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Not the collectors, not the buyers. The gallerist. Two weeks after I sent the new list, an email that had begun "Lukas, I have something exciting for you" became "let me think about the timing." I had expected pushback from the buyers. There was none. The three works that sold this spring went at the new numbers without a single negotiation, and one of them was to someone who had asked about the price in 2019 and gone quiet. So it was not the market that flinched. It was the person whose cut got smaller in relative terms, because a 30% raise on my side does not lift his commission in the same proportion he was used to. I am not sure what to do with this. I spent fifteen years being told the price is a signal, that cheap work reads as unserious, and mostly I believed it and still could not bring myself to charge it. Now I did, and the consequence is not more buyers or fewer buyers. It is a quieter phone. The studio does not care either way. I am working on three panels, 180 by 140, cold wax over a red ground, and the scraping back is going badly.

I painted over a self portrait in November. Full blackout, then I rebuilt the whole thing in about four hours, wrong on purpose, ugly around the mouth. I posted it at like 1am expecting nothing. It's now the only piece I've sold twice. First print buyer was a guy in Dublin who said it "looked how grief feels in your shoulders." Then a woman in Lyon bought the original. Meanwhile the two pieces I spent six weeks on, glazed and reworked and babied? Crickets. One of them is still leaning against my radiator. I'm not saying everyone should post the worst thing they make. I'm saying I had my "good" work and my true work and I could not tell them apart until strangers did it for me. I was cropping out the hand that shook because I thought the shaking was a flaw. Still don't fully know what to do with that. I keep making careful things and hating them and hating myself a little for making them careful. Also I stopped scheduling posts. I used to sit on a piece for a week "timing" it right. Now it goes up the second it comes off the easel, wet, glare in the corner, whatever. Sales went up. Not a ton. Enough that I noticed.

For years I kept prices off my site. Gallery habit, I suppose: you don't discuss money in public, the buyer asks, you reply discreetly, c'est ça. In March I finally put a range on the site, honestly, with a note that the small studies start lower and the large things are not cheap. What I expected: fewer inquiries. What happened: the opposite, and better ones. Someone wrote last week that she had assumed everything was out of her reach, saw the range, and bought a 24 by 30 study. I sold three of the small ones in two months. The questions I get now start at "is the light in this one from the window or from the lamp" instead of "how much." The thing I got wrong was thinking discretion protects the work. It mostly protects the awkwardness of the person asking. People want a number. Give it and you both stop circling. The part I still dislike: a few painters in my circle think it is vulgar. Maybe. But I spent a decade painting little and talking much, and I prefer this.

I raised my originals by forty percent at the start of the year. Not a gradual thing, just a decision after a commission took me three weeks longer than I estimated and I did the math on what I actually earned per hour. I expected some pushback, at least a pause before purchases. Nothing. The last three pieces sold within the same window they always have. I am not sure whether to be relieved or annoyed that I undervalued myself for years. The work did not change. The buyers did not change. Only the number did. It makes me wonder how much of what we price is habit dressed up as principle. If you raised rates recently, did it change anything measurable? I would like to know whether my experience is the rule or the exception.

I finally did it. After three years of charging 1500 SEK for the same A3 paper collage, I bumped it to 2000 in January. Thought it was modest enough to keep people around. Lost three people who'd bought from me every year. One of them wrote back saying she was "surprised by the increase." That one stung more than I expected because she'd always seemed genuinely interested in the work, not just the price. I'm not going back down. But I didn't expect the silence to feel this specific. I thought I was ready for it and I wasn't.