bought two stretched canvases at the hardware store today, the cheap pre-primed ones. got them home and immediately flipped them over to look at the back, which is the only part I actually care about. staples, the little sag in the weave where it's been leaning against something. so now they go in the corner with the other ones. I have maybe eleven canvases in that corner and I've painted on the front of exactly none of them. the thing is I know why. my brother's denim jacket had the seam worn down to white on one shoulder, and I keep thinking the back of a canvas is the only surface that gets to hold a life without being asked to perform. the front is a stage. the back is just where something sat. so I keep buying them and putting them in the corner. my studio is 9x11 and the corner is becoming a problem. yesterday I moved the shop vac and there was mold on the wall behind the stack, which, fine, that's the wall's fault not mine. not asking for advice exactly. just. if you also keep a pile of blank things you can't use, I'd like to know I'm not alone in it
Six canvases. Six. I thought I was saving time, buying them already stretched by people who supposedly know what they're doing. Every single one has a little depression right in the middle, like someone pressed a fist into it before the glue dried. I sized them anyway, hoping it would tighten up. It didn't. Now I've got to either strip them and re-stretch myself or paint around a soft spot for the next three months. I know the answer is "do it yourself." I do. But sometimes you just want to buy a thing and have it be the thing you bought, non? I'm too old to be surprised by this and yet here I am, surprised.
Ok confession: I've been painting on scraps and old cardboard for weeks because I was too scared to touch the good linen. Told myself it was "economic" but really I was just terrified of wasting a $40 surface on a bad idea. So today I went and bought 12 mid-range canvases, stacked them by the easel, and just started throwing charcoal at the first one with zero plan. The first one's already a mess. I love it. That's the thing, when the surface is cheap enough to ruin you actually take risks and then you make the weirdest stuff. I keep having to learn this lesson over and over. 😭 Anyone else hoard their good supplies like it's the last loaf of bread? Because I need to know I'm not alone. I've got entire drawers of nice brushes I'm "saving" for something.
i counted. fourteen canvases sitting around in various states of almost. the big one behind the door has been "nearly there" since february. made a coffee this morning fully intending to finish one of them and instead stretched a fresh canvas and started something new by 7. no notes. this is just who i am now.
Spent most of this week on two large ones, 190 x 150, and for once the grey held. That sounds small. It is not small. Grey is the thing that eats me alive in the studio. Mixed warm it turns to mud, mixed cool it turns to dishwater, and after three days of layering and scraping back you look at it and feel nothing. This time I took the cold wax down hard, more than I usually dare, and kept the pigment lean. It dried matte, slightly chalky, and the colour underneath keeps showing through at the edges where I dragged the scraper. Two days ago I stood in front of it and did not want to fix anything. That almost never happens. Usually I want to fix everything. The other canvas is still fighting me. Same mix, same hand, and it sits there like wet cardboard. I keep telling myself the good one only looks good because the bad one is next to it, which is probably true and also useless as advice. I have a show in the spring, so the timing is good. The market can do what it does. Right now I am mostly relieved that a colour I have been chasing since about 2019 finally stood still for a minute.
I know you can buy perfectly good pre-stretched canvas. I know this. And sometimes I do, for studies or when I'm traveling. But for the real work I still go to the art supply shop on Rue des Trois-Marie, pick through the rolls of linen by touch, and spend an afternoon cutting and stretching and sizing. My husband thinks it's a ritual I won't let go of. Maybe it is. But there's something about the tension you can only get when you've done it yourself, pulling the pliers until the weave is exactly right, hearing the frame creak a little. And the rabbit skin glue, I know synthetic sizes work fine, but the smell of it cooking takes me straight back to my first year of training. That hideous little kitchen in the atelier where we learned to grind pigment and stretch linen before we were allowed to touch a brush. I had a student last year who asked why I bother. She'd only ever worked on pre-primed cotton. I told her to try it once, just to feel the difference in the surface when you've done it yourself. She never did, I think. But the ones who try it understand immediately. I'm not saying it makes better paintings. But it makes my paintings. That's enough for me.
so i did a group show at this bar two neighborhoods over, the kind where they hang stuff above the booths and hope nobody spills a $9 beer on it, and i sold one. $280. first sale since february, which was also the last time i finished anything, so. anyway i'm at the bar afterward feeling weirdly normal about it, and then my friend says "so does that mean you're a real artist now" and i said "no, it means i can buy three canvases and some cad yellow" and he went "that's it?" and yeah. that's literally it. $280 is 2/3 of a rent payment or one canvas and some paint and a sandwich. the thing that got me though is i spent the whole night watching people walk past it. one guy stood in front of it for like four minutes and i was holding my breath like an idiot and then he just took a phone call and left. the person who bought it barely looked at it. just asked if it was "the orange one" and pulled out a card. which is fine! it's fine lol. i don't need them to have a moment about it. still. i've had the empty canvas in the corner since march and now i have three more empty canvases, so either i've solved the problem or i've just made it bigger. going to go with solved. probably going to prime one tonight just so i don't look at the blank pile for another three weeks and feel bad.
A friend from years ago asked me to paint her daughter's portrait for her 18th. I said yes at €600, already half what I'd charge a stranger for a 50x60cm oil on linen. She's a friend, fine. Then the emails started. "Could you do it from these five photos instead?" "Actually she's wearing a different dress now, can you change the colour?" "Her hair is shorter than that photo shows." "My mother thinks the background should be lighter." I repainted the face from new reference, adjusted the dress twice, scraped and repainted the background. All told I probably spent close to 25 hours on a painting that should have taken maybe 12. At my usual hourly rate for commissioned work that comes out to about €24 an hour. My assistant, who stretches canvases, makes €16. So I earned roughly the same as the person who stretches my canvases, for a job that required twenty years of training. The friend was happy. The daughter cried when she saw it. Beautiful moment. I don't regret it exactly. But I sat down afterwards and did the math and realised I'd basically given her a €1,200 painting plus a free workshop in how to manage an artist. Never again without a contract that says: one reference, one revision, anything beyond that is a new fee. Curious if anyone else has a number attached to the "learning experience" of a commission that ran away from you.
Ripped a canvas in half at midnight last night because the face I'd been fighting for three days looked like a mannequin. Dead eyes, nothing behind them. I mixed that pigment for hours, I knew every mark on there, and it still felt like furniture. Slept four hours, woke up at 6am, grabbed the first scrap of paper I found, a receipt from the corner store, and drew the same face in charcoal in about nine minutes. It was alive. It had a pulse. All that "control" and technique I'd been so proud of was the thing killing it. I have a box of ruined canvases under my bed. Twelve of them. Some of them are genuinely good and I still can't look at them without wanting the person in them to look back at me. Anyone else keep your failures around like that or do you burn them?
A gallery in Düsseldorf asked me last week what I charge for a day in the studio when they send a photographer along, and I said 780 euros, plus the canvases are extra. Two years ago I said 540 for the same thing. Nobody blinked. That is the part that bothers me. All those years of 540 were not a market price, they were my nerve failing. The absurd thing is I only did the math afterwards. I added up the wax, the linen, the ground, the hours of scraping back a layer that did not work, the fact that a 160 by 200 canvas takes me five weeks and I can only really work on one at a time. Divide it out and I had been paying myself something closer to a good electrician's rate, without the security. So now the number is on paper and it sits badly with me. Not because I think it is too high. Because I know exactly which people I quoted 540 last year and I have not told them anything.
i raised my prices in march. 450 to 850 on the mid size canvases, the 60x80 ones. sold one in nine days to a guy who runs a bike shop, paid full, didn't haggle, thanked me for my time. i thought ok. this is the part where it clicks. raised again in june to 1400 on the same size. crickets. not "too expensive" crickets, just silence. three inquiries since then that all went "love your work!! do you have anything smaller?" which i now understand is code for a different number entirely. what's annoying is i know the advice is right. the 850 sale proved there's demand above where i was. but i can't tell if 1400 is a real ceiling or if i just killed the discovery thing by fiddling with it. i'm not consistent, i post when i finish something, sometimes twice a week sometimes twice a month. so the raise landed on a feed that already forgets i exist between paintings. the other theory, and i hate this one, is that 850 was the "i can justify this on a card" number and 1400 is the "this needs a conversation with my partner" number. completely different buyer, not just a different price. anyway i'm painting the big one for the show in october and telling myself the answer lives in there. it does not live in there. it lives in a spreadsheet i refuse to open.
I got my first real representation sideways. A group show in a converted factory space in Plagwitz, maybe 2003, and the gallerist spent the whole evening in the corner eating the cheap sausages and barely looked at the walls. I assumed nothing. Three weeks later she called and asked if I had more work in that direction. I had four canvases and a lot of nerve, so I said yes. That was it. No portfolio, no polite emails, no follow up. I have never once got a gallery by sending an application cold, and I have sent many. So I am curious how it went for others: what was the actual door that opened the first time? A friend who knew someone, a studio visit, a juried show, a bartender, your mother's neighbour? And was it luck or did you do something deliberate that worked? Tell me the real version, not the tidy one you put in the bio.
A woman with about 90k followers messaged me in March, a lifestyle account, pale interiors, very clean. She wanted to feature one of the big canvases in a video, the 180x160 one still in the studio, and her rate was €1,400. Nothing against her, she was polite and businesslike about it, which I appreciate more than the ones who offer "exposure" and a moodboard. I said I would think about it. I thought for four days. Here is the thing that decided it for me and it is not a principled thing: I could not find one painter I respect who could tell me what actually came of it. Everybody had a story about a post going well. Nobody had a story about a sale. And I am not in a position to spend €1,400 on a feeling. Maybe I got it wrong. The galleries say reach is reach. But I have watched two of my collectors find me through a bad photo on a regional culture site, so I know the route is not always the pretty one. Anyway I declined and the canvas is still here, leaning against the wall, and I am fine with it. Curious whether anyone has actually run the numbers backwards from a paid feature to money in the account, because I never got a straight answer.
spent the whole afternoon trying to get a crease out of a piece I'd already signed and titled. the crease was mine, my own fault, I stacked two canvases wrong and left them three weeks. now the surface is flat again but it will never be the same and honestly that's the part I keep looking at. also I signed it before I noticed. so there's that. the collector who has this one is going to hang it somewhere bright and never see half of what's in it, which is fine, it's how it goes. just found myself ironing my own work like laundry and wondering who I am now.
i raised my prices. i know it's what you're supposed to do, and honestly i believed it. the 850 painting sold in nine days, so i figured i'd been leaving money on the table and bumped everything about 40%. that was two months ago. sold one small one since, to a friend, at a discount she didn't ask for and i offered out of panic. the annoying part is the work didn't get worse. it got better. i finally figured out how to get that flat saturated orange to sit on top of a purple underpainting without turning into mud, which took me like four separate failed canvases to learn, and nobody cares because nobody's looking. so now i have nine finished pieces stacked against the wall in the studio, which is also my kitchen, and a pricing spreadsheet that i keep opening like it's going to say something different this time. it does not. not asking what to do about pricing, i've read all the threads. more like, is this just the shape of it now. you do the thing, you price it like a professional, and then you wait in a room with your own work.
A small gallery in the 6th asked to see my recent work in November. She came to the studio, spent an hour, was polite. Then she told me the paintings were "trop léchées", too finished. As if the finish were a failure of nerve. She said her clients like to feel the struggle, the doubt. I sat with that for the train home and I'm still not sure if it's an insult or a market fact. Because here's what I keep turning over. I spent four years learning to bring an edge into focus without it looking like I tried. Now the advice is to unlearn it, to leave the hand visible. And maybe she's right about the buyers, maybe the collector wants to see the artist thinking. But I painted a hand last month and I want it to look like a hand. The thinking is there, it's just not performing. I don't have a resolution to this. I have a stack of finished canvases and a nagging feeling that "finished" became a dirty word while I was teaching in my thirties and not paying attention. Voilà.
so a friend of a friend wanted a big one. 36x48, their loft, "whatever you think looks good" which is the most expensive sentence in the english language. i quoted 900. felt fine at the time. that was 11 days ago. since then: 2 stretched canvases bought (ruined the first one, long story, don't ask), 3 tubes of that phthalo, a roll of tape, and i've redone the same corner twice because the edge kept going soft. did the math last night out of curiosity, which is a rookie move. comes out to like 14 an hour. for the most stressful 4 weeks of my year so far. and the part that actually stings is i know exactly what happened. i had a number in my head from 2021, from when i was broke and desperate and flattered anyone asked, and i just... said it. didn't even think. it came out like a reflex. i'm delivering monday and i'm already drafting the email for the next person who asks. 1 800. not negotiating it down to feel liked.
there's a chair in my studio that has held a stack of failed canvases for like four months now. i keep meaning to move them to the corner and i keep not doing it because the corner is where the good light is and i don't want to look at them in the good light. the chair itself is fine. it's from ikea, it's the one everyone has. i have never once sat in it. today i moved the stack to the hallway and immediately put a wet panel on the seat. so i guess the chair is for drying now. it's been a chair for two hours and it already has a job that isn't sitting in it. weirdly this is the most useful piece of furniture i own.
For years I have kept notes in the worst possible way. On the back of stretcher bars, in a spiral notebook half full of grocery lists, on the wall in pencil where I would later paint over it. Last week the gallery asked for a proper chronology of the series and I panicked, then sat down and wrote the whole thing out. Forty-one pages. Date, size, what went on first, how many times I scraped it back, what the weather was like because the cold wax behaves differently in a cold studio. It took four evenings. The strange thing is what came out of it. Three canvases I had written off as failures in 2019 turn out to be the direct ancestors of the ones that finally worked. I had forgotten entirely. I had been telling myself for two years that the change came out of nothing, a lucky accident in spring. I don't think I am a better painter now for having the log. But I am less superstitious about it. The work has a spine I couldn't see because I was standing too close. Naja. Next time I will keep it as I go, which I say every time.
Not the rejection, the sentence. The one that stuck. Mine came from a woman in Paris who looked at three of my canvases for a long time and then said, "You paint the light very well. Now paint something that is not about the light." I was furious for a week. It took me two years to understand she was right, and I still hear it when I catch myself making a beautiful nothing. So what is yours? The one that stung and then turned out to be useful, or the one that stung and still stings. Tell me which.
