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Raised my bronze prices 12% this spring. First real increase in about three years. The foundry raised their cut twice in that span, so I was already eating it. Two collectors who bought from me every couple of years for over a decade both passed. One said "maybe next year." The other just didn't answer. I know that's the math working the way it's supposed to. I still lay awake doing it over. Sixty-seven hours in a piece I sold for $4,800 last year. That's under seventy an hour before materials, before the foundry, before the crate and freight. Raising it to $5,400 should feel like nothing. It felt like I was the one being unreasonable. I keep a ledger from my apprenticeship days. First bronze I ever had cast, the foundry charged me $180. I sold it for $900 and thought I was rich. Same foundry, same size piece now runs me $3,100. Young sculptors ask me what to charge and I don't have an answer that doesn't sound like I'm complaining.

Just finished the fabrication on a welded steel base for a bronze sculpture that's over seven feet tall. It's about 1500 pounds of mild steel, mostly 4-inch square tube. Had to build a custom jig to get the angles right. The welding is all done, now it's just grinding and prepping for patina. Feels good to get this beast off the floor. It fought me the whole way.

I've been chasing the same patina off and on since the late nineties. Liver of sulfur, ferric nitrate, cupric nitrate, a few things I won't name because the neighbors would get nervous. Never quite get the green I'm after. Muddy, or too blue, or it flakes off in a year. Yesterday I finally got close on a small piece. Did the same thing I've done a hundred times, except the shop was at 46 degrees and it took forever to dry. That humidity swing did more than any chemical change I've made. Twenty years of tinkering and the answer was I was rushing the drying. Wish I could say I felt smart about it. Mostly I feel stupid for not trying that in 2004.

First pour out of a new shell mix went wrong in March. Cold shut on one shoulder, whole piece scrapped. Rebuilt the pattern, remade the shell, and today the sprue cut off with a hacksaw and a chisel and the casting underneath was sound. No porosity, no chasing to hide anything. Thirty years and I still hold my breath on that cut. You never really know what's under there until you're through. Foundry man said it was the sand. He's probably right.

They said no, of course. You cannot put a photograph of rotten floorboards on the front of a poster, people will think the building is falling down. Which it is, a little. That is the piece. So the poster has a nice wide shot of the whole room, everything lit evenly, you can see the arc of it, very impressive, and nobody walks in ready for the smell. The smell is half the work. Wet plaster and old wool and something I have never identified, from a mattress I took out of a skip in Žižkov in 2019. Visitors come in, they get the smell, and then they stand there for a while doing the arithmetic of what they are standing in. My point is not that marketing people are philistines. Half of them are better at reading a room than the curators. My point is that the thing that actually pulls someone off the street is almost never the thing that fits on the poster. It is the detail that sounds like a mistake. I have started keeping a folder. Every time someone photographs something small in one of my rooms and ignores the big obvious sculpture, I keep that photo. The rotted floor gets more phone time than the commissioned bronze. I do not know what to do with this information yet. I suspect it means the poster should be a close-up of something broken and the room should be discovered. The gallery will fight me. We will compromise, and the compromise will be worse than either idea, as usual.

Dropped a three-foot welded steel piece on the studio floor yesterday. My own fault. Sloppy rigging on the hoist, clip let go around head height. It bent where I'd spent a week getting the line right and I wanted to throw the whole thing in the scrap bin. Left it sitting there overnight instead. Came in this morning and the failure is obvious now. The foot wasn't plumb before the drop, it was just welded well enough to fool me. Ground it out, re-cut, re-welded. It's better now than it was yesterday before it fell. That's the part nobody tells you about this work. The disasters teach you more than the wins ever do, if you can stand to look at them the next morning instead of smashing them to pieces. I've had a ruined bronze teach me more about wall thickness than any book. Anyone else got a piece that failed and came back stronger?

Got talked into a portrait bust in Indiana limestone last fall. Widow wanted her husband, done from photographs. Quoted 6,000. Sounded like money. Here is what it actually was. Block was 1,400 delivered, and I bought two because the first had a hairline seam I didn't trust. 900 in abrasives and a new set of carbide points, which I needed anyway but they came out of this job. Six weeks of mornings on it, and portraits are the slowest work I do because a face is unforgiving, you can't fudge a nose. Then the pedestal, cutting and setting, another 400 in material and a day I didn't bill. Add it up and it's under 30 an hour. A stone mason down the road bills 85 for a stoop, no face on it, done in two days. The bust came out right, which is the only reason I'm not angry about it. But I've been quoting faces off the block cost alone for years and that's a mistake. Talked to a guy who does bronze and he prices the whole commission off the finished weight. I don't know if that holds for stone but I'm done pretending carving a face costs the same as carving a wall.

Just quoted a small bronze casting, maybe 10 pounds of metal. The foundry's minimum charge is $1500. That's before any finishing work. I had to tell the client it's going to cost more than the actual metal. It’s hard to make a living on these small pieces when the overhead is the same as a much larger job. You end up losing money or scaring people off with the price. Anyone else struggle with this on smaller commissions?