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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.

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.

I've never approached a gallery, honestly. I've only ever done local art fairs and a couple of small cafe shows. I keep telling myself I'll send some work out but I don't even know where to start, and part of me is scared of being laughed at with my little landscapes lol. I'd love to hear how your first one actually happened. Did you walk in cold? Send an email with photos? Get invited somehow? And how long had you been painting before you tried? I'll take all the stories as encouragement to finally do it. My plan was to email a small local gallery with three images and see what happens, but I've been sitting on that draft for two months 🙃

I've been painting seriously for about seven years now and I've still never had a real gallery show. I do the local art fairs, sell a couple pieces a year, and honestly that's been fine for me. But I'm starting to wonder if I'm leaving something on the table by never even trying. For those of you who've done it, how did your first gallery show actually happen? Did you cold email, know someone, have a friend who knew a friend? And be honest, was it worth the effort? I hear so many stories about commissions taken, work sitting unsold for months, weird contract stuff. Sometimes it sounds like a dream and sometimes it sounds like a part-time job nobody pays you for. My sister keeps telling me I should just start emailing small local galleries with photos of my work. She makes it sound so easy. I keep thinking they're going to see my stuff and wonder why I wasted their time. Tell me I'm wrong, or tell me your story. I want to hear the real ones, good and bad.

The craziest part about selling at local art fairs isn't the selling, it's the people who come up to your booth and say they've seen your work online. Every single time I'm caught off guard. I've got maybe 400 followers and post whenever I remember to, yet twice this summer someone walked up and said "oh you're the one who does those fall barn paintings" like I'm a celebrity. Meanwhile the piece I actually poured weeks into and thought would finally be "the one" has sat in my living room unsold for six months. My 8 year old said it looks like a sad house. Not wrong honestly. Trying to just accept that the internet works in ways I'll never fully understand and keep painting what I like. The barns sell because people want a barn on their wall, not because they're my best work. Feels like it should bother me more than it does.

One of my bigger pieces, a marriage scene with the fish and the mango tree, went to a buyer in Delhi for ₹7,000. That sounds respectable until you sit and count the days. Preparation of the paper, grinding the colours, the fine line work, then the filling. I worked maybe four hours each day for nine days. That is thirty-six hours. Seven thousand divided by thirty-six comes to about ₹194 an hour. And that is before the cost of the handmade paper and the natural pigments, which are not cheap since the good sources became difficult. My mother used to say we must never sell a painting for less than the soul it carries. But the soul does not pay for the grandson's school books. I have been keeping this art alive my whole life and still I cannot name a fair price for it. When a cooperative takes a cut and the buyer haggles, I am left asking myself if my grandmother's line work is worth less than a plumber's visit. I raised my price to ₹8,500 this month. I am scared to go higher because the buyers are not many. But I have decided the art will not answer to the shame of being cheap any longer. If it sells, good. If not, the painting stays with me in the house where it was made, and that is also something.

A friend from art school, someone whose work I genuinely like, sold a paper piece at a fair in Stockholm for 12,000 SEK. Same size as what I do, similar material, similar time investment. I charge 3,500 for mine. We're at the same stage, we came out of the same program. I know I'm not being ripped off, I set my prices, nobody forced me. But the gap is hard to sit with. Makes me wonder if I'm undervaluing the work or if they're just better at selling. Probably both. I raised my small pieces by 500 SEK this month and it felt like a test I was going to fail.

I had a booth at a local craft fair Saturday and a woman picked up one of my acrylic landscapes, looked at it for a good minute, and said "oh this is nice, I could probably do this with my daughter's $5 watercolor set." And I just stood there like... okay. So do it then? I'd love to see you mix titanium white into a puddle of Crayola paint and get that kind of coverage on canvas. Please. Film it. I didn't say any of that of course. I smiled and said "you should give it a try, it's really relaxing!" and she moved on. My husband said I was too nice and I probably was but also what's the point. People who think art supplies are all the same are not people you're going to convince in one conversation at a folding table. Still felt like packing up my easel and going home though.

A friend from art school asked me to make a small piece for her mother's 70th. Something with botanical prints, her mother loves old herbals. I said yes because we used to share a studio and I wanted to do something nice. I didn't think about the hours. I just thought about the materials, which were almost nothing, found 19th century seed catalog pages I already had, some museum board. So 500 SEK felt fair for a friend, maybe even generous. Then I actually tracked the time. Tearing and arranging is slow. Letting things sit and come back to them. I ended up at about 14 hours from start to finish. That's roughly 35 SEK an hour. About 3 euros. Less than a coffee in this city. I'm not angry about it. She's a friend and I'm glad I made it. But I realised I have absolutely no instinct for what my time is worth. I undershoot every time. I think because the materials are cheap I assume the whole thing should be cheap. But the materials are cheap because I spent years learning where to find them and how to use them. That's not nothing.

Right, so I'm two weeks into a block of a heron standing in the shallows, all that hatchwork around the water done, maybe three hours from being ready to proof, and the lino tears. Clean down the middle, right through the bird's chest. Not a crack or a chip. A catastrophic divorce. I stood there holding the two halves for a good minute. Then I laughed, because what else are you going to do. The dog looked up at me to see if I was alright and decided I wasn't worth the effort, went back to sleep. Two weeks. And the stuff I was using was perfectly good lino too, not cheap grey stuff, it just decided it was done with me. The funny thing is, I kept both halves. I'm fairly sure there's a way to mount them and pull them as two pieces, but honestly I might just frame the block itself the way it broke, it's sort of brutal and lovely. Or use the heron's head half for a smaller print. Give it a chance to redeem itself. Anyway. If anyone's got a method for rescuing a torn block, I'm all ears, but I'll warn you I've already talked myself into it being art. The missus says I'm a hoarder with a printing press. She's not wrong.

ok so I need to say this somewhere because my partner is tired of hearing it and honestly they're right. I did a little gouache commission last month, 11x14, a house portrait for a coworker of my mom's (mom's coworker, not even mine, which is its own whole thing). Quoted $260. Felt generous at the time, felt like a real artist number. It took me four sessions. Four. Because the roof had all this dappled light on it and I kept redoing the same three shingles like a maniac. Plus materials, plus the scan and a print of it as a thank you, plus driving it over to her house because "oh don't worry about shipping." By the end it was like $40-something an hour if I don't count the prep drawing I threw away. If I DO count it, it's less. And then she tipped me $20 and I almost cried, which, in fairness, might have been the sleep. The thing that's actually bugging me isn't the $260. It's that I quoted it off the top of my head in a two-second text. Didn't look at anything. Didn't think about size or complexity or the part where a house has like nine hundred windows. Just said a number because saying a bigger number felt rude. Meanwhile I've got a 5x7 in the same style I've been charging $85 for since art school, and those take me maybe two and a half hours now, so per hour they're actually not awful. It's the mid-size ones that are quietly eating me alive. Which I only figured out because I wrote every job down in a notebook this month like a responsible adult, and the notebook is mean. Anyway I think my 11x14 needs to be $400 and I've been sitting on that number for a week like it's a live grenade. Saying it out loud here so it stops being just mine. Nobody warned me that the hard part of full time isn't the painting.

So a gallery I won't name messaged me last week. Not a show. A "featured artist spotlight" on their account. €180 for one grid post and three stories. They were very warm about it, said they love my torn paper work, said it would introduce me to "collectors and curators." I sat down and did the math like the logistics person I used to be. Their account has 11k followers, most of whom I'd bet have never bought a piece of art in their lives. At €180 that's basically paying for a lottery ticket with worse odds than the actual lottery. I said no and they got cold immediately, which told me everything. Here's the part that bugs me. Two of my friends said yes to similar offers over the last year. One got a single comment. The other got nothing at all. Both of them said it felt good to be asked, like being validated, and I get that, I really do. Being asked feels like being chosen. But nobody asks you to pay to be chosen. I'm not anti paying for stuff, I pay for the booth at the local print fair, I'll pay for a listing that actually puts work in front of people who collect. This just felt like renting a room in someone else's house. Anyway. Curious if anyone else keeps getting these.