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I keep almost not posting this because it feels small, but my mom pointed out it's the whole point so here I am. Someone found my work on instagram (which still feels fake to say, like who is out there FINDING my work) and commissioned a little painting of their dog. Not a friend, not a friend of a friend, a total stranger. And the money from it covered my groceries this week, which I know sounds like nothing but it's the first time I've paid for food with art money and I cried in the checkout line at Aldi. Like actually cried. Over frozen vegetables. The dog was a corgi named Mabel and she had this ridiculous grumpy face that I fell in love with. I spent three days on a 8x10 and I keep thinking about how her person is going to hang it in their house somewhere and think of her. Meanwhile my landlord just emailed about rent. Life is so funny like that. One door opening while another one is standing there with its hand out. Eight months into this full-time thing and I'm still mostly terrified but days like today I think it might actually work? Anyway if you've ever wondered whether the small wins count, they do, they're the only ones that have kept me going some weeks.

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.

there's this artist I keep noticing who posts the same kind of piece over and over, slight variations, and their comments are full of "this is stunning" and "where can I buy". mine are usually 3 likes and one bot. but last month I wrote a long boring wall text about how I distress the paper and how the varnish behaves and three people actually bought something. not the pretty post. the nerdy one. I don't know what to do with that. the fun stuff is more fun. but the gallery text pulled actual money. maybe people who buy art want to feel like theyre learning something, not watching a show. anyway I'm probably overthinking it. I just wish the thing that got traction and the thing that got sales were the same post, once, instead of always having to choose.

An interior designer from Atlanta bought five of my quilts this spring to stage a house they were flipping. Paid full price, no haggling, wired the money same day. Not one word about the piecing, the history, the work itself. Just wanted the colors to match a rug. And you know, at first it stung a little. Here I spent fifty years learning to make cloth talk and she wanted a throw pillow. But then I thought about it, because she asked me to cut them loose and let her hang them on a wall instead of a bed, that designer's clients are going to see my work and their grandmothers are going to ask who made it. That's the seed. Same with that gallery show I had in January. The lady who bought the biggest piece told me she'd never owned anything by a Black woman artist and honestly I didn't know whether to feel honored or put on a shelf. I told my granddaughter about it and she said "Mae, they're not buying the quilt, they're buying the wall." And maybe that's the truth of it. The work carries more than I get credit for while I'm standing there. All these years I'd get a little quiet when somebody talked about my quilts being "art" instead of what they are. But the money talks, honey, and the money walked right into my checking account. I guess what I'm saying is don't turn your nose up at the sale that feels a little off. That one may carry the next three.

So my granddaughter set up my Instagram a few years back, and I just post what I'm working on. I don't know all the tricks, I just put the quilt up there with whatever I feel like saying about it. And this young lady from California, she's a curator at some museum, I had to look it up, messages me and says she found my work through a hashtag I didn't even put on there. #improvisationalpiecing, something somebody else tagged me with. She said she'd been looking for quilters working "in the Gee's Bend lineage" and couldn't find nobody who wasn't already famous and priced out of reach. I sold her a quilt for $800. She found it through a tag I didn't even know existed. I got regular customers, Lord bless 'em, the ones who buy baby quilts and lap quilts for their mama. That's steady money. But the people who find me through these art-world tags, they're a different kind of buyer entirely. They want the story. They want the history. They don't blink at the price. Makes me think I'm posting for the wrong audience half the time. But I don't have the energy to chase two worlds at once. Y'all got any advice on that?

I used to do this thing where I'd tell people "pay what you can afford" because I genuinely believed in making art accessible and also I hate conflict LOL. But here's what kept happening: Someone who clearly had money would pay me $20 for a charcoal portrait that took me 6 hours. And I'd smile and say thank you because I SAID they could name the price and I didn't want to be a hypocrite. Meanwhile I had a single mom pay me $150 for a small drawing because she said "I know what labor costs and I want you to keep making work." The sliding scale only works if people are honest. And I realized I was letting the people who COULD pay more off the hook because I was scared to just... state my price like a real businessperson. Now I just say what it costs. If someone genuinely can't afford it I'll trade or work something out one on one. But I stopped making my pricing a charity auction where the rich get the discount. Anyone else do the "honor system" thing and regret it?

Right, I'll go first so nobody feels like they're confessing into the void. I said yes to a spot years back in a town I won't name. Small room, nice light, chap seemed sound, and about a week before the show he started asking if I'd "do the framing myself, like, to save us both a few bob." Grand, sure. Then he wanted a cut of the door on the opening night. Then he wanted me to help paint the fecking walls. I was that thrilled to have a wall at all that I said yes to every one of them and did the walls badly. Ended up fine, sold a few, learned nothing, went back to him twice more. That's the honest part. I didn't learn anything for years. So, what was the earliest red flag you spotted and ignored anyway? The deposit that never quite happened, the "we'll sort money after", the gallery that's actually a cafe with hooks, the landlord's cousin who "knows art people". Give me the one that had you going ah here, that's not right, and then you signed anyway. Not looking for the horror stories where it all went wrong, I want the small ones. The ones you talked yourself past. Tell me I'm not the only eejit.

ok so I've been circling this one piece for like three weeks, a view from my kitchen window at dusk, the one I paint over and over, but with all this heavy gray-green raincloud coming in. And I kept ruining it because I was trying to make it look "dramatic" and "serious art" or whatever and it just kept coming out dead and muddy. Then yesterday I was in a mood, like genuinely anxious about money and whether I'm wasting my savings on this full-time thing, and I just grabbed my brush and went at it without thinking. And I let the water take it where it wanted, didn't fight it, didn't try to control every bloom. And it's the most alive thing I've painted in months. The clouds look like they're moving. My partner came home and said "that one feels like you." I think I've been so scared of making bad art that I forgot the good stuff comes from the same place. Anyway it's drying on my table and I keep walking past and going "oh, there you are." Just wanted to tell someone who'd get it 🙂

ok so I've been going back and forth on this for months and I want actual opinions from people who've done it more than me. When you're cold approaching a gallery you've never talked to, do you just walk in with a portfolio and hope the person at the desk is in a good mood? Or do you email first and wait three weeks for a reply that never comes? I did the walk-in thing once. Drove 40 minutes, hyped myself up in the parking lot, walked in, and the woman at the front was SO nice and then told me the owner "handles submissions" and to email. Which I did. Never heard back. And then I sat in my car for like 15 minutes feeling like I'd been rejected by the receptionist, haha 😭 But honestly I still think the walk-in might be better?? Because at least they've seen your face?? Or is that just me being naive and wasting gas money. Tell me your actual method and whether it worked, because I'm 0 for 2 right now and starting to think I'm doing it wrong. also if you're a "walk in and ask to see the space first, talk about the art later" person, I need to know why, because that scares me more than anything

Yesterday one man came to my house, his daughter is 14, she has been learning with me on Sundays since four months. She is good, ji, very steady hand, better than many boys who come and go. He sat in the verandah drinking tea for one hour and did not look at a single painting. Then he asked what scope is there in this work. I did not have proper answer. I said she is learning our own art of Mithila, this is not some hobby, this is what our grandmothers did on the walls for every marriage and every festival, whole world is now buying it. He nodded in that way people nod when they have already decided. Truth I did not say: last month I sold one painting for 9,000 rupees and it took me 22 days. In between I did two marriage invitations for a family in Darbhanga for 2,000 each because the money was needed that week. Her father is not a fool. He has seen my house. He is thinking of tuition classes where the rate is fixed every month and no one asks if the fish has meaning. She will come next Sunday, I think. She wants to. But I am also knowing that one more Sunday and he may stop her. We talk about reviving the art, saving the art. Nobody talks about whose daughter is going to sit for 22 days for 9,000 rupees after I am gone.

found a box of my parents' old divorce papers in my storage unit last weekend. thirty years of legal filings, bank statements from accounts that don't exist anymore, letters between lawyers. almost threw it out. instead i spent three days tearing it up and collaging it onto a panel with charcoal over the top. felt gross at first, like i was violating something. then i realized those papers were already dead. the marriage was dead, the money long gone. i'm just making something honest out of the paperwork of it all. nobody's seen it yet. not sure i want anyone to, actually. but it's the most alive i've felt in the studio in months. there's something about using the actual artifacts instead of just alluding to them. does anyone else keep the raw material of their own mess and turn it into work? or is that just me being morbid

I did the thing I tell other people not to do. Ran out of burnt sienna on a Tuesday night with about a third of a painting left to go, and instead of driving to the art store I ordered a cheap 12 tube set off Amazon. It came Saturday. The tubes are smaller than my thumb. I know, I know. But honestly the cadmiums are not as bad as I expected and the burnt sienna is the one that's noticeably chalky. Which is exactly the color I needed. So now I have eleven tubes I half trust and one I'm mad at, and I still have to go buy the good one anyway. The painting's fine by the way. I mixed a little of the old tube with the new and it got me through. Anyway I'm curious what everyone's line is on this stuff. I'll spend real money on brushes without blinking but I cheap out on paint every single time and then complain about it.

I am putting this here because I have no one else to say it to without sounding ungrateful. Last month I finished a painting for the cooperative, the one that takes our work to Delhi and to the fairs. Wedding scene, peacocks on both sides, natural colour. Fine line work, my eyes are not what they were, so it was slow. Three weeks nearly, with the teaching going on in the mornings. Account came: 1,850 rupees. Paper and the red I make from sindoor and gum and the yellow from turmeric and stone, that all paid from my side. So the real figure is lower than 1,850. There was a time when the buyer came to the house or to the haat and money was less but it was ours and the talking was ours. Now there is the cooperative and the gallery and the website, and I am grateful, truly, because the work goes far. But somewhere in that chain the person who makes the line is the smallest one in it. My son says I should put my own price on the paper when I send it. I am 56, I have been doing this since I was a girl of nine. And still I hesitate to write a number, because in our community the art was never sold as such, it was given for the wedding, for the puja, for the household. That thinking is inside me and I cannot remove it. Tomorrow I have to send two more to the same place. I will send. But something in the chest is sitting heavy.

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?

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.

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.

had a piece in a small group show last month, nothing fancy. yesterday the gallery emailed me saying a buyer wanted to contact me directly. nice, right? turns out she's an interior decorator. she loves the color palette. she wants to know if i can do something "similar but a little warmer" for a client's dining room. the piece she bought is a collage made mostly from a torn-up book about the 1918 flu pandemic and some pages from my brother's old copy of the odyssey. i worked on it during a two-week stretch where i barely left the apartment. it's about loss and contagion and maybe a little about odysseus being an idiot. but sure. warm tones for a dining room. i can do that. i said yes obviously. i need the money. but i feel weird about it. like i'm selling something under false pretenses even though she owns the actual piece and likes it for her own reasons. maybe that's just what selling art is? you put something dark out in the world and someone hangs it over their sofa and that's fine. anyway i'm going to make the warm dining room piece and try not to resent it. we'll see.

I mix all my greens from primaries, which means a bad yellow poisons absolutely everything downstream. Opened the tube this morning, squeezed out a bead, and it's a pale, chalky, faintly pinkish ochre. Real Naples yellow is a dense, opaque, slightly warm cream, and it should sit in the leaf of a magnolia without a fight. This is the color of skimmed milk that's been left out. What bothers me is not the money. It is that the label is allowed to say Naples yellow, and it will go on saying it, and someone in a class will buy it and spend three weeks wondering why their whites look muddy. I've written to the manufacturer. I will not be sending a photograph, because I do not think this is a matter that requires one.

I've been rationing it. Squeezing the tiniest worm out onto the palette and then working it with a palette knife like I'm stretching a paycheck to Friday. Meanwhile the piece is SCREAMING for a big wet slab of it and I know it. I know it. And I still sat there for twenty minutes trying to mix the same red out of alizarin and a burnt sienna that's basically a rock at this point. The last piece I made I did it in like 4 hours because I stopped caring and just went at it with my hands, and it's the best thing in my studio right now. You'd think I'd learn. Apparently I only learn for two weeks at a time. also the tube is basically empty and I'm already dreading the drive to the art store where the guy will look at my hands and know exactly what I've been doing

Last spring I sent a quote to a small Kunsthalle for a room installation. Fourteen thousand euros. Materials, three weeks of my time, the two students who help me weld and haul, transport from the depot in Holešovice, and the part nobody budgets for, which is the week at the end where you walk through the thing alone and move eleven objects until it stops feeling wrong. The reply came back the next morning. She asked whether the fourteen thousand was per square metre. I sat with that for a while. Not because she was being rude. Because she genuinely did not know what she was looking at. In her head a room of art is a quantity, like gravel or plasterboard, and it must have a unit price. Somewhere in her institution there is a spreadsheet column for that. I wrote back and said no, it is for the whole room, and then I halved it, because I wanted the show and because I am fifty-eight and still doing that. Seven thousand. She said it was a lot for a temporary project. I said nothing for two days. Then I signed. The thing I keep chewing on is that the number was never the problem. I could have held fourteen and she would have found it, institutions find money when they want the work. The problem is I have no vocabulary for defending the figure. I can talk about assemblage for an hour. Ask me why a room costs what it costs and I go quiet and discount myself like a man haggling over his own coat. I am told younger artists have this figured out. I hope so. It took me thirty years to learn to weld properly and I still cannot say a price out loud without apologizing in the same sentence.