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deadline's friday. freelance gig for a wellness brand, which already tells you everything. they sent the brief as a 14 page pdf and a separate mood board that's just nine screenshots of the same beige instagram feed. today's note: "love it! can we make the logo bigger? like 40% bigger." the logo is a wordmark. the whole card is the wordmark. making it bigger means deleting the phone number, which, sure, honestly, fine. the thing that gets me is i did this exact conversation in 2019. and 2021. i know all the moves. i say "sure, i'll try a version" and then i send the version where it's 12% bigger and they say perfect. i'm not even mad at them. i'm mad that i'm this good at it. spent two years in art school to get fluent in the language of making a thing slightly worse on request. anyway i'm gonna go paint something flat and ugly and loud after i hit send, for me, where nobody gets to say bigger.

Ok so this is a win but it's also making me want to lie on the floor. Three commissions this week. Three!! I've had maybe two in the whole eight months since I quit the café, so this is genuinely new territory for me and I keep waiting for someone to email back like "oops wrong person." One of them is a portrait of a woman's dog, which, fine, I can do a dog. The other two are big-ish and I quoted prices without flinching and they both just said yes?? I reread both emails like four times. Things I did not expect to feel: mostly panic. Because now there's a version of me that costs money and can be disappointing, and I have to actually finish these instead of tucking them in a drawer when the second wash goes sideways. I did the deposit math on a receipt paper at my desk and then just stared at the number for a while. Also my partner came home and I told them and they picked me up off the ground which is the correct response. Anyway I'm celebrating but I'm also very aware I have no idea what I'm doing. If you take commissions, do you have a system for not spiraling between the yes and the actual starting? Because right now I'm just painting the window again instead of starting the dog

I once walked into a "gallery" that was really a framing shop with a few things on the wall. They wanted 50% and I had to deliver everything framed myself. I said no and the woman acted like I was the unreasonable one. What's the most confusing gallery experience you've had, the one where you weren't sure if you were talking to a gallerist or something else entirely?

City called in February about a plaza piece. Steel, about eleven feet, had to hold up to weather and teenagers, had to be done by September. I said yes before I'd even priced the steel properly. First time in a long time I took a job that scared me. Eight months of fighting that thing. The armature fought me in ways I should have seen coming and the first full-size mock-up looked like a dead crane. Scrapped it in June and started over. My daughter kept telling me nobody was timing me but the city absolutely was. Installed two weeks ago. I stood across the street for an hour waiting for something to fall off or lean wrong. Nothing did. A couple of kids were climbing on the base and that's what it's there for. It's still standing and it doesn't look like anything else in town. Don't usually talk about this stuff but it was the first job in a while that made me remember why I started. And I've got the welds to prove it held.

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.

Myself Ramesh. I have a question for the experienced people here. A gallery in Delhi showed my Mithila paintings last year. Very nice people, good space, they treated me with respect. But the split was 50-50. I agreed because I was happy just to be there, honestly. My family said I should have asked for more. Now I am wondering, what is the normal thing? What percentage you all are giving, or taking? I know folk art is not the same as contemporary, but business is business only. Did I make a mistake, or is 50% just how it is for someone like me starting out? Please tell me straight. I can take it. 🙏

Forty minutes into the morning class, a woman who has been painting for eleven months puts down a grey that made me stop mid-sentence. Not a grey from a tube. She mixed it herself, three pigments she had no business combining yet, and it was exactly the colour of the north wall of my studio in November at five in the afternoon. I have been chasing that grey for something like twenty years and mostly failing. The thing that annoyed me, and I mean this sincerely, is that she did not notice. I said something, she shrugged, she said it looked muddy and went back to her shadow side. I spent the rest of the session working on a hand in a portrait commission and thinking about that grey. A good grey is genuinely one of the most difficult things in this whole business. You can teach value, you can teach the drawing, you can teach edges until you are hoarse. You cannot teach someone to arrive at a particular grey on the right day. It happens when it happens. Then she wiped it off the palette at the end of the class with a rag like it was dirty water.

My granddaughter posted a picture of the blue one, the one I finished in March, and a lady messaged me direct. Said she loved it. Then she asked could I make her one "but not so busy." Said all the different prints was giving her a headache. Mm. Honey, that busy-ness is the whole quilt. I cut those strips off my mother's church dresses. Three of them. There's a piece in there from a shirt my daddy wore to my brother's wedding in 1974. It don't match because it wasn't supposed to match. Nothing in this family ever matched and we made it work anyway. I told her I'd be glad to make her one and I'd pick her out some nice fabrics, but I wasn't gone take the patterns out. She never wrote back. Then Sunday I'm sitting behind Sister Ruth and she leans over and says the blue quilt put her in mind of her own mama's curtains. And that's it. That's the whole thing. Somebody will always want it quieter. I'm not making it quieter.

My first gallery sale, I was so happy I almost didn't notice the cheque took four months to arrive. Almost. The second one took five, and a nudge. I was young and I thought that's how it worked, you wait, you don't ask, you're grateful. Now I have a rule: two months, and I send a polite email. Three months, and I start to wonder if they're running their business on my work. What's your line? How late before you say something, and what do you say? I told a gallerist once "I know you're busy, but my bank is less patient than I am" and it worked, but I still felt like the difficult one. Which is ridiculous, non?

I finished a double wedding ring two weeks back. Hand pieced, all of it, and I used up cloth that had no business being in there together. My mother's church dress from 1971, a cotton print so faded you'd swear it was tan, and some bright orange scraps left over from a baby quilt I made in 1998. My granddaughter says it looks like a sunrise fell down. I said well, thank you baby. Put it up on the wall in the front room this morning, over the sofa where the light comes in about four o'clock. Sat with it a good while. Here's the thing I can't settle. Every quilt I've made in my life I made for somebody. Wedding, funeral, new baby, somebody leaving, somebody coming home. This one I just made because the idea got in me and wouldn't leave. Now it's hanging there and I keep looking at it wanting to know who it's for, like the answer's supposed to come to me. My husband walked through and said "that's a pretty one" and kept going, so he's no help. I'm not sorry I made it. I just don't know what to call it. A quilt with nobody's name on it yet feels half finished to me, and I've been sewing long enough to know that feeling usually means wait.

So I'll tell you what happened and you can decide if I'm codding myself. Start of the summer I got sick of the whole rigmarole. The Facebook page was at me every day, "boost this", "your reach is down", and I was spending a solid hour a night liking other people's posts so they'd like mine back. Feels like being back at school doing favours for lads who'd still not sit beside you at lunch. So I just stopped. Six weeks. Didn't delete it, just left it there like a shed you don't open. Two things came out of it. First, nothing happened. No cliff, no fall off a ledge, the exact same trickle of sales as before. Which tells me the hour a night was doing absolutely nothing except making me feel busy. Second, and this is the bit I can't fully explain. I stuck a wee sign on the table at the Saturday market in Galway. Just a laminated card, "if you'd like to hear when there's a new print, write your email here". Real pen, real paper, and I stand there like an eejit with a clipboard. Went from 61 names to 128 over the six weeks. I think people are just tired. They'll give you their email when you ask them face to face and there's a crayon involved for the small one, but they won't click a link you put under a photo of a heron. I've gone back on the page now, but it's down to one post a week and I don't read the comments on the boosted ones anymore because there's no speaking to them. Anyone else find the thing you were most afraid to stop doing was the thing doing the least?

The buyer was from Patna, a gentleman who came to the house with his brother. He saw one Kohbar painting, the one with the bamboo grove and the lotus pond, and he liked it very much. I said 3,500 rupees. He paid without any bargain at all, which should have told me something. Then afterward I did the full sum on paper, because my wife asked me straight how many days it took. Eleven days. Not full days, mind, but mornings and evenings, and the paper and brushes and the natural colours also have cost. The black from soot, the yellow from turmeric, the red I make from kusum flower and it takes one full day just for that grinding. So when I put the paper cost and the colour making and eleven days together, it came to something like 180 rupees for one day of work. My wife said nothing. She only looked at me. That was worse than if she had said something. And still I am not able to raise the price, this is my difficulty. In my area people will say, why so much for a painting on paper, my cousin's daughter also does this. The cooperative also gives a fixed rate which is old rate only. And I am afraid if I say 6,000 then the gentleman will go quietly to somebody else and I will never know. Now I am thinking to keep one painting aside and not sell it, only to see what price it can get if I wait. Has anybody here done this waiting business successfully? For me patience is there but the house expenses are also there, both things are pulling.

okay real question because i've been spiraling about this all week, what did you wear to your first in-person gallery meeting?? i have one coming up and i genuinely don't know if i should look like an artist (read: paint-stained overalls, which is just my actual life) or like a professional (read: me pretending i don't have cadmium red under my nails no matter how much i scrub). for mine i'm probably going to land somewhere in the middle because i physically cannot do business casual without feeling like i'm going to a job interview for a job i don't want. but i'm so curious what other people did. did anyone go in full paint-apocalypse and it was fine? did anyone overdress and immediately regret it? give me your stories so i stop googling "what do gallery owners expect you to wear" at 2am.

A man I've sold three paintings to over the years, nice enough, serious collection, comes to the studio, emails me last month. He wants two new pieces, both around 80x60cm. He asks if I can "do something" on the price since he's taking two at once. I said no. Politely but directly. I explained that my price is the price because of what goes into it, not because I'm guessing what the market will bear. Buying two doesn't make the painting easier to paint. He wrote back the same day, a bit cool, said he understood. I haven't heard from him since. Maybe I lost a client, maybe he's just busy. What I keep thinking about is how uncomfortable that moment was, the feeling that I was being rude by not playing the game. In France especially, people negotiate on everything. But I don't want my work to be something you bargain over like a carpet in a souk. The price says what the work is. If I bend, I'm saying it wasn't really that price to begin with. Still. The silence makes you wonder.

There's a Saturday market in Galway I've been doing on and off for maybe twelve years. Rain, hail, the odd glorious day where everyone's in great form. And I used to think the point of it was to shift prints, which it is, but the real thing it taught me is how to talk to people about what you make without sounding like you're selling. You get all sorts at a stall. The tourist who wants something that says Ireland without being a leprechaun on a toilet. The local who stops because they recognise the pier or the mountain. The person who clearly loves the work but hasn't got thirty quid and stands there turning a card over in their hands. And you learn, quick, that the ones who buy aren't the ones you try to convince. They're the ones you just talk to, normally, about the carving or the ink or the hare that lives in the field behind your house and won't let you get near it. The thing that stuck with me is this: I've never sold a print by telling someone how good it is. I've sold plenty by telling them the story of the night I carved it and nearly took the tip of my finger off, or how the block got dropped in a puddle and the crack became part of the print. People want the thing behind the thing. They don't want a pitch. Anyway. The market's grand for that. But online, I still catch myself trying to sound like a proper business instead of just a fella in a jumper with ink under his nails. And the minute I do that, engagement drops off a cliff. The posts that work are always the ones where I forget I'm supposed to be marketing and just talk about what happened today. Sure I don't know where I'm going with this except that the best marketing advice I ever got was from a woman buying a print of a heron who said "just tell me why you made it" and walked away with two.

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 🥲

walked into a gallery opening last week, guy comes up, says he's been watching my stuff online. my heart's pounding because holy shit someone noticed. then he says "your work has so much raw energy but you'd sell three times as much if you just... pulled it back a little. make it more accessible." i stood there holding my wine and wanted to cry and punch him at the same time. accessible. like what i'm doing is too MUCH. like the whole point is to make people comfortable. i spent years learning how to stop making polite art. i grew up in a house where we didn't talk about what was actually happening and i painted that way for so long, safe, quiet, looking good on the surface. i taught myself to tear that open and now someone wants me to smooth it back down so it matches their couch. i told him no and he gave me this little pity smile like i'd made a business mistake. maybe i did. don't care. art that doesn't cost you anything isn't worth looking at. i'll keep painting the ugly honest stuff even if it hangs in my hallway forever 🔥

Ok so I need to say this somewhere. I spent almost two hours yesterday filming a reel of a wash going down, and you know what the wash looked like by the time I checked the footage? terrible, because I'd been half-watching my phone propped on a stack of books instead of actually painting it. the paper dried uneven where I lifted the tape early to grab a better angle, and I have a whole sheet now with a big ugly bloom right in the middle of the sky. real painting, ruined, for 11 seconds of video. and the wild part is it got like 200 views. my last actual painting got 2.3k and sold in four days. so what am I even doing. I think what's getting me is that I started this because of the light on my kitchen wall at like 4pm and now I'm learning about hooks and trending audio and I feel so dumb for caring about both at once. like I want people to see the work and also the entire system is built so the only way they see the work is if I become a content person, which is genuinely the opposite of the thing that makes me good at painting. I zone out for three hours and that's the whole point. you can't zone out with a tripod. my partner keeps telling me to just post the painting and let it be boring and I know they're right but there's this voice that's like ok but what if nobody sees it. and then I remember I have 700 followers which is not a business, it's a group chat. so the stakes are kind of imaginary. anyway I'm going to paint today and not film any of it and if the sky blooms I'll keep it. maybe I'll post the wrecked one, honestly it's more interesting than the reel.

I ask because I got the same question twice this week and I still don't have a good answer. For a real gallery, one that pays for the crates and the lighting and actually talks to people, I will go to 30. Above that I start to get stupid about it, even when the math works. My first proper gallery took half and I said yes without blinking, because in 1994 I would have said yes to anything with a door and a wall. Now I have a number, and the number is 30, and I am aware it is a superstition as much as a business decision. So, what is yours. Not the principled answer you give at a panel. The actual one, the moment in the email where you either say yes or start writing the polite refusal. And has anyone walked away because of it, or is it always you who folds.

Set up at a local fair this past Saturday and made a dumb mistake. I hung my favorite little still life right at the front of the booth, eye level, where everyone turns the corner. It sold before 10am. Great, right? Except the next 31 paintings just sat there for the rest of the day. The piece that would have pulled people deeper into the booth was gone before the crowd even showed up. I did the math on the way home. Sold one $65 piece and maybe 4 greetings cards. Meanwhile the booth next to me, a jewelry maker, had her whole display set up so there was no single focal point, and she was busy all afternoon. I think I keep treating this like a gallery wall when it's really a storefront. People browse the front, something catches them, they step in, they stay. Next fair I'm putting the good stuff in the middle and keeping the doorway bits simple. Anyone else hit this? Or am I overthinking crowds that mostly want a free mint?