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I had a piece in a group show last spring. Small gallery, decent neighborhood foot traffic. They took 40% commission. That's fine, I know the deal, rent's real. But I also had to pay for my own framing. Print the postcards myself. Supply the wine for the opening. They asked if I could "activate my network" on social and tag them in stories every day leading up to it. So I'm paying to make the work, paying to present it, doing their marketing for them, and they take 40% of whatever sells. And I walked away thinking I was lucky to be there. I don't have a tidy conclusion. I'm still trying to figure out which part of this is normal and which part is getting played. Because I keep hearing about how the model is broken for artists but I don't see a lot of alternatives that aren't just "go viral on tiktok" which is its own kind of nonsense.

ok so I finally got brave enough to start reaching out to galleries properly this year, and one of the first replies I got was basically "send us your follower count and engagement stats before we look at your portfolio" and I was so thrown?? like I thought the work was supposed to speak first? I get that galleries care about whether you can bring people in but it felt backwards honestly. I ended up not sending anything because it made me feel weird but now I'm wondering if that's just how it is now and I'm being precious about it. anyone else had this? did you send the numbers or walk?

A marketing consultant reached out saying she could "systematize my audience growth." I told her I don't have an audience, I have maybe 400 people who care about industrial salvage installations in Prague. She said that's exactly the problem. So for a month I let her try. She had me post on a schedule, use certain words, track when people engaged most. I did it. Numbers went up slightly. Total new people who actually came to a studio visit or wrote something that showed they understood what I'm doing: zero. The thing is my work takes six weeks to build and you walk through it in ten minutes. You can't optimize that. You can't gamify someone standing in a room full of old factory parts and feeling something. I told her I think the disconnect was that my work is slow and her job is to make things fast. She said I was being resistant. She wasn't wrong. But neither was I. I don't know what the proper social media strategy is for work that takes months and asks for patience. Maybe there isn't one. Maybe the answer is just keep making the rooms and the people who need to find them eventually will.

I spent three weeks fighting this gouache piece of my apartment window in the rain, I genuinely could not stand it the entire time, kept almost scraping it off the paper and starting over. Posted the finished thing mostly out of spite and exhaustion. It's the most saved piece on my site this month and two people have asked about prints and one person messaged about commissioning something similar. Meanwhile the window painting I actually love, the one I finished and immediately wanted to frame myself, sits there with like 40 likes lol. I know the whole "the work you hate is the work they love" thing is basically a cliche at this point but it still gets me every time. I have no idea what makes one land and the other flop. Is it the colors? The mood? The fact that it's messier and more honest? I genuinely can't reverse engineer it, I'm just out here throwing paint and praying. Anyone else have a piece they lowkey despise that the audience latched onto?

My first real gallery took a 50% cut and I was so relieved to have the representation I didn't question it. Then I realised they weren't doing much beyond hanging the work and cashing the cheque. No marketing, no collector outreach, no press. I was bringing them my own audience. I've heard worse. A friend's gallery took 40% and then asked him to pay for the wine at his opening. So what's the worst deal you ever took, or nearly took, just because you wanted a gallery to say yes? And when did you finally walk?

After a decade of charging what I thought was reasonable, 800€ for a 40x50cm oil, I finally did what my husband's been telling me to do for years and raised them to 1,100€ for the same format. Same canvas, same hours, same me. Just finally stopped apologising for what I ask. I lost one client. A woman who'd bought three paintings from me over the years, always asked for a small discount, always got one. She sent a polite email saying she couldn't justify the increase. I wrote back, equally polite, that I understood completely. And honestly? The relief of not painting for someone who sees your work as something to bargain over is worth the lost sale. The other clients didn't blink. One said she'd been waiting for me to raise them. That stung more than the loss, in a good way. I know the numbers are different for everyone, different city, different medium, different audience. But I wish someone had told me ten years ago that the fear of losing clients is usually worse than the reality. The ones who value what you do will stay. The ones who don't were already costing you more than they paid.

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.

Two people this month have suggested I start a Substack newsletter. A former student who now does very well on social media told me I was "sitting on a goldmine of expertise" and letting it go to waste. The gallery that represents me sent an email suggesting it would help with "audience building." I have a small pile of beautiful, unused Moleskine notebooks and a perfectly good fountain pen. I also have a quiet studio, a waiting list for my classes, and more work than I can comfortably finish. I am not sure what problem Substack is meant to solve for me, and at 47 I find I am becoming less interested in solving problems I do not have. I understand the argument. I teach techniques that are hard to find elsewhere. I have opinions about pigments and paper that people might want to read. But the pitch always assumes the thing you are not doing is the thing you should be doing, and I am not convinced that is true. Writing a proper newsletter takes time and thought. I would rather put that into another painting or a better lecture for my students. Has anyone else here pushed back on this pressure and been glad they did? Or do I sound like someone who will regret this in a year.

ok so I spent like a month earlier this year obsessing over my instagram grid, scheduling posts, planning reels, the whole thing. had a notion doc and everything. and you know what happened? nothing. flat engagement, same followers, maybe one sale from it. then I had this week where I just said fuck it and made 40 tiny test tiles, different clay bodies, glazes I mixed myself, firing temps I'd never tried. just messing around, no end goal. I posted them ugly, in progress, some failed. just the real process, no polish. those posts outperformed everything I "planned" by a lot. like triple the saves, actual comments from other potters, and two commissions from people who saw the test tiles and wanted something in that glaze. I think the audience can smell when you're performing vs when you're actually doing the work. the planning was me trying to look like a serious business. the test tiles were me being a ceramicist. anyone else find that the stuff you don't overthink just lands better?

So a Barcelona-based clothing brand reached out, they wanted to use photos of my pieces styled with their new collection for a lookbook. I thought cool, my wonky little ceramic heads next to nice linen, why not. They offered 400€ and a bunch of clothes, I said yes. The second I posted the announcement, the comments were... not mean exactly but disappointed. Like I was selling out. "Oh so we're doing fast fashion now?" "Mateo no." A couple people said it felt off-brand. And ok, I get it. But also, I'm 27, my kiln is held together with wire, and 400€ is 400€. The brand is small, Spanish, not Zara. They make stuff by hand too, different material but same energy. I felt good about it until I didn't. I don't know. I still think independent artists and independent brands can help each other without it being gross. But the reaction made me second-guess everything. Has anyone else done a collab that felt right but your audience just wasn't there with you? How do you tell the difference between selling out and just... making rent?

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?

There's something about dismantling things other people threw away. The motor was seized, the screws were stripped, I had to drill out three of them. By the end my hands were cut up and there was grease in my hair and I realised I hadn't thought about a single thing except getting that rotor free. I'm not even sure yet what I'll do with it. Maybe nothing. Maybe it just sits on the shelf for six months. But that hour of pure mechanical problem-solving with no audience, no jury, no curator waiting for a statement, that's the part they don't put in the grant applications. Makes me wonder how many of us are secretly just hobbyists with good framing.

I had a newsletter for almost two years. Every two weeks, a studio note, what I was printing, the tide tables that week, a dried piece of seaweed I pressed between pages. Nothing pushy. Just the work. I stopped six months ago. Not because of open rates or unsubscribes. Because I realised I was writing for an audience I couldn't feel. The emails went out and something went into a void and maybe someone read them somewhere and maybe they didn't. I had no way to tell. I know the advice. Build your list. Own your platform. But I think there's something honest about admitting that not every kind of reach is worth having. The newsletter worked better on paper than it ever did in my gut. I've been quieter online since then. Posting less. Selling more through the people who find me through word of mouth and the local shop that carries my prints. It's slower. It also doesn't feel like I'm feeding something that never looks back. Anyone else stopped doing something that was supposed to be essential and found it didn't matter?

3am thought i can't shake. i don't know if i actually love making art or if i love the idea of being a person who makes art. someone watching me sketch in a cafe is a completely different drug to being alone with a blank page, which honestly mostly just feels like dread. if you took away every audience forever, no posting, no shows, nobody ever seeing it again, would i still do it. im a bit scared of my own answer

when i first moved into this space two years ago i was so annoyed about the windows. it's a basement unit and the only natural light comes from these little hopper windows at street level that just show a brick wall about three feet away. i thought i'd hate it forever. but there's something about a wall that close. you watch the light change on the brick across the day, how it goes from grey to gold to almost purple. in winter the frost traces the mortar lines. i see maybe six inches of sky if i press my face against the glass. it's enough. also no one can see in so i don't have to tidy up for an audience. there's a pile of stuff next to my table that's been there since august. i know where everything is.