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There's a second-hand bookshop two streets from the studio and the man who runs it has started giving me a knowing look when I walk in. He doesn't ask anymore. I buy books I have zero intention of reading, mostly from the 50s and 60s, and I cut them up within a week. The really sad part is I'm a paper conservator. I spend my working days carefully saving paper, and my evenings destroying it. I've started telling myself it's a kind of balance. Today I found a 1958 Swedish nature guide with the most beautiful pale green endpapers, slightly foxed. It's already on my table. The text is going in the recycling, the paper I'll keep. I paid 20 kronor for it and I feel only slightly guilty.

got a weird one. gallery reached out, wanted me in a group show, sent me dates, we agreed on terms. then nothing for two months. i followed up once, polite, just checking in, and got a "yes we're still planning" that felt like air. show was supposed to be last month. never heard another word. i'm not even mad, just confused. is this a thing that happens or did i somehow get cursed by a very specific gallery gremlin anyone else had a gallery initiate everything and then just vanish into the ether? did you ever find out why?

Sister Bernice cornered me after service today. Said she saw the picture my daughter posted of the wedding quilt I just finished for my niece. "Gloria Mae, that would be so much prettier if you just followed a nice pattern out of a book. All those crooked pieces just look like you made a mistake." I stood there holding my pocketbook and just smiled. Told her my grandmother didn't own a pattern book in her life and what she made hangs in museums now. Bernice's face went tight as fresh starch. Y'all, I been quilting since I was seven years old sitting on a flour sack at my grandmother's feet. The "mistakes" are where the breath gets in. The crooked pieces are where the spirit moves through. Bless her heart though. She means well. She's just used to quilts that lay flat and quiet. Some of us like our quilts to have something to say.

One of my bigger pieces, a marriage scene with the fish and the mango tree, went to a buyer in Delhi for ₹7,000. That sounds respectable until you sit and count the days. Preparation of the paper, grinding the colours, the fine line work, then the filling. I worked maybe four hours each day for nine days. That is thirty-six hours. Seven thousand divided by thirty-six comes to about ₹194 an hour. And that is before the cost of the handmade paper and the natural pigments, which are not cheap since the good sources became difficult. My mother used to say we must never sell a painting for less than the soul it carries. But the soul does not pay for the grandson's school books. I have been keeping this art alive my whole life and still I cannot name a fair price for it. When a cooperative takes a cut and the buyer haggles, I am left asking myself if my grandmother's line work is worth less than a plumber's visit. I raised my price to ₹8,500 this month. I am scared to go higher because the buyers are not many. But I have decided the art will not answer to the shame of being cheap any longer. If it sells, good. If not, the painting stays with me in the house where it was made, and that is also something.

okay so I keep thinking about this and I wanna know if I'm the only one this has happened to. I had a gallery owner literally shake my hand at a studio visit, say "these are perfect, let's get you on the books," and then... nothing. never heard from them again. I followed up twice, polite but not pushy, and just got radio silence. did this happen to anyone else?? like is this just part of the game or did I do something wrong? I'm still pretty new to this whole gallery thing and I honestly don't know if I should've been more aggressive or if they just got busy and forgot or what. my take rn is that handshake means nothing until there's a signature but man it stung a little haha. tell me your ghosting stories so I don't feel like the only one 🥲

Working part-time at the paper conservation studio has ruined me for hoarding. People bring in these things, old letters, theatre programs from the 30s, family photos where the emulsion is lifting, and I get to touch them, gently, and then they go back to the owner. Nothing stays. Meanwhile my own collage stack is mostly junk mail and book pages I've torn out of things nobody wanted anyway. Nothing precious. Which is probably why I can actually cut into it. There was one piece today though. A 1942 ration card, some address in Malmö, pencil handwriting on the back. I sat with it longer than I should have. It went back in its sleeve and off to the client. Fine. But that's the thing that'll be in my head while I work tonight, not any of my own paper.

Lord have mercy. I'm still chewing on this one. We had the annual church social Saturday, good food, good fellowship, and they asked me to bring a few quilts to hang up in the fellowship hall. So I brought three. One of 'em's a piece I've been working on slow for months, greens and browns and a strip of my mama's old housedress I been saving since she passed. Improvisational piecing, the way my grandmother taught me. Nothing in it is supposed to line up like a grid. That's the whole point. This man, I've known him forty years, he knows better, he stands there with his cup of punch and he says, "Now Gloria, this one right here... you know if you just squared those blocks up, it'd really be something." Just like that. Like I'd been trying my best and come up short. I said, "It already is something, Leonard. It's a Gloria Mae original. That's worth more than a perfect seam and you know it." He laughed it off but I was hot about it the rest of the evening. My granddaughter said I should've charged him admission for the art lesson. She's not wrong. Y'all. The squares aren't supposed to line up. That's the music in it. That's the breath. My grandmother's quilts never lined up a day in her life and they're in books now. So I guess Leonard can keep his opinions to himself or I'll start charging.

Back in 2009 I had a show in a small gallery in Brno that no longer exists. The gallery put up a basic website with installation shots. When the gallery closed, the domain died but the PDF of that exhibition somehow stayed live on some forgotten server subfolder. Last year a curator from Oslo emailed me. Said she found that PDF through a deep Google search while researching a specific material I used. She'd been looking for anyone working with industrial felt and rusted steel in that particular way. The PDF was the only document online that showed it. She booked a studio visit. I got two museum shows out of it. Norway, of all places. Meanwhile I'd been stressing about Instagram, trying to shoot better video, wondering if the algorithm hated me. And the thing that worked was a dead link from 15 years ago that I didn't even know existed. I don't know what the lesson is. Leave things online and don't delete them, I suppose. The internet forgets slower than we think. Or maybe it's that the useful person is always looking in the wrong place and you can't predict where they'll dig.

I find myself drawn to the silence more than ever lately. Trying to make something of the small gaps, the places where the usual marketing chatter just… isn't. It's not about ignoring the noise, but about finding the signal in the quiet. My own practice is very much about this – using found paper, old book pages, and leaving a lot of empty space. It’s about what’s not there as much as what is. Wondering if anyone else finds value in intentionally creating that space online, away from the constant performance.

After my wife died I just stopped raising prices. Didn't think about it. Just kept quoting what I'd always quoted, year after year. My daughter looked at my books last winter and asked if I was trying to go broke before I retired. So I bumped everything. A commission I'd have done for $4,000 I quoted at $5,800. Small courtyard piece I used to do for $1,200, now $1,700. Felt wrong sending the emails. Lost two regulars. One told me straight up I'd priced myself out of their range. The other just stopped answering. That stung. But the jobs I got? Better clients. People who didn't nickel-and-dime the delivery fee. One of them paid half up front without me asking. Still feel like a fraud every time I type a number. But I'm not going back.

I've been fighting the same portrait for two weeks now and specifically the nose. Eleven times. I keep erasing it and every version is technically fine, the shadow is right, the light is right, it's a perfectly acceptable nose. And it is not HER nose. I can't even say what's wrong, I just know when I look at it that it belongs on a different person. The funny thing is nobody else can see it. I showed a friend and she said it looks lovely. And I thought, good, so I'm just crazy. But then I looked again and it's still not her nose. I think this is the part of portraiture nobody warns you about. It's not about getting the anatomy right, it's about getting the small wrongness right. The exact degree of crooked that makes a face a face. You can't learn it from a book, you just have to look a thousand times until your hand catches up with your eye. Anyway I'm on attempt twelve tonight. Wish me luck. Or tell me you know this feeling so I feel less insane.

Found a box of my ex-husband's old slides at the back of a closet yesterday. We split four years ago, he'd have sworn he took everything. 200-some slides of vacations we took together, mostly boring ones. A beach in Portugal. A dumb monument somewhere in Italy. His hand holding a beer. I sat on the floor and looked at every single one. Not sad exactly. Weird. Like reading a book you know the ending to but forgot the middle. I'm not going to destroy them or make them into art or do anything meaningful. That feels like the expected move and I hate the expected move. I think I'm just going to put them back in the box and let him come get them someday, or not. There's something okay about leaving them there unexamined, too. Anyone else sitting on things they should have thrown out years ago?

sold a piece last month to someone who actually got it, which is rare enough that i keep turning it over. it was the one with the torn phone book pages and the burnt edge. she told me it reminded her of her dad's workshop, the way things get layered and never really cleaned. i didn't tell her where it actually came from. just let her have that version. funny how that feels more honest than explaining. maybe the work is supposed to mean something else to everyone who looks at it. maybe that's the whole point and i keep forgetting. anyway the money went straight to more charcoal and a new roll of paper. the cycle continues.

i have a perfectly good easel. i have a drafting table i found on facebook marketplace for $40. and yet for the last three months i've been doing all my small studies on a clipboard i grabbed from the checkout aisle at stop & shop while buying trash bags. it's just... the right amount of friction. i can prop it on my lap, lean it against a stack of books, take it outside, set it down anywhere. there's something about the lack of ceremony that makes starting easier. no adjusting, no standing up, no "ok now i am in the studio doing Art." just grab the clipboard and go. i think i've made more paintings this quarter than the last two combined and i hate admitting it's because of a $6 piece of bent metal and a spring clip. but here we are. what's the dumbest thing in your setup that you're secretly loyal to

Had a woman in the studio last week. She saw a small collage I made from a 1920s Swedish grammar book page and some torn map fragment, and she spent a solid twenty minutes explaining to me that it was about the fragmentation of national identity in post-industrial Scandinavia. I said it was about liking the yellow of the map against the grey of the paper. She looked at me like I'd said something stupid. Maybe I had. But also maybe that piece is just me being picky about two colours that sit well together and leaving most of the page empty because empty feels right. Not everything is a statement. Some things are just a decision about where to stop cutting.

had a piece in a small group show last month, nothing fancy. yesterday the gallery emailed me saying a buyer wanted to contact me directly. nice, right? turns out she's an interior decorator. she loves the color palette. she wants to know if i can do something "similar but a little warmer" for a client's dining room. the piece she bought is a collage made mostly from a torn-up book about the 1918 flu pandemic and some pages from my brother's old copy of the odyssey. i worked on it during a two-week stretch where i barely left the apartment. it's about loss and contagion and maybe a little about odysseus being an idiot. but sure. warm tones for a dining room. i can do that. i said yes obviously. i need the money. but i feel weird about it. like i'm selling something under false pretenses even though she owns the actual piece and likes it for her own reasons. maybe that's just what selling art is? you put something dark out in the world and someone hangs it over their sofa and that's fine. anyway i'm going to make the warm dining room piece and try not to resent it. we'll see.

There is a girl from our village, maybe eighteen years now. I taught her when she was small, maybe ten, how to hold the brush, how to mix the rice paste for the base, the meaning of the fish and the lotus. She would sit on the floor with me and her lines were shaky, very much so, but she had patience. Last week her father brought me one of her new pieces. A Sita in the forest, done on handmade paper, all natural colours, the indigo she made herself from the leaves. And I tell you honestly, the linework stopped me. Clean as anything my mother ever did. The detail in the leaves, the border pattern she invented herself, not from the book. I sat with it for a long time. I felt first pride, then a small strange other thing. Not jealousy exactly. But something that sat in my chest heavy. She has surpassed me. At her age I was still copying, still learning. She is already making. I told her father she should apply for the state craft fellowship. He said what will she do with a fellowship, she will marry next year. I said nothing then. But I am thinking what to say. It is her hands. They should not stop now.

I delivered a small piece last week, 20x25cm, torn pages from a 1930s French anatomy book, just three elements on a pale ground. Charged €250. The gallery sells my work at €480 and takes 50%, so I got €240. It took me 14 hours because I kept scrapping it and starting again. That's about €17 an hour before materials. I know the math is bad. Objectively I know. But I also know I wouldn't have made it faster if I'd rushed. The quiet part is I'm not sure I want to work faster. I want to sit with a piece until it's right. That's the whole point of doing this. I don't know what to do with that. Raise the price and risk the gallery dropping me? Accept that collage is a loss leader for a life I'd be living anyway?

I've been selling my small collages for 2,500 SEK (about €220) for three years now. They're maybe 20x30cm, framed, took me a week of looking and arranging to finish one I don't want to scrap. I know that's low. I know my materials cost is basically nothing, old book pages, found envelopes, but the time and the looking isn't nothing. And I know people buy them, so clearly the price isn't the problem. But I sit down to change it to 3,200 and I just... don't. I tell myself the market here is small. I tell myself paper work isn't taken as seriously. I tell myself I'm not established enough. All of which might be true but also none of it is the real reason, which is that I don't want to have to explain why I'm suddenly more expensive. I think I'm afraid of the conversation more than the number. Like someone will write and say "why is it more now" and I'll have to justify my own time out loud.

Raised my charcoal portrait rate from €250 to €400 after a year of people telling me "you're too cheap, you undersell yourself." Everyone said do it. Everyone. Lost every single client. All of them. The two commissions I had booked cancelled the next week. Three months now, nothing. I keep checking my DMs like a loser. And the worst part is I know the work is good. It's not impostor syndrome talking, this batch of pieces is some of the best stuff I've ever made. But nobody will pay the price that's actually fair for what goes into them. I'm sitting here genuinely considering dropping back down to €250. And I hate that because everyone warned me this is the trap, this is exactly what they said would happen, that I'd cave. But rent doesn't care about my dignity. €250 for 22 hours of work is €11 an hour. I know that's insane. But it's food money. Anyone else just... hit the wall and folded back to the old number? Or actually waited it out and survived?