesn't?

Went to this fine art fair over in Nashville back in the spring. Set up my booth, had my best quilts hung proper, the whole thing. Three days and I sold exactly one small wall hanging to a lady from Memphis who said it reminded her of her grandmother's kitchen. That was it. I was packing up feeling a little foolish for the booth fee when this woman from a gallery in London comes walking by. She'd been watching me from across the room for two days she said. Didn't want to bother me while I was working. She asked about my piecing technique and I showed her the back of a quilt where you can see all the stitching and she just stood there quiet for a long time. Now I'm getting ready to ship six pieces to England next month. First time my work crosses the ocean. The Lord moves in ways that don't make sense to us in the moment. That dry fair taught me something about who's really watching. It ain't the people handing you cash right then. Sometimes it's the one standing back taking notes while you're just doing your work.

A foreign buyer came to my village last year. A German lady, very polite, through a cooperative. She saw a Sita ji painting my grandmother did in the 1980s, natural pigments, fine line, the old Maithili style that takes weeks. She wanted to buy it. I told her price, 8,000 rupees. She smiled and said "for local art, that seems high." Then she offered 500 rupees. I could not speak for a moment. 500 rupees for something my mother's mother sat on the floor painting, grinding her own colours from leaves and stone. I told her no, sorry, this painting is not for sale now. She looked confused. I think she thought I would bargain. But some things you do not bargain over. This is the problem we have with folk art. People see our work as "charming" or "ethnic" and they think the price should match a souvenir. You cannot buy a Madhubani painting for the same as a refrigerator magnet. My daughter worked three days on a single fish motif last month. Three days. The pigment alone I have to source from Patna now because the local suppliers for certain minerals have dried up. I am not angry at the lady. She did not know. But I am tired of explaining that this art has a price. My time, my mother's time, my grandmother's recipes for colour. It is not decorative. It is our history.

Kid couldn't have been older than twenty. Points at a piece I'm loading out, thirty pound chunk of basalt I spent three weeks on. Asks if I found it like that. I said no, I carved it. He says yeah but did you make the rock or did you find the rock. I told him I found the rock. Four hundred million years old, I didn't make it. But I sure as hell made what's inside it. He nodded like I was humoring him and walked off. Not his fault. Nobody teaches looking anymore. They think if it didn't come out of a machine it must have washed up on a beach fully formed.

Had a young guy at the booth this weekend, looked at my price tag, nodded like he'd figured something out. Said he could probably do the same thing himself with a Dremel and some YouTube tutorials. I said maybe he could. But I'd been thinking about it all evening and it still bothers me. Not the disrespect, I don't care about that. What bothers me is the assumption that the tool is what matters. Like the only difference between me and him is I own bigger equipment. I've got a 50lb tungsten chisel that I dressed myself because nothing on the market was right for the cut I needed. I spent three months learning to sharpen it right. A Dremel wont teach you how to read grain or when to walk away or what to do when you're 40 hours in and the stone decides to split wrong. Anyway. He walked off with a print. Probably gonna try to carve it this weekend. I hope he does. That's how you learn the difference between wanting to make something and wanting to have made something.

Took me forty-five years and a divorce to say it out loud but here we are: if someone hands me a theme and a deadline, my brain turns off like a switch. I stare at the wall. I cut and reset the same piece of stone six times. I produce something technically fine that I don't care about. Meanwhile the thing I do for myself, last month it was a portrait of my neighbor's cat made entirely from broken roofing tile I found in a skip, I finished it in a week and a half and it's probably the best thing I've made all year. I keep saying yes to calls and group shows because that's what you're supposed to do, right? Get your work out there. Network. But I think I'm done pretending I function that way. I'll take the solo slow route even if nobody sees it for a while.

Signed up for a "Sunday afternoon landscape workshop" at the local community center. $65, reasonable. Show up and it's 1pm to 6pm. That's not an afternoon, that's a full work shift. I've got to pick up my 8 year old at 4:30. So I got to do the underpainting and then pack up while everyone else was adding their second layer. I asked if they ever do shorter versions and the instructor said "well, you really need the full time to develop the piece" like I hadn't just paid to develop about 40% of a piece. I get that you can't rush painting but also I have a life??? I'd pay the same $65 for a tight 2.5 hour session that actually fits into a Saturday.

bought a new tub of gesso yesterday, opened it today, and it's got the texture of slightly wet chalk. lumpy. separated. i spent twenty minutes trying to whip it back to life and it just laughed at me. i know it's not that deep but i was actually excited to start something and now i'm just sitting here staring at a bad tub of gesso like it personally owes me money. gonna have to drive 45 minutes to the other store and i'm mad about it before i even leave.

Found a painting of someone's dachshund from 1983 yesterday. Terrible painting. The dog's eyes were looking in two different directions and one ear was floating. Frame was trashed, matting was that pilled velvet stuff. Bought it anyway. Took the painting out, put it in a drawer. I don't know why I do this. I have a stack of bad pet portraits now and no use for them. But throwing someone's dog away felt wrong. Same thing happens with photographs. Estate sales, flea markets. I've got a shoebox full of people I don't know. Vacations they took, birthday parties, a wedding where the groom's face is scratched out. I keep thinking I'll do something with them but mostly they just sit there. Maybe it's just cheaper than therapy. Or a different kind of hoarding.

walked into a gallery opening last week, guy comes up, says he's been watching my stuff online. my heart's pounding because holy shit someone noticed. then he says "your work has so much raw energy but you'd sell three times as much if you just... pulled it back a little. make it more accessible." i stood there holding my wine and wanted to cry and punch him at the same time. accessible. like what i'm doing is too MUCH. like the whole point is to make people comfortable. i spent years learning how to stop making polite art. i grew up in a house where we didn't talk about what was actually happening and i painted that way for so long, safe, quiet, looking good on the surface. i taught myself to tear that open and now someone wants me to smooth it back down so it matches their couch. i told him no and he gave me this little pity smile like i'd made a business mistake. maybe i did. don't care. art that doesn't cost you anything isn't worth looking at. i'll keep painting the ugly honest stuff even if it hangs in my hallway forever 🔥

Myself Ramesh. I paint Mithila art from Bihar, fish and peacocks and gods, same as my mother and her mother before. This is our tradition, many centuries old. Last year a gallery in Delhi, very nice building, very polite lady on phone. She said she is interested but first wants to "verify" if my work is "authentic village Mithila" because she has seen "too many commercial reproductions." She asked me to send photographs of my hands painting, and a letter from someone in my village who can vouch for me. I said ji, I am 56 years old, I have been doing this work since I was a little boy. My mother learned from her mother. You can see the natural pigment, the line work. But she insisted. So I sent. Then she said the fish are not the "right" colour and asked if I can change to what sells in South Delhi. I said no, this is Mithila fish, this is how we do. She stopped replying. Any of you had a gallery ask you to prove your own tradition? Or tell you your own art is not "authentic" enough? What do you even do with that.

Y'all, I been selling quilts my whole life, church bazaars, word of mouth, folks stopping by the house. Never needed much more than that. But my granddaughter got me on Instagram a few years back, and I tell you what, the folks I've met through there... mm. People from England, from Japan, from California, wanting a piece of what I do. I sold a quilt last month to a woman in Paris. Paris, France. She saw a picture I took on my kitchen floor and paid more than I used to ask for a whole summer's worth of craft shows. And I'm grateful, don't get me wrong. The Lord's been good. But there's something funny about it, these folks paying top dollar for what my grandmother did out of a flour sack because that's what she had. They call it "art" now, and I guess it is. But it was art then too, wasn't it? Anyway. I'm still figuring out what to make of it. Grateful, but figuring.

Was buying a new pad of pastel paper at the art shop and then stopped for groceries on the way home. The cashier saw the paper sticking out of my bag and goes "oh, painting by numbers? my grandma does those." I just said no and smiled. But I've been thinking about it all evening. Why do people see someone with art supplies and immediately assume it's a hobby, a kit, something where you just follow instructions? Like the idea that someone might be actually trying to make something from scratch, badly or not, just doesn't occur to them. And I know it's not a big deal. It's a random comment from a stranger. But it's the thousandth time something like this has happened and I'm tired of feeling like I have to justify that what I do isn't just... coloring inside someone else's lines. Anyway. Put down a portrait tonight that I hated and scraped off with a razor. At least that was my own bad decision, start to finish.

I have been trying for months to make nice reels about Mithila painting. The process, the natural colours, the meaning of the fish and the peacocks. Good lighting, proper background, all arranged. My son helps me with the editing. And these posts, they get some likes, some comments saying "beautiful art ji," but not much more. Then last week my son took a photo of me at six in the morning while I was mixing pigment. I had not even bathed. Old kurta, hands stained with lampblack. The photo is not good, blurry, bad angle. I told him delete it. He said no, let me post. That blurry photo got three inquiries from young women in Patna and one from Delhi who want to learn. They said it looked "real." One said she could see I was actually doing the work, not performing. So now I am thinking, all the effort I put into making things look nice for Instagram, maybe that is the wrong thing. Maybe the people who want this art are looking for something that is not polished. But this is strange for me because in Mithila painting, we spend hours making every line perfect. The whole point is precision. But online, they want the opposite. I am not sure what to do with this information. Keep posting the blurry morning photos or go back to the proper videos? Both feel wrong in different ways.

I was buying a new palette at this little art supply shop downtown, one I've been going to for years, and this guy maybe 60s just watching me pick out colors finally goes "you know, with watercolor, you have to work light to dark." Like I had wandered in off the street and picked up a brush for the first time that morning. And I laughed it off because I'm bad at confrontation but then I spent the whole walk home fuming at myself for not saying anything. I've been painting daily for like a decade. I have a BFA. I taught a workshop last month. But sure, random man at the art store, please explain the most basic principle of my entire medium to me like I'm five. Honestly the thing that gets me is I KNOW he wouldn't have done that to a guy holding an oil palette. Watercolor is "dainty" or "hobbyist" or whatever until you try to actually control it and realize it's the most unforgiving medium there is. One wrong wash and you're done. But okay. Work light to dark. Got it. Thank you so much.

i brought in a 30x40 acrylic for a commission frame job and the guy behind the counter goes "oh nice, decorative" with this little smirk. like yeah dude that's one of the functions of art. i hang it on walls. it's visually pleasing. do you want me to be miserable every time i look at it or what. i should've said something but i just did the customer service grimace smile and said "yep that's me" and now i'm mad about it in retrospect which is worse. if you're gonna be a framing shop art critic at least have the spine for me to argue back while we're both standing there.