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So a gallery I was talking to, small, not huge, but seemed legit, wanted me to ship them a bunch of pieces on consignment, cover the shipping myself, no guarantee anything would sell. I asked about the split and they sent me their "artist agreement." 70/30 their way. For a solo show. And I'd be paying for the opening night drinks out of my 30%. I laughed and said no obviously. But I'm still thinking about it, what IS normal these days? Like what's an actual fair split for a small gallery that's actually doing the work? I've heard 50/50, I've heard 60/40 artist-favoring, I've heard some places do 70/30 the artist's way if the artist is bringing the collectors. What are y'all actually seeing out there? What's walking-around real vs what's them trying it?

weird thing i noticed about myself. i can paint alone in my flat for six hours and feel like im wasting my life. but the second someone walks past the window and slows down to look, suddenly im an Artist with a capital A, posture fixed, very serious about the brush. is it just me or is the whole thing a bit of a performance and we just don't admit it

Namaste to all ji. Myself Ramesh, Mithila painter from Madhubani in Bihar. Forgive me if I am not so used to this online talking, my son has set it up for me. My first gallery, many years back, I went to Patna with three paintings rolled in cloth, no folder even, no photographs, nothing. I sat in the office and the lady there asked me, "who is your artist representative?" I did not know such a thing existed. I said, my mother is my representative, she taught me since I was six. She laughed, but kindly, and she kept one painting on the wall for a small show. That one sale fed my family that month. So I am asking: how did your very first gallery happen? Cold email, walk-in with work under the arm, a friend who knew someone, a group show you almost did not apply for? Tell me the real story, not the polished one. I want to hear how it actually went for you.

six months of emails. "we love the direction." "let's revisit after the summer show." meanwhile my inbox stayed quiet and my work sat in my studio getting dusty. then last week they post the lineup for the fall exhibition. same slot they'd been hinting at for me. filled with someone whose whole thing is neon resin pours that all look like the same puddle. i'm not even mad at the other artist. i'm mad at myself for treating "maybe" like a yes for half a year. should've kept pushing my own thing instead of holding my breath for them. everyone says don't wait for permission. i believed it until an actual door cracked open and i stood there politely waiting for it to open the rest of the way. that's the part that stings. anyway. the market crowd keeps buying, so it's not like the work's dead. just wondering how many "maybes" i let keep me small.

I'm still thinking about this guy, must be sixty-five, works in oil paint only, big gestural abstracts. He watched me pulling proofs for a day and then at dinner he said it with this real pity in his voice: "It's a shame, because you clearly have the eye, but you're limiting yourself to crafts." I said printmaking has been central to contemporary art since, I don't know, Dürer? And he said Dürer was a painter who also did prints. Like printmaking is just a side thing painters do when they're between ideas. The thing that gets me is the hierarchy. Oil painting = serious. Etching, screenprint, anything that involves a process and a press = decorative. It's so nineteenth century. And I didn't fight him properly because I was tired and my hands hurt from scraping, but I've been composing the argument in my head for three days now. You know when the perfect retort arrives too late?

so i killed my instagram in february. 11k followers, three years of posting almost daily. the reach had gone to shit anyway, i was getting maybe 200 views on a reel that took me an afternoon, and i kept catching myself making work that would photograph well instead of work i wanted to make. that's the part that got me. i made a piece in january specifically because i knew the process video would do numbers. it did. i hated the piece. anyway i deleted it. no announcement, nothing, just gone. what i did instead: went back to emailing. actual emails to about 40 people, buyers from the last two years plus a few gallerists and one curator who'd been nice to me once. no newsletter platform, no funnel, just me at the kitchen table with the names in a spreadsheet. one email every four or five weeks with a photo of whatever's on the wall and one line about what i'm doing. sold four pieces since february. which is more than i sold in the previous eight months of posting. i don't fully understand it. maybe it's that email feels like a person and the feed feels like a shop. maybe i just got better at asking. either way i'm not going back and i feel slightly stupid for the three years i spent chasing views that never turned into anything. the thing i can't decide is whether this only works because i already had the followers to begin with. like if i were starting from zero tomorrow would i have to do the whole dance again. i think probably yes and i don't like that answer

ok so this happened tuesday and I'm still weirdly annoyed about it. There's this watercolorist I've followed since like 2019, I have her book, I've basically studied her washes. She reposted one of my gouache pieces to her story. I sat there refreshing like a maniac. 40 new followers in two days, which is more than I usually get in a month, and I was SO sure this was it, this was the breakthrough, I'd finally have to figure out how to do a mailing list properly. Two people emailed me. One of them asked if I could paint a portrait of their dog for $60 because "it's just a small one." The other was a company asking if I'd do a free piece in exchange for exposure. Meanwhile the thing that's actually kept me fed since I quit the café is a 3-person email list (ok slight exaggeration, it's 91 people) where I send a photo of whatever's on the easel and a paragraph about how it's going, and I sell something almost every time. It's ugly and unglamorous and I keep trying to make it prettier than it needs to be. I think I've been chasing the wrong number this whole time and I don't totally know how to stop. Followers feel like a scoreboard. They're not. Anyway if you have a mailing list, what actually goes in it? Because mine is basically a group text at this point and I'm not sure if that's the secret or if I'm just getting lucky with 91 very patient people.

I turned off my Instagram and the other one for all of January. Just to see. Had 2,400 followers, which I'd been half-maintaining for years out of some sense that I had to. Nobody noticed. Not one message. My Etsy orders didn't change. The gallery that carries my work emailed about something else entirely. Two things came out of it. One, I'm not going back to posting three times a week for an audience that wasn't there. Two, it cost me nothing, and that's both freeing and a bit humbling. The people who actually buy my work found me through the gallery, through word of mouth, through a craft fair in November. Not through my hashtags. I'm not saying online doesn't work. It clearly does for plenty of people. But I'd built my whole week around a platform that didn't care whether I was on it or not. That's a strange thing to have done for a decade.

I spent years tweaking my website. Better photos, cleaner navigation, more process shots, less process shots, SEO keywords my friend who works in tech kept telling me to use. And I'd get maybe three inquiries a month, usually from students asking about internships I don't offer. Two months ago my domain expired and I just... didn't renew it. Put together a single PDF with recent work, editions, prices in a table, and my email at the bottom. It's ugly. It's just a document. I send it to people who DM me or write. That's it. And somehow this feels more honest? Like the website was performing professionalism for nobody in particular, and the PDF is just me handing someone what they asked for. I've sold more prints in the last eight weeks than in the previous six months of having a proper site. I don't know if this scales or if it only works because I'm a printmaker with edition sizes I can count on one hand. But I'm starting to think the whole "you need a professional web presence" thing was built for a different kind of practice, or maybe a different decade.

honestly this is such a stupid thing to be bothered by but we were on the phone last night, she's asking how the work is going, and then she goes "so what do you actually do all day though? like hour by hour" and I just. sat there. because the answer is I spent four hours on monday watching a single wash dry and re-doing it three times because the first two went chalky on me, and then I ate lunch standing up, and then I stared at the same window (the one from my apartment, the one I keep painting) and decided the light was wrong and did nothing for the rest of the afternoon. that IS the job. and I couldn't say that to her because it sounds like nothing!! it sounds like I'm lying to her!! so I said "a lot of prep and color mixing" which is technically true and also a total dodge. the thing is she's not even being mean, she genuinely wants to understand, she's just got a whole lifetime of "work = you go somewhere and someone tells you what to do" and I quit the café eight months ago and I think she's still quietly worried, and every time I fumble the answer I'm basically confirming the worry. anyway. called her back and explained the wash thing properly and she said "oh, like waiting for paint to dry, that's actually kind of nice" and I almost cried. she gets it more than I gave her credit for.

Had a meeting a few years ago with a space in Berlin that said they loved my work but wanted to "see more range" before they'd commit to a show. Which translated to: could I make something less repetitive, less conceptual, more decorative. Basically could I be someone else. I said no and we both wasted six months anyway. I still wonder if I should have been more flexible. But also, the whole reason I work in print is repetition. The multiple IS the point. So "show range" felt like showing I didn't believe in my own ideas. What's the worst thing a gallery has asked you to change about your work? And did you do it?

The woman was very polite on the phone. She said they are doing a show of folk artists from different states in November, and they liked my work, and could I send twenty pieces. I said I will send six. She was quiet for a moment. Then she said twenty is better for the wall, the space is big. So I told her the truth. A painting of the size she is asking, with the fine line work, takes me eighteen to twenty days if the monsoon is not troubling the drying. Twenty pieces means five or six other hands. And whose hands will those be? My neighbours' daughters, who I teach. Fine. They are good. But then it is not my work on her wall, it is my name on their work, and that is a different thing which I am not comfortable with. She said other artists manage it. Yes, I said. That is true. They also manage a signature. Now I am wondering if I have done a foolish thing. November is a good month for selling. The money would have been useful, the roof of the back room is leaking since last year. But I have seen what happens when one name becomes a small factory. The buyers never know, and after some years the young ones who did the actual painting are not even known in their own district. Six pieces I can do with my own hand. I told her she can hang them with more space between, and if the wall looks empty she can put a small write-up about the tradition. She is thinking.

Okay so I finally caved and paid $60 for a feature from one of those big art accounts that posts "emerging artists" to their 50k followers. Figured it'd be my big break you know, get some eyes on my stuff that aren't just my mom and the same 12 people who like everything I post. The post did get decent likes. My follower count went up maybe 40 people, and I got three follows from accounts that look suspiciously like the same kind of account. And zero actual inquiries about my work. ZERO. Not even a "do you do commissions" message. I spent $60 to get an audience of people who apparently scroll past art the way I scroll past ads. Meanwhile last week I posted a video of me just cutting paper for a frame and that got more actual comments and DMs than anything in months. Like literally cutting paper. Me being mildly annoyed at a crooked mat knife. I'm not saying shoutouts never work for anyone, clearly they do for some people, but I think I finally get that followers aren't the same as people who buy things. The folks who buy my stuff are the ones who've been hanging around my tiny account watching me paint the same window for three months. They feel like they know me. A stranger seeing my work in a feed of 30 other artists is not that. Anyway I'm $60 lighter and slightly humbled. Anyone else had a paid promo flop or is it just me 😭

was at an estate sale this weekend, said i was looking at a box of old photographs. just looking. woman running the sale walks over, all friendly, says "oh those are nice, you could cut them up and make something pretty." i stood there holding a picture of someones grandmother and felt genuinely sick for a second. like no, margaret, actually you cant. that's somebody's whole face. that's somebody's whole life in a cardboard box for 3 dollars and i'm supposed to be the one who makes it palatable. she saw my face and laughed. "or not! whatever you artists do." i bought them anyway. all of them. box was 12 bucks. they're on my kitchen table now and i can't touch one without feeling like i owe them something. which is probably why i'm an artist and she sells dead people's lampshades. nothing wrong with that. but don't tell me what to do with a stranger's face like it's craft supplies.

poured a bunch of time into a proper little ad setup. proper targeting, a carousel of actual finished work, a link straight to the shop. figured if people complain about the algorithm maybe it's time to just pay the damn thing. $80 later I got 14 link clicks and one DM that said "I love this, any chance of a discount for a struggling artist?" I told them I was the struggling artist and the discount was already baked in by me not knowing what my time is worth. they did not buy the thing. I know ads are supposed to be a long game and you're not supposed to judge on one round. but man. I could've bought a nice stretcher frame for that eighty bucks and had something to show for it.

Nine hours on a charcoal head, 300 euros. She sat down, saw the first version, and just started crying, and I sat there not knowing what to do with my hands and then said the price out loud and it came out as 300. I watched my mouth do it. Couldn't stop it. Here's the thing nobody warns you about: the discount doesn't stay with that one person. Word travels. Her sister messaged me last week, lovely message, "my sister says you're amazing, she says it was 300." Now I'm either the artist who charges 300 or the artist who has to explain why she was 300 and this one is 900. And I already know I'll do a bad job explaining it because I'll feel mean. The worst part is I don't even regret it. That painting is good. She cried. But I did the math after, 300 divided over nine hours plus the paper plus the fixative plus the two days I couldn't work because I'd used my whole arm doing it. And I'm 31 and I still live in a flat with a bathroom I won't describe. How do you actually say no to the second person without making the first person feel like a charity case.

I'm asking because I nearly died of shame at this. First gallery I approached, they said send your artist CV, and mine was a blank page with one group show from 2019 and my day job on it. I panicked and wrote two paragraphs about "my practice" instead, which I'm fairly sure nobody read. Now I have a bit more and honestly the blank-CV years are still the thing I dread talking about. So: what did you actually do? Did you send the empty one, pad it out, leave the art out and just talk about yourself, or say nothing and hope they didn't ask? Tell me I'm not the only one who googled "artist CV no exhibitions" at 2am 🙂

I'll go first. The one that strung me along for months had a "we're really excited about your direction" email and then nothing. No contract, no dates, just vibes. I kept thinking it was about to happen. It wasn't. The one that actually worked out, I nearly didn't bother with. Small space, weird hours, the person running it was blunt to the point of rude. Turns out blunt just meant honest. So what's the thing you saw and talked yourself past? the assistant who "handles the artists" and never answers, the group show that turns out to be a pay-to-play, the owner who badmouths every artist currently on the walls. tell me I'm not the only one who's done this twice.

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

Had a gallery owner come through the studio last month. Walked around for twenty minutes saying almost nothing. Looked at the welds on a piece I'd done three years ago, ran a hand over the stone base, asked me what grit I finished with. I told her 400 by hand, same as always. She nodded and wrote me a check for a show next spring. Ten years ago I would've prepared a statement, cleaned the studio, rehearsed what to say. This time I had grinder dust on my jeans and half a sandwich on the bench. She didn't care. She wanted to see how the work was actually made. I think the whole performance of being an artist is getting in the way for people who can actually make things. You spend so much time trying to look like an artist you forget to just be the one holding the tool.