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Back when I was still doing a lot of fabrication work for other artists, a friend asked me to weld a gate for his backyard. Nice guy, helped me move a block of granite once. I quoted him basically materials plus a couple hundred for my time. He was happy, I felt good about it. Five years later he wanted a matching gate for the front. Expected the same price. Then his brother heard about it. Then a neighbor. Then I'm the guy who does cheap custom ironwork for an entire neighborhood and every one of them thinks I'm gouging when I finally say no. That was the last time I did a friends-and-family price on anything. Cost me more in aggravation than I ever saved in goodwill.

I finally did it. Went from €80 to €95 for a full day workshop, materials included, seawater hauling not. Two people who'd been coming every month for over a year just stopped replying. Not even a "that's too much now" or a goodbye. Just silence. I know €95 for a day of my time, my chemicals, my paper, the space, the clean-up, I know that's not a lot. I know that. But it felt like a lot to say out loud. And now I'm sitting here wondering if I should have stayed quiet and kept them. The worst part is I don't even think €15 is what stopped them. I think it was the act of me naming it. Like me raising my price broke something they'd assumed about me, that I'd always be the cheap option, the artist who does it for love. And I am doing it for love. That's exactly the problem.

I've been working on a study of Fritillaria meleagris, the snake's head fritillary, and I keep running into the same problem with one particular passage. The grid pattern on the tepals requires a very controlled lift to get those pale chequered marks out of a darker wash, and my usual standby burnt sienna from Winsor & Newton is staining the paper in a way I can't work around. It's a lovely pigment for many things but it simply will not lift cleanly once it's dried for more than about thirty seconds. I've tried different papers, different dilution levels, even switching to a synthetic sienna from another brand, and the behaviour is the same. I know there are artists who pre-wet the area and work into a damp surface to avoid the problem, but that sacrifices the crispness of the edge I need. I wonder if some of you have found a particular brand or formulation of burnt sienna that lifts more cooperatively, or if you simply avoid it for this kind of work and use something else entirely. I am not ready to give up the colour, it is exactly the right earthy rust for this species, but I might have to adjust my method.

Sold a 140x140 oil and cold wax piece to a regular collector for €1,100. Then I saw the invoice from the framer. He'd paid €400 for the frame, plus delivery, plus the wall hanging rig. I did the math on my end afterwards: between the stretcher, the oil, the cold wax, the months of drying time sitting in my studio, and the actual painting hours, my rate came out at around €14 an hour. The frame he chose costs more per square meter than my painting does. I'm not saying the price was wrong. He's passed on two smaller pieces since, he's serious, and €1,100 for a painting that size from a mid-career artist in this country is roughly where the market sits. But there's something slightly absurd about a piece that took me a year of thinking and painting being worth less than the aluminium profile holding it up. The real problem is I'm the one who has to be the one saying the number. The framer never flinches. I do, every time. I keep asking myself what the actual number should be, and the honest answer is I don't want to find out by losing the collectors who made this a living in the first place. That's the trap, and I know it's the trap, and I'm still sitting in it.

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.

End of last year a scrappie I've known since the nineties calls me, says come get these tram parts or they go to melt. Old Škoda 8Tr stuff, brake valves, couplers, chassis brackets. Beautifully worn, that smooth worn metal you get from forty years of use. So I went. Paid him in coffee and a bottle of something. Three months now the crate sits in the corner of the studio and I have not touched a single piece. I walk past it every day. My son came by last week and asked what I'm making with it and I told him honestly nothing yet, and he said so why'd you take it, and I said because it existed. That's a lousy answer but I think it's the real one. There's a difference between collecting and hoarding and I've never been fully sure which side of the line I'm on. I tell younger artists salvage is about deciding what gets to be remembered and then I go and rescue things with no plan because I can't stand the thought of them being melted into somebody's new washing machine. One day I'll know what they're for. Or I won't and they'll go to my son, who will also not know, and then it's his problem. That's how the good stuff moves through the world.

I did the math last night because I couldn't sleep and I think I'm genuinely losing money on every piece I sell. Like a small drawing takes me 4-6 hours minimum, the big ones are 15-20 easy. I use good paper, good charcoal, fixative, all that adds up. $80 for something I spent 8 hours on is $10 an hour. I make more bartending one shift than I do from a whole week of selling work. But here's the thing, I'm terrified to raise them. Every time I think about listing a drawing for $200 I get this voice in my head like who do you think you are. You're self taught. Nobody knows your name. You're not even in a gallery. $200 for a piece of paper from someone's apartment? Please. And then I see artists with less skill (sorry, I said it) charging $500 for stuff that's technically weaker and I get so mad. But also jealous. But also I still won't raise my prices. My therapist says this is about worthiness or whatever and I told her maybe it's just about rent and being realistic lol. But I think about it constantly. Every time I hand over a drawing and take the money I feel a little sick. Anyone else stuck in the "I know I'm undercharging and I can't stop" loop? How do you break it without feeling like a fraud?

Sitting in my studio with a small interior I've been working on since the start of the month, a woman at a table with morning light coming from a window behind her left shoulder. The whole thing is nearly done. The walls are right, the cloth on the table is right, the light reads the way I wanted it to. And her hand on the table is dead. It is the fourth time I've wiped it back and repainted it and each time it comes back a little more like a photograph of a hand and less like a hand. Here is the specific problem. I can build the form fine. Palm, knuckles, the taper of the fingers, all correct. What I can't find is the edge. The place where the light side meets the shadow side. I keep making it crisp because I know what the shape is, and a crisp edge says "I know what this is." I don't want her to know what it is. I want the light to have made it. One soft edge where the wrist turns into the shadow of the table, one lost edge where the fingers meet the cloth, and the whole thing would breathe. I know all this. I've taught it. And I still paint a hand like I'm describing it to a police sketch artist. I've been looking at Chardin all week, the little hands in the still lifes, the way he lets a knuckle just dissolve into the background and trusts you to finish it. It is a kind of confidence I don't have yet at this size. At a big scale I can be loose. Small and I get nervous and tidy. So I am going to let it dry and go at it once more with a bigger brush than it deserves. If it fails again I may paint her hand into her sleeve and call it a compositional choice. Not really. But it's been that kind of week.

so i did a group show at this bar two neighborhoods over, the kind where they hang stuff above the booths and hope nobody spills a $9 beer on it, and i sold one. $280. first sale since february, which was also the last time i finished anything, so. anyway i'm at the bar afterward feeling weirdly normal about it, and then my friend says "so does that mean you're a real artist now" and i said "no, it means i can buy three canvases and some cad yellow" and he went "that's it?" and yeah. that's literally it. $280 is 2/3 of a rent payment or one canvas and some paint and a sandwich. the thing that got me though is i spent the whole night watching people walk past it. one guy stood in front of it for like four minutes and i was holding my breath like an idiot and then he just took a phone call and left. the person who bought it barely looked at it. just asked if it was "the orange one" and pulled out a card. which is fine! it's fine lol. i don't need them to have a moment about it. still. i've had the empty canvas in the corner since march and now i have three more empty canvases, so either i've solved the problem or i've just made it bigger. going to go with solved. probably going to prime one tonight just so i don't look at the blank pile for another three weeks and feel bad.

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.🙂