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ok here's one, the first gallery I ever approached (small, local, I was so nervous) basically told me to come back when I had more followers. Not "your work needs work," not "we're full," just... go get popular first. I was so mad. But also I kinda took it as a challenge? Spent the next year just posting like crazy, doing markets, building a tiny newsletter, making connections with other ceramistas. When I went back I had maybe 2k followers, not huge, but I had people who actually bought my stuff and showed up. Anyway they took me that time. And now I wonder if it was bad advice that worked by accident, or if they were kind of right but said it the worst way. What's the worst "advice" a gallery gave you that you actually ended up learning from? Or that was just straight wrong and you ignored completely?

I had a small show open at a library in Majorna in March, six pieces, and I did the sensible thing for once: no announcements, no countdown, no "link in bio". Posted nothing at all for the six weeks around it. Partly stubbornness, partly I was in the conservation studio four days a week and just did not have it in me. Result: eleven people came. Two of them were staff. One bought a small piece for 1,200 kronor, which for me is a good sale, not a great one. The thing that did anything was a photo I took on the table by accident, half the work cropped out, just a torn edge and a bit of old ledger paper with the light across it. Put it up at nine in the evening with no caption. Four people asked about the paper. One of them is now coming to the studio in May. I have no idea what that means and I am not going to build a method out of it. What I keep turning over is that the photo was worse as a photo and better as a thing to look at. The proper shots, the ones my partner took with the good lens, did nothing. Flat, correct, dead. I think people could tell there was a person behind the bad one. Not advice. I am not going to start posting bad photos on purpose, that would be a tactic and it would show.

Spent most of this week on two large ones, 190 x 150, and for once the grey held. That sounds small. It is not small. Grey is the thing that eats me alive in the studio. Mixed warm it turns to mud, mixed cool it turns to dishwater, and after three days of layering and scraping back you look at it and feel nothing. This time I took the cold wax down hard, more than I usually dare, and kept the pigment lean. It dried matte, slightly chalky, and the colour underneath keeps showing through at the edges where I dragged the scraper. Two days ago I stood in front of it and did not want to fix anything. That almost never happens. Usually I want to fix everything. The other canvas is still fighting me. Same mix, same hand, and it sits there like wet cardboard. I keep telling myself the good one only looks good because the bad one is next to it, which is probably true and also useless as advice. I have a show in the spring, so the timing is good. The market can do what it does. Right now I am mostly relieved that a colour I have been chasing since about 2019 finally stood still for a minute.

I got a message from a friend on Tuesday morning, a photo actually. The old house on 4th Cross, the one with the red oxide floor and the wooden balcony with the turned railing posts. Gone. Just the compound wall and a pile of rubble and two men sitting on it having tea. I have eleven sketches of that house. Eleven. From different angles, different mornings, different light. And I still felt like I hadn't really looked at it. That's the thing that gets me. I could draw a building a hundred times and still not be sure I actually saw it, and then one day it's a pile and the sketches are all I have and some of them are wrong. The proportions off, the balcony too high, the shadow in the wrong place. When I was an architect I used to draw buildings so they could be built. Now I draw them so they can be remembered and honestly I'm not sure I'm any better at it. Different job, same feeling of missing something. Not looking for advice on this one. Just wanted to say it out loud somewhere. Tuesday was a bad day.

I'll go first since it's only fair. There's a tailoring shop near my old neighbourhood in Malleshwarigalli side, the owner had this long blank wall above the folding table and he was tired of looking at it. I used to sketch outside his shop most mornings, we'd got friendly, and one day he just asked if I wanted to hang some of the old house paintings there. Not a gallery, not a sale, just a wall. But it was the first time anyone asked, and I said yes before he finished the sentence. Two of them are still there. He refuses to take them down even though the wall's due for repainting. So, how did yours happen? The proper way, the accidental way, the mortifying way, all welcome. Was it a cold email, a friend of a friend, an open call you nearly didn't send, a walk-in that went badly or surprisingly well? I want to know the actual story, not the advice version. And tell me the truth about the first one. Did you sell anything, or did you just stand there beaming at your own frames?

I spent the morning sorting a box of offcuts I've been keeping since last spring. Anything smaller than a stamp goes into it. Hand-marbled endpapers from a 1901 hymnal I took apart, mostly. Some scraps I have not touched in eleven months and will not touch. I know this. Still could not do it. The box went back on the shelf, slightly tidier, which is not the same as emptied. The whole point of collage is that you take things apart, so the hoarding makes no sense on paper. Then again the scraps are the work. Every piece I have finished came out of a box like that one. I'm not asking for advice. I think I just wanted to write down that I failed at a very small task, in a room by myself, and it took the whole morning.

Vale, real numbers because I'm tired of vague advice. My last three glaze process reels: 340, 210, 180 views. A story I posted from the studio at 23:40 with a photo of the kiln door and the words "esto va a salir mal, lo sé" (this is going to come out bad, I know it): 1200 views, and 9 people replied asking what I was firing. So the thing that "works" is me admitting I don't know. Not the finished piece. Not the timelapse. Me at midnight, in a dirty apron, betting against my own work. I think this is because everyone can smell when a post is a shop window. And a kiln at night is just a kiln at night, no selling in it. The problem is I can't schedule genuine dread. I've tried. I posted a very constructed version of the same thing last week with nice lighting and a caption I wrote twice and it got 90 views, which honestly is what I deserved. Also my firing did come out mostly fine, one small crack at the foot, so even the dread was a lie in the end. Do any of you post the actual middle of the process, the ugly boring part, or am I just going to keep accidentally making content out of being anxious

I did a screenprint edition last month, 50 copies, three colours, hand-pulled, on nice 300gsm. Cost me about €450 in materials plus probably 30 hours in the studio. Sold 7 so far at €40 each. That's €280. Even if I sell every last one I'm barely breaking even on materials, let alone labour. And I know the advice. Raise the price. Build a mailing list before you print. Test the market with a preorder. All sensible. But there's something about making the edition first, committing to it, that's the whole point for me. The risk is part of the form. If I only printed what I'd already sold, it'd feel like a different practice entirely. I'm not complaining exactly. More trying to figure out where the line is between doing something for the work's sake and just being bad at the business side. Because I think I'm genuinely bad at the business side. But I also think the people who are good at it sometimes make work that's too safe. Any other printmakers here just accepting they'll lose money on editions because the object matters more than the margin? Or am I deluding myself.

I ordered cold wax in the big tin this time, two liters, because the small ones kept running out in the middle of a session and I got tired of rationing. That was three weeks ago. The tin is still nearly full. The problem: the 180 by 140 canvas in the studio has been the same grey since March. Not a bad grey. A perfectly reasonable grey. That is exactly the trouble with it. I put down a layer, scrape it back, and the thing underneath is still the thing underneath. Every morning I stand in front of it with the palette knife and think, today I ruin it, and every afternoon it is still reasonable. When I was thirty I would have thrown turpentine at it by now, just to have something happen. Now I know that a painting that resists for four months is usually one that has not decided what it wants to be, and force makes it decide wrong. So I wait. And the wax tin sits there. Naja. I know a few of you will say just paint over it. I have heard that. It is correct and useless advice at the same time, which is the most German kind.

So I'm sitting in a cafe on the north side of town last Thursday, and this guy who runs a small space, maybe twenty pieces on the wall, no storage, no real lighting, asks if I want in on a group show. Fine. Then he says forty percent. And I heard myself say "sure" before my brain caught up. Here's the part I can't get past. I did the math on the drive home. A piece I've got six weeks into, the one with the torn photograph of a stairwell I've been reworking since March, my price is 3200. At forty percent I'm at 1920. That's not a commission, that's him taking the cost of the paper and the frame and part of my hands. And I said yes because I wanted the wall. I know the standard advice is walk away, know your worth, all of it. I've read those posts. But I've got four finished pieces and a fifth that won't resolve and no one standing in front of them except me and my friend Dani who says everything is "interesting." There's a version of this where I say no and stay home and make another thing nobody sees. Genuinely don't know if I made a bad trade or a fine one. Thirty percent I could live with. Forty feels like paying him to be looked at.

two months ago i got in my head about "the algorithm" and paid someone $500 for a 90-minute zoom where she told me to: film myself painting (i hate this) use trending audio (i'm 33) post 3x a day (i will simply die) do a "bts" of my sketchbook (it's just bad drawings, that's the whole point) i tried it for a week and felt like i was performing having a personality instead of having one. my engagement went down. i wanted to quit painting. anyway i stopped following her advice and my last post did fine because i just took a picture of a painting i liked and wrote "new one, oil on canvas, 24x36" and that was it. 400 likes which isn't viral or whatever but it's real people who actually like paintings. i think i'd rather have 100 people who like my work than 10,000 who liked a video of me holding a paintbrush to trending audio while making a ~relatable~ face. the math might not math on that but my brain feels better.

Started this piece at 6am hyped as hell, had it all in my head, the feeling was THERE. And now it's 9pm and I'm staring at these two dead fish eyes that look nothing like the person I was trying to paint. They're technically fine. That's the worst part. They're just. Fine. No soul. I know the advice. Walk away. Come back tomorrow. But I can feel the whole thing going stale while I sleep on it. The energy leaks out overnight and tomorrow it's just a painting I have to fix instead of a thing that was alive. Sometimes I think the bad ones are my fault and the good ones are luck and I hate that I can't tell the difference.

Finished a small collage on Thursday, torn book endpapers and a bit of ledger paper, mostly empty. Making it took about six hours across two evenings. Then I spent most of Friday trying to photograph it. Kitchen table, north window, the light here in November is roughly the colour of dishwater. Fourteen shots. The paper is slightly warmer than the photos make it, and the torn edge disappears into the grey background. I know the advice. Get a lightbox, get a proper setup, treat the photo as part of the work. I resent it. The piece is a physical object made of thin, fragile paper and it does not care about a screen. What I make on the table at 23:00 is not what comes out the other end. So I'm considering just posting the bad photo. Slightly grey, slightly off, and honest about it, instead of the lie of a perfectly neutral white background. Not sure if that is stubbornness or a real idea. Probably both.

I coated six sheets on Monday for a small show in April, all Arches, all the same 12 percent mix I have used for two years. Hung them on the line to dry and felt nothing. The problem is not the technique. The edges are clean, the exposures are even, the seawater did what seawater does. That is exactly the trouble. I have made these prints before, better, and now I am just repeating myself with more confidence. What I think happened is I stopped being surprised by my own materials. I know what the seaweed will do. I know the net will go soft at the edges. So I place it, I wait, I rinse, I get what I expected. There is no conversation anymore, only instructions. I have one sheet left from that batch. Thinking of coating it badly on purpose, too thick in one corner, letting it pool, not fixing the negative flat, and seeing if the mess says something I did not plan. Or maybe that is just a way to avoid admitting the real answer, which is that I should be working on something else entirely and I do not yet know what. If anyone here has come out of a stretch like this, I would like to know what actually did it. Not the advice version. The thing you did.

Younger artist came to me for advice, said a gallery took thirty percent off his first solo. I told him that's nothing, wait till you price your own time as a pile of old radiators and broken chairs and realize you've been paying for the privilege of working. A collector here in Prague commissioned a piece for his villa. I quoted 18,000 CZK, which felt fair. Then I spent a month sourcing, cleaning, assembling. Did the math after delivery. Between material and hours I cleared maybe 120 Kč an hour. That's less than the guy who delivers my coffee. I keep doing this. I've told myself for twenty years that installation work doesn't price like a painting, that the process is part of it, that the history of the objects matters. And then I sit down with a calculator and it's 120 Kč an hour. Some things I did under the old regime I did for nothing because I had to hide them. Now I do them for nothing because I'm bad at saying a number and staying in the room while the silence stretches. The two feel different in theory. In practice, my bank account can't tell the difference.