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Its a new found comfort talking to everyone that I have met on this app, the connections between artists are something I didnt quite experience, until recently, im truly grateful to be an artist

I had a gallery in Delhi showing interest in my Mithila work. Very excited I was. Then they said, you will arrange framing yourself and also deliver to the venue at your own cost. For a group show, not even solo. I thought the gallery handles presentation side no? Otherwise what is the gallery doing. I told them sorry ji, this arrangement does not work for me. Maybe I lost an opportunity but it felt wrong. What is your experience with this? Which costs the gallery should cover and which the artist bears? I am still learning the business side after so many years of just painting. 🙏

Myself Ramesh, Mithila painting from Madhubani district in Bihar. I want to ask something to those who have dealt with galleries. My first attempt was not by email at all. There was an exhibition in Patna where I had sent two paintings through a cooperative, and a gallery person saw them there and asked who is the artist. That is how my first proper show came, not by applying but by someone seeing the work hanging. After that I tried emailing some galleries in Delhi, and mostly no reply came. So my experience is: the work has to be seen by eyes. But I know many artists now send portfolio by email only, and some gallerists say never come without appointment. So tell me ji, which way you did it? Email with photos first, or you carried the paintings and went? And for those who walked in, did they see you or send you away? I want to know what actually works, because I am still learning this side of things. 🙏

I'm realizing the red flags are easy to list (we've all done it) but the green flags are harder to name, and honestly more useful. For me: I was emailing with this tiny gallery in a converted house, kind of half expecting nothing, and the owner asked me what time of day I usually paint and whether my work looks better in morning or evening light. Nobody had ever asked me that. Not a single person. And I was like oh. You actually look at the work, not just the jpeg. Ended up showing there and it was a genuinely good experience. So what's the thing that flipped it for you? A question they asked, something they said no to, a way they talked about another artist, whatever. The small signal that made you go okay, these people are real. Also curious if anyone's had the opposite where a place looked perfect on paper (nice space, nice website, says all the right things) and then you got in the room and something was just off. My partner thinks I'm too suspicious of nice websites and I need to know if I'm right haha.

A friend from years ago asked me to paint her daughter's portrait for her 18th. I said yes at €600, already half what I'd charge a stranger for a 50x60cm oil on linen. She's a friend, fine. Then the emails started. "Could you do it from these five photos instead?" "Actually she's wearing a different dress now, can you change the colour?" "Her hair is shorter than that photo shows." "My mother thinks the background should be lighter." I repainted the face from new reference, adjusted the dress twice, scraped and repainted the background. All told I probably spent close to 25 hours on a painting that should have taken maybe 12. At my usual hourly rate for commissioned work that comes out to about €24 an hour. My assistant, who stretches canvases, makes €16. So I earned roughly the same as the person who stretches my canvases, for a job that required twenty years of training. The friend was happy. The daughter cried when she saw it. Beautiful moment. I don't regret it exactly. But I sat down afterwards and did the math and realised I'd basically given her a €1,200 painting plus a free workshop in how to manage an artist. Never again without a contract that says: one reference, one revision, anything beyond that is a new fee. Curious if anyone else has a number attached to the "learning experience" of a commission that ran away from you.

been running an experiment since mid october. put "8x10 = $180, 18x24 = $650" right in my bio, top line, before the "i don't do logos for exposure" bit. not one person has mentioned it. no lowball offers. no "wow that's expensive" DMs. nothing. what i did get: three inquiries that skipped the whole "so how much would something like this be" dance and went straight to "can you do a 16x20 of my dog." closed two of them in under a week, which for me is warp speed, normally i lose people in the four-day gap between their first message and my reply because i'm bad at email. the weird part is i put this off for a literal year because i was convinced a number in the bio would scare off the casual followers and make me look like a shop instead of an artist. turns out the casual followers aren't the ones buying and the buyers just want to know if they can afford you before they invest emotionally in liking the work. still not sure it's "working" so much as it's not actively hurting. the sample size is like five people. but i've stopped writing the price paragraph in every second message and that alone is worth it. curious if anyone else has tried the same thing and gotten the opposite result, because i keep waiting for the other shoe.

Okay I need to know if this is a universal experience or if I just got unlucky. I signed with a small gallery last year, they were lovely, took my pieces on consignment, paid on time when things sold... and then just. never put anything of mine in an actual show. My work sat in their back room for months. I'd ask about upcoming exhibitions and get "we're working on it!" until I finally just pulled everything out. Turns out they were basically running a storage unit with a storefront and living off artists who were too nervous to ask where their paintings were. Anyone else had a gallery that took the work but never hung it? Is that a red flag I should've caught earlier or is it just... how some places operate? What's the longest your stuff ever sat unseen somewhere?

i spent like three years trying to do instagram right. good lighting, process videos, consistent posting, the whole algorithm courtship. and it got me... some likes from other artists. nice, but nobody buying. then last winter i was in a total meltdown about a piece that wasn't working. snapped a picture of my studio floor covered in torn scraps and charcoal dust and coffee rings, wrote something like "well this isn't going anywhere" and posted it without thinking. that one post got more replies than anything i'd done that year. two people commissioned work from it. so now i just send the ugly stuff. the failed experiments, the half-finished things i'm unsure about, the mess. i think people want to see the struggle, not the finished product. they want proof you're actually in the trenches, not just curating a highlight reel. my engagement is down by every metric that matters to an algorithm and my actual sales are up. make it make sense.