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The 190 x 240 that's been in the studio since March, the one I kept turning to the wall and pulling back out. Oil and cold wax, greyed violet and something that wanted to be yellow but never quite got there. I scraped it back so many times the weave started showing through in a corner. Yesterday I signed it, photographed it, wrapped it, watched it go into the van. All day I told myself it was just another piece. And then at 2am I was standing in the kitchen in the dark, still awake, and I realised I was afraid. Not of it failing, of it meaning something. To someone else. Outside the room where I made it. That's the part you can't rehearse. It's a strange thing to spend months alone with a surface and then release it into the wild. Like watching your kid get on a bus for the first time. You want them to go. But you also want to pull them back and keep them safe. Anyway. It's gone now. I'll know in a few weeks. Or I won't. Sometimes you never know.

I sold a piece last year through a gallery in Berlin. Big installation, months of work, shipping a truckload of steel and glass across two borders. The collector paid 18,000 euros. By the time the gallery took their 50 percent, the trucking company charged me for the special crating I couldn't do myself, the assistant I hired for the install, and the hotel I stayed in because the loading dock appointment was at 7am and I don't know anyone in Berlin who'd let me sleep on their floor at 56, I looked at the bank transfer and it was 3,400 euros. The framer who built the crate made more than I did. I know because I asked him what he charged. He told me. Nice guy. He earned it. I'm not telling this as a sob story. I agreed to the terms. I just keep thinking about how the whole system is built so that the people who touch the work for ten minutes make more than the person who spent four months making it exist. And we all nod and say that's how it works. But it's funny, no. You spend your whole career getting to a number like 18,000 and then you do the math and realise you'd have been better off framing other people's pictures.

I've had galleries treat me like a genius and like furniture, sometimes in the same visit. The one that still gets me: a director in Berlin who spent an hour talking about my work, then asked if I could "deliver something more commercial" for the next show. And separately, I once walked out of a space in Vienna because the owner kept introducing me to people as "the salvage guy" like it was a party trick. So what's yours? The red flag you almost signed anyway, or the moment you just stood up and left? Mine: the Berlin one. I almost said yes because I needed the room. Didn't. No regrets. What's your story?

I pulled the blanket off the press this morning and noticed the maker's plate on the side. Glaser, West Berlin, 1962. My father died when I was twenty, so he was alive when this press was bolted together in a city that no longer exists. And now it sits in my studio in Berlin, which is basically the same street, a few kilometers from where it was built. My father was not a printmaker. He was a surgeon. I don't know why I keep doing this arithmetic with the dates. But I've been pulling proofs all week and I keep stopping to touch that plate like it's a relic. There is something about objects that outlive the people who made them. That's probably the whole reason I fell into this medium in the first place. The plate, the proof, the edition. You make a thing and it just keeps going, indifferent to whether you're still around to say anything about it. Anyway. I pulled a good proof of the new aquatint today. The first one that actually feels like something. So the press and I are on good terms right now.

I did the math on a recent sale because I was trying to convince myself it was worth it. Large oil and cold wax, 160 x 200 cm, worked on it for about six weeks on and off. Gallery takes 50%, which is standard here. Fine. Then: stretcher bars and canvas, oil, cold wax medium, pigment, about €280 because I don't buy cheap canvas. Transport to Berlin in a hired van because it wouldn't fit in my car, €120. Insurance for the transit. The opening, where I bought drinks for a few people and we all went to dinner after, and I picked up the bill because the gallery director looked at me and I knew I was supposed to. That was about €340. So €4,200 becomes €2,100 after commission. Subtract €740 in costs I can track. That leaves €1,360. Then maybe six weeks of work, but not full-time weeks, so call it 18 days. That's about €75 a day. And I haven't paid tax on the €2,100 yet. I don't know what to do with this information. The painting is sold. The collector is happy. The gallery wants more. And I'm sitting here thinking I should feel good and instead I feel like I ran a small business that lost money on a job. Which I did, if I paid myself minimum wage. The problem is the painting wouldn't exist without those weeks. I can't separate the time from the thing. And the gallery can't sell a painting they never see. And I can't get the painting to Berlin for nothing. So the costs are real and the math is bad and I don't have a solution. Just the numbers.

Okay so this is going to sound like I'm about to sell you a course and I promise I'm not. I deleted the app off my phone nine days ago. Not the account, just the app, because I was opening it while the kettle boiled and then the kettle would boil for eleven minutes and I'd be watching some guy in a loft in Berlin explain underpainting to me. My actual painting time was like 40 minutes a day and my scrolling was two hours. Do the math, it was ugly. Then three commissions came in. From the same two people who've bought before, plus a woman I met at a market in March who said "I'll think about it" and I fully wrote her off. And I keep trying to figure out if this is causation or if it's just that the work I made in those nine days was better because I wasn't painting with half my brain doing caption math the whole time. I think it's the second thing. The commissions might be coincidence. The work is definitely not. The part that bugs me is that the "post every day" advice isn't wrong exactly, it just made me a person who was making content about painting instead of making paintings, and I didn't notice the swap happening. It was slow. Also honestly the account's fine, I'm not quitting, I just check it on my laptop now like a Victorian. Anyway. Nine days, three commissions, one very smug partner who told me to do this in June. Has anyone else taken a step back from posting and had it go weirdly okay, or is this just a lucky streak I'm about to be humbled by

Back in the 90s a gallery in Berlin wanted to show my work. Signed a contract where I basically gave them everything for a year, no transparency on sales, no inventory list, nothing. I knew it was wrong when I read it. Signed anyway because I was hungry and flattered. Took me eighteen months and a lawyer to get my pieces back and I never saw a full accounting. What's the red flag you saw early and walked past anyway? Or the one you now spot in five seconds and refuse to work with.

I keep two lists on my phone. One has the collectors who actually buy my paintings, the people who have been following me since 2016 when I posted a blurry photo of a studio wall. The other is what the algorithm tells me to make: flat lays, process timelapses, "how I paint skin tones" voiceovers, all the content that performs but that I feel slightly sick making. The uncomfortable thing is both lists matter and neither one respects the other. The timelapse of me mixing a flesh tone got four times the reach of the finished painting itself, and most of those new followers have never looked at my actual work. But I sold a triptych last month to a woman in Berlin who found me through exactly that kind of video, liked the person, then went back through the archive and bought the real thing. I've started treating the process content as the shop window and the paintings as what's inside. The window has to be well dressed or nobody comes in. But I also stopped pretending to myself that the window is the art. That distinction was costing me more than the algorithm ever has.

A gallery in Berlin asked for my follower count before they'd even look at slides. Not my CV, not my exhibition history, not the work. Just the number. I told them 4,800 and the conversation cooled about ten degrees. They said they'd "keep me in mind." I've been painting seriously for thirty years. Thirty. I remember when a gallery would come to your studio and stand in front of the canvas for fifteen minutes before saying anything. Naja. I can't even be angry, I'm too tired for it. But I keep thinking about what that number actually measures. It measures how well I perform for strangers on a phone. It doesn't measure a single thing about whether the work is any good. The irony is I'm not even a Luddite about it. I post, I show the process, I answer comments. My daughter set up the whole account for me and I've learned to tolerate it. But I refuse to make the account the point. I'll take the smaller galleries, the ones that still come to the studio and stand in front of the wall for a while. There are fewer of them every year, but they exist. I don't know what the answer is. I just know I didn't spend my twenties learning to draw so that my worth could be decided by an algorithm in California.

I've been selling small etchings for €180 since 2021. Same size, same paper, same amount of work. Three years of the same number while my studio rent in Berlin went up twice and the price of copper plates nearly doubled. Last month I finally raised them to €240. Not a huge jump. Still probably too low for the time that goes in. But I did it. Then a former professor, someone whose opinion I actually respect, saw the new price list and said, in that careful tone, that the pricing was "ambitious." Asked if I was worried about "pricing myself out" of the market. The market being what, exactly? The market of people who think art should cost as much as a nice dinner? I didn't say what I wanted to say, which is that I know etchers in London charging £400 for a similar plate and nobody calls that ambitious. I just said I'd think about it. Now I'm sitting here wondering if I should have raised them more, or if I'm actually wrong. The math says €240 is still a bad hourly rate when you add up drawing time, plate prep, printing, editioning. But the voice of that professor is stuck in my head.

My first real gallery came out of nothing I did well. I was sharing a studio in Berlin, and a woman who had the space next to mine was curating a small group show about the copy. She needed one more printmaker because someone dropped out two weeks before. She asked me, I said yes, that was it. No portfolio, no email, no strategy. Total accident. I have been trying to reverse-engineer that accident for eight years now and I still don't know how to do it on purpose. So the question: how did your first one actually happen? Not the version you put in the bio, the real one. I want to know if anyone got in by anything resembling a plan, because everyone I know seems to have got in sideways. And a second thing, since I am curious: who did the asking? Did you approach them, or did someone hand you the door already open? I think the second happens more than we admit and we pretend it was all our hustle. I will say mine: nobody handed me anything, a curator needed a warm body with a press. Tell me yours is better.

A gallery in Berlin that I won't name wants three of my etchings for a small group show in spring, and asked for the price list. I sent it. Three plates, aquatint, edition of 18, 780 euros unframed. The reply came back the same afternoon. Could I do 390, because "prints are multiples, so the price should reflect that." I have been chewing on this for two days and not because I'm insulted. Because the logic is wrong in a way that's interesting. The multiple is exactly the reason the price is what it is. Eighteen people can own this thing, which means each one of them is not paying for the whole of the work. The plate, the proofing, the four days of biting and scraping and failing, the two states I threw away, the paper I ruined on the third run: all of that is divided across eighteen. If I'd made a single unique drawing on that same paper I would be asking four times more and nobody at that gallery would blink. So the argument isn't that the multiple makes it cheap. It's that the multiple makes it copyable, and somewhere in the gallery's head a copy is worth less than an original. Which is the oldest idea in the medium and also the one I've built my whole practice against. Walter Benjamin would have a field day. Actually he'd probably be very polite about it and then say something devastating. What I want to know is whether I'm being naive. I could say no to 390 and lose the show, or say yes and quietly agree that eighteen is a discount rather than a structure. I said I'd think about it. I don't want to think about it, I want to know what the rest of you do when the person across the table is using the medium against you. Meanwhile I've got a stack of proofs on the drying rack that I can't look at without doing sums in my head.

Everyone has the gallery story that stung. Mine was about fifteen years ago, a well-known Berlin space turned down a body of work I'd spent two years on. The letter was polite and specific, which almost made it worse. I was angry for months. But here's the thing, that rejection forced me to look at the work with colder eyes. They pointed at things I'd been too close to see. The next series was the one that got me my current gallery. I'm not saying they were right, to be clear. But I kept the letter and I've reread it before every new body of work since. What about the rest of you, did a rejection ever do you any actual good? Or are they all just noise you had to push through?

I've shown with the same gallery in Berlin for twelve years. When we started, I signed their standard agreement without really reading the resale and secondary-market clauses. Stupid, I know. You think you're being gracious, above the business, and you're really just being careless with your own livelihood. Last spring a collector who bought two big canvases from me in 2016 sold one at auction for nearly four times what he paid. Fine, that's his right, that's the market, whatever. But then I learned my contract gives the gallery a cut of that resale, a percentage that runs indefinitely. Not to me. To them. For a painting I made and they sold once, a decade ago. I did the math on it. That one resale paid them more than my last three new commissions combined. And I sat there feeling petty for even noticing, because they were good to me when I was nobody. But nobody works for free, and I have a family. I raised it with them, gently, at our last meeting. The director went a little quiet and then said we could "look at restructuring" for new works. New works. The two paintings already out there, nothing to be done. I don't know what I'm asking here. Maybe just that someone who's been at this longer than me tell me whether this is normal, whether I'm the fool for not having read the fine print at 34, or whether everybody learns this exact lesson the same way and at the same cost.

A gallery in Berlin asked if they could document my studio as it is right now. Dust, the collapsed table, the half-finished thing from 2019 I keep meaning to throw out. I said yes so theyd stop asking, and now they want to show it as an installation. Somebody else's trash is art, your own is a mess. I worked decades to get out of rooms like this and now they want to put the room in a room. I should be flattered, probably. Instead I am thinking about which corner to clean and hating myself for thinking it.

For ten years I kept a paper notebook of every piece I sold. Who bought it, how they found out about me. Back when that was mostly gallery openings and word of mouth. Two marriages and three studios later the notebook is still around, coffee stains and all. Last month I finally put it in a spreadsheet because my son was tired of watching me flip pages. And there it was, plain as day. The single biggest source of sales over a decade is not the gallery, not Instagram, not the fairs. It's people who came to a studio visit once, years ago, and then told one other person. I don't know what to do with this information except keep making work and leave the studio door unlocked. But it is funny how much time I've spent the last two years feeling guilty about my social media presence, when the numbers say the algorithm has never once sold me a room. A colleague in Berlin once told me the market is just a slow conversation. I think about that more than I should.

I got talking to another printmaker here in Berlin about this the other day, how many times a gallery has looked at my portfolio and said "this is great but can you make it bigger/smaller/on paper/on canvas/in a different colour." And how many times I actually did it. Early on I said yes to almost all of it because I was desperate for the wall space. Now I'm more suspicious. Not because I'm difficult but because the ones who wanted me to change everything also turned out to be the ones who didn't really get what the work was about. They just needed something to fill a slot. But I also know a painter who let a gallery push her toward bigger formats and it genuinely opened something up for her. So maybe I'm wrong. What's your line, the point where a requested change stops being useful direction and becomes a red flag?

I'm thinking about the moments that surprised you in a good way with a gallery. For me it was maybe ten years ago, first meeting with a gallerist in Berlin. I brought my usual folder, ready for the standard conversation. She'd read my artist statement. Actually read it. Asked me about a line in it about layering as a form of memory, and I realised she'd thought about it more than I had in years. I didn't get the show. Didn't matter. That conversation changed how I thought about the work. What's a gallery interaction that surprised you, something that restored a bit of faith?

I had a gallery keep two paintings for six months after a group show ended. Not sold, just... sitting there. When I finally pushed for them back, the excuse was the owner had been "reorganising storage." Sure. Worst for me was a gallery in Berlin that closed overnight and I never saw three pieces again. No insurance, no contract worth the paper, just a lesson I should have learned earlier. What's the worst a gallery has ever done with your actual work? Not the rudeness or the slow emails, I mean physically, with the pieces.

Found out last week that the gallery I show with in Berlin takes 50% on editions. Not prints sold through them, editions. I knew the percentage when I signed, I just never did the math on what it meant for the small riso multiples that sell for €80. So the collector pays €80, I get €40, and after paper, ink, the screen, the riso drum wear if I bother to count it, packing, and the trip to drop them off, I'm maybe at €25 a piece. Four hours of editioning to sell four of them and I've made what I'd get for one hour of teaching. The stupid part is I keep pricing as if the gallery cut doesn't exist. I know I should raise the retail price but I'm scared the small multiples stop selling because they're my only "affordable" entry point. So instead I just quietly resent it every time I drop off a batch. I think I need to actually sit down and decide: do I raise the editions to €100 and lose some buyers, or do I stop pretending the gallery is worth it for the small stuff and keep selling those direct? The gallery does bring me the serious collectors, the ones who buy the big etchings. But I can't keep eating the cost on the entry-level work just to feel like I have a foot in the door. Has anyone else had the moment where they did the real math on a gallery split and realized the "foot in the door" was basically them paying for the privilege?