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I've been selling small etchings for €180 since 2021. Same size, same paper, same amount of work. Three years of the same number while my studio rent in Berlin went up twice and the price of copper plates nearly doubled. Last month I finally raised them to €240. Not a huge jump. Still probably too low for the time that goes in. But I did it. Then a former professor, someone whose opinion I actually respect, saw the new price list and said, in that careful tone, that the pricing was "ambitious." Asked if I was worried about "pricing myself out" of the market. The market being what, exactly? The market of people who think art should cost as much as a nice dinner? I didn't say what I wanted to say, which is that I know etchers in London charging £400 for a similar plate and nobody calls that ambitious. I just said I'd think about it. Now I'm sitting here wondering if I should have raised them more, or if I'm actually wrong. The math says €240 is still a bad hourly rate when you add up drawing time, plate prep, printing, editioning. But the voice of that professor is stuck in my head.

So I've been full-time for eight months now which means I've been doing all the "okay so I guess I have to market myself" stuff that nobody prepares you for in art school lol. And the thing that actually worked, the thing that got me my first real gallery relationship, was the most humiliating process ever. I spent a weekend sending 40 cold emails. Like, proper ones, with images and links and a real bio. And I got one reply. ONE. And honestly for like two days I was so embarrassed I almost didn't open it because I assumed it was a no too. But it was a yes. A small gallery in a city I'd never been to, but they liked my work and wanted to talk. That one yes turned into a group show, which turned into two commission requests from people who saw the show, which turned into enough money to pay rent for three months without panic-ordering takeout. Anyway I'm not saying cold emailing is the secret sauce, mostly it's just brutal lol. But I think sometimes we hear about the one reply and not the 39 silences. So here's my question I guess: what's the thing you tried that felt stupid or embarrassing or like it wasn't working, and then it kind of... did?

My first pieces sold in a tiny fish-market café at the edge of the old town, pinned up between the counter and the shelf of salted cod. Nothing framed the way you'd frame for a gallery, just paper and clips. A woman bought one while her coffee went cold. It meant more to me than my first proper show, I think, because nobody there had come to look at art. It just got caught in their day. These days I still do a couple of spots like that, on purpose. A surf shop, a little restaurant with its windows open to the harbour. People who'd never step into a gallery. Am I alone in this, or do some of you keep a foot in the non-gallery world too? Where was the oddest place one of your pieces ended up?

A visitor from Germany came to our village last month through a cooperative tie-up. She saw the fish and the peacock panel I had done for the wedding season, and she asked the price. I told her twelve thousand rupees. She did not bargain, ji. She simply took out the money and paid me twenty-two thousand because she said my work was worth more than I was asking. That very night I could not sleep properly. Not because I was happy. Because I kept thinking, for thirty-five years my mother sold the same size of painting through the local haat for eight hundred rupees, and it was good money then. I have never once named a price that came to me naturally. I always think of the market here, where the families cannot pay. So we all keep the art cheap to keep it in the hands of our own people, and the foreign buyers walk away with it for whatever they feel. I am not blaming anybody. But I have started asking myself, am I doing a disservice to my mother's art by pricing it for the ones who cannot pay and not for the ones who clearly can. I have not got an answer yet.

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. 😅

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.

A gallery in Leipzig asked me for a small edition of risograph prints for their holiday market, 50 copies, two colors, A3. I said €250 because I thought riso was cheap to produce and I'd breeze through it. I forgot to account for the test prints, the misregistration on the first 15, the fact that I had to reorder one of the inks mid-run, and the two full days I spent separating the layers because the files the gallery sent were trash. Total cost of materials plus my time: somewhere around €17 an hour. For printmaking. That's less than I paid for the paper. I keep doing this thing where I price the work as if the thinking part is free. As if the years of knowing how to troubleshoot a bad registration or choose paper that won't ghost count for nothing. I just factor materials and a small gesture toward labour and call it done. I'm raising the next edition to €600 and I already feel like I'm being greedy. Which is insane, because €600 for 50 prints, two-color, A3, with original art, that's €12 a print. That's nothing. But the feeling is there anyway.

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.

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.

okay so today at the market this guy stood in front of my booth for like ten minutes, studied everything, asked thoughtful questions about the pigment load and the cold press paper, I'm thinking oh nice, a real one. And then he goes "so can I just take a photo of this one instead of buying it? my phone does great in low light" and I laughed because I genuinely thought he was joking. he was not joking. he pulled out his phone and everything. I had to physically step between him and the painting like a bodyguard. That's my job now. I'm a bouncer for a watercolor of a window I've painted forty times. the weird thing is I get wanting the image. I take photos of art at museums all the time. but there was something so... confident about it? like the physical object, the hours of layering washes, the brush I had to rewet and rework because the sky went muddy and I nearly threw it out the window, none of that registered as worth anything. he just wanted the jpeg for free. anyway he left without buying anything and I did NOT cry but I did pack up twenty minutes early and eat a sad croissant. just needed to say it out loud to people who get it.

Today I ground my own green from the neem tree behind the house. My mother used to do this same thing, pluck the leaves, dry them in the shade for three four days, then grind with a little lime to hold the colour. The shade it gives is not bright, not like the market green from a tube. It is dull, dusty, like the underside of a leaf. But when you put it on the paper next to the vermilion it wakes up somehow. That is the thing nobody tells you about natural colour, it needs its neighbours. Alone it looks dead. Put it beside the red, beside the lampblack, and it starts to talk. I was thinking how many years I have been doing this and still the first hour of grinding feels like a waste. Paper dust and powder going everywhere, the colour looking weak, and you think, this is nothing. Then you mix it and you remember. Every single time the same doubt. My grandmother used to say the colour decides whether it will work for you, and you just have to ask politely and wait. She was right, I think. Maybe that is also the whole lesson of this art. You cannot rush the leaf.🙏

Myself Ramesh. I want to say something that has been on my mind. In the old way, we make our own colours. Rice paste for white. Lampblack from the diya. The red from kusum flower or from geru, the earth. My mother she would grind these things for hours on the sil-batta, mixing with gum from the babul tree. The colour sits on the paper differently. It breathes. Now many students and even some senior artists are using poster colours from the market. It is faster. Also cheaper sometimes. But I look at those paintings and the line has no life. The colour is flat like plastic. You can feel no hand in it. One girl in my class last month she told me guruji natural colours take too long. I said beta that is not a problem. That is the art itself. The grinding, the mixing, the waiting, this is not wasted time. This is the painting. But I also understand. The buyers they want bright. They want quick. And we must eat. So I am conflicted ji. I use both now. Some natural for my own work, some synthetic when I must. But I feel a little shame mixing the two in one painting. Like I am cheating my grandmother. Anyone else feel this way about old materials vs new ones? Or is it only me.🙂

Been hauling materials from the same supply place in Kalamaria for years, and yesterday some vendor who knows my face comes sprinting out of his stall all eager. Says he'll help me carry the palette of smalti I just paid for. Sir, that is 40 kilos of glass and you are wearing sandals. I told him no thanks, I've got it, I've done this a thousand times. He does not stop. He grabs one corner anyway. Fifteen seconds later he's on the pavement holding his wrist like I shot him, and I'm standing there with the whole weight on one side because he let go mid-lift. My back is going to remind me of his good intentions for a week. The thing is he meant well. That's the part that gets me. Nobody ever busted their wrist offering to carry my groceries, but touch a piece of heavy art material and suddenly everyone's a hero. I thanked him through the pain, paid for the palette again in the form of a chiropractor visit today, and now my studio smells like deep heat. I know it's not the worst thing that happened in the world today. But my knees are 45 years old and they did not need this.