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Took on a piece last month I had a bad feeling about from the first call. Client kept saying "modern" and "organic" and I should've known those two words don't sit together in steel. Now I'm three weeks in and fighting the material to make something that's neither. My own fault. I've got a rule about turning down work when the first conversation feels like a puzzle instead of a handshake and I broke it because the money was good. The honest part: the fabrication is fine. It'll hold up. That was never in question. It's just dead on arrival and I know it, and the client will love it because they don't know any better, and that's the part that sits wrong. Charging someone for a thing you'd never stand behind if your name went on the plinth. Anyway. Ten more days and it's out of the shop. Next time I remember why I made the rule.

Seriously. Had my phone plugged in and everything, then BAM. Black screen. No warning. Tried everything, it's just dead. We were talking numbers too, like, actual numbers. I'm hoping they'll call back or email but honestly, I feel like such an idiot. This never happens to me. Now I'm just staring at this blank screen wondering if I should just go paint something angry. Anyone else ever have tech betray them at the worst possible moment? So frustrated right now.

Got a call this week from a guy who wanted a steel piece for his office lobby. Fine. Then he asks if I can make it "go viral." I thought he was joking. He wasn't. Said his marketing guy told him everything should have a hook now. I told him the only hook in my shop is the one that holds the chain block up. He didn't laugh. We're at the point where people want the sculpture to do the advertising instead of the other way around. The piece is 400 pounds of welded steel. It doesn't need to trend. It needs to hold up for forty years and not look like it was built last Tuesday. That's the job. He still placed the order. We'll see what he says when I send the progress photos and they're just, you know, photos of steel.

Not the yes you wanted. The first real one. Mine came from a small gallery in Lyon that specialised in something completely unrelated, and the woman who ran it had seen two of my paintings in a group show in the suburbs, three years apart. She called me about a wall, not about my work. I have never once got a yes from a proper submission, and I've stopped believing that is the normal route. So what was the actual door that opened for you? A friend, a client, a neighbour with a cousin, a fair, an open call, someone seeing a painting in a café. Be specific, it's more useful than the success stories.

Client saw a photo of the piece in progress, called me up, very cheerful, "Dimitra, why does it take you so long? Just fill the gaps quicker, nobody's going to look that close." That's the thing. They never look that close. That's exactly why they end up with a mosaic that's held together by hope and a prayer, lifting off the wall in three years, and then they call me back to fix it and act shocked at the price. No. I don't rush the setting. The gaps are the work, actually. The gaps are where the whole thing holds or falls. You want quick, buy a printed tile, it's thirty euros on Etsy. You want a mosaic that'll outlive your grandchildren, I place every piece and I don't rush a single one. He went quiet. I think he gets it now. Or he's off finding someone who'll give him quick. Either way, not my problem. My hands don't move faster for anyone, not even for money. Especially not for money, actually, I've learned that the hard way. 🙂

I did a half-length of a woman in a green armchair last spring. Fourteen sessions, two hours each, plus the drying and the varnishing. Quoted 2 200 euros for the painting. The client wanted it framed and I said yes, I'll take care of it. Went to my man in the 7e, solid oak, hand-finished, 310 euros. Handed her the painting, she was delighted, she paid, everyone shook hands. Then I did the arithmetic on a Sunday, which is always a mistake. Fourteen sessions plus prep plus varnish, call it thirty-five hours, minus the frame, minus the canvas and the lead white I burned through, that's not 63 euros an hour, it's closer to 54. Before I pay myself anything at all. For work that took me eleven years of atelier training to be able to do. I know that 54 is not nothing. But my dentist doesn't frame things for free. Voilà. The real problem is I never asked myself whether the price should have included the frame before I opened my mouth. I just said yes, because she was standing in front of me being nice about the painting. I am very good at being nice about the painting. I've since put framing on a separate line on the quote. It feels awkward, like I'm nickel-and-diming a client who is already spending two thousand euros with me. But the alternative is me eating 310 every time and calling it part of the job.

The piece was 30x40, acrylic wash and torn paper over a photo of somebody's grandmother's kitchen. Client found me through a friend of a friend. 900 felt generous when I said it out loud. Then I actually sat down with the receipts. Panel 62. Mediums, call it 140 because I wasted a whole tube of a grey I ended up hating. The photograph was a scan and a print, 34. Frame, because it needed one and I didn't trust them to pick it, 210. Shipping 55. That's 501 gone before I touched it. What was left was 399 and maybe 60 hours. I don't work fast. I re-tore the same paper corner four times. So roughly 6 an hour, and that's before the gallery takes a cut if it ever shows. The part that actually bothers me isn't the number. It's that I knew it was low when I said it. I said 900 because I could hear myself about to say 1400 and it scared me. Fear has a price and mine is 500. Quoting a new one next week. Same size, same materials. I'm going to say the higher number and just sit there.

Mine: a small space in the 6th that wanted 60% and asked me to "adapt my palette to the season" for their clients. I said no thanks, and the woman seemed genuinely surprised. Another one kept me waiting forty minutes while he took a personal call, then explained commission to me like I was a student. So tell me the one that made you walk. Not the ones that just ghost you, the ones where you were in the room and something smelled wrong and you were right. I'm asking partly to feel less alone and partly because I have a meeting next week and I want my antennae up. What did you ignore that you should not have ignored?

I ask because I ignored one once and paid for it. A space in the south, decent room, good light. The director talked for forty minutes without once asking what the work was about. Only about the client list. I signed anyway, because I was younger and flattered. Two years, one sale, and the sale was to his brother-in-law. Tell me the red flag that made you walk. Mine from that time: he called the work "product." I should have heard it then. Naja, or the ones who want three years of exclusivity on a handshake. That one too.

Had a piece ready for welding last month, a big steel armature that needed a structural weld I couldn't do in my own shop. Got a quote from a foundry I've used before for $600. Dropped it off. Picked it up and the invoice was $1,200. Foreman said the job took longer than expected because of the wall thickness and they had to re-jig the setup. No call to warn me, no authorization. Just the work done and the new price. I paid it because the piece was already in my truck and the client deadline was two weeks out. But I sat in the parking lot for five minutes first. That's the part I keep thinking about. Not whether they were right or wrong. Just that I sat there and decided to eat it because restarting somewhere else would have cost me more than the difference. Still don't know if that was smart or weak. Probably both.

I have a portrait commission, a woman and her two daughters in the salon of their apartment near Bellecour, and it has become the most interesting fight of my month. The older daughter has a hand on the back of the chair, half turned away, and the morning light comes across her from the tall window on the left. I left the raw umber and lead white of that hand loose. A few strokes, the structure showing, the warm ground coming through. It is the best thing in the painting. Honest light does that, it does not need the whole thing described. The mother loves it. The grandmother, who is paying, called it "unfinished" and asked me to smooth the edges and give the girl her fingers properly. So now every Tuesday we talk. And I find I cannot entirely dismiss her. Because she is not wrong that a portrait for the family wall is a different animal than a picture in my studio. It will hang over a sofa where children will run past it. It is not meant to be looked at, it is meant to be lived with. But the moment I nail down those fingers the whole thing goes dead. I have seen it happen, I did it once to prove her wrong and scraped it back within the hour. I have not told her that. I am letting her think I am considering it, which is not entirely a lie, I am considering it the way you consider stepping off a curb into traffic. Voilà. That is the whole of it. The painting is due in March and I have no idea which of us is going to win.

I did the math on a commission last week. Big public piece, welded steel, seven months from first sketch to install. After materials, shop rent, the kid I hired to help with the welding, and the cut the fabricator took for the base plates I don't have the equipment to make myself, I came out to $7.50 an hour. I remember when I started out I'd have been thrilled with that. Thrilled. Now I look at it and think what the hell am I doing. The worst part is the client was happy. Paid on time, no complaints. So the price felt fair to them. It's me who underpriced it, because I still think like the guy who's grateful anyone wants the work at all. My wife used to say I had no idea what my own time was worth and she was right. Three years since she passed and I still hear her saying it. Anyone else do the math on a finished job and feel like a damn fool?

Finished a limestone piece in 2009, 300kg, sat on the client's porch in Vermont ever since. Four years ago I was up there for something else and saw a crack running out of the bottom left corner, about six inches, following the bed plane. Nobody else noticed. I've thought about that crack maybe twice a month since. Here's the part that bothers me. I knew that stone had a seam there when I blocked it out. I could feel it under the chisel, that slight give. And I set the piece so the seam sat in the least loaded corner and called it fine. It was fine. It's still fine. That's the problem. Nothing teaches me anything. I have a new block in the shop now, Indiana limestone, 180kg, and there's a seam in it in almost the same place. I've been walking past it for three weeks. I know the correct answer is to cut the block down and lose the mass, or send it back and eat the freight. What I actually want to do is set it the same way and tell myself I'm being practical. I've done that before. So this is me saying out loud that I'm not going to do it. I'll report back when I've ruined a smaller piece instead.

Daughter talked me into posting the installs. So I post them. That part actually works, in a way I didn't expect. Two commissions this year came from a guy who found me through a photo of a finished piece in a courtyard in Vermont. What doesn't work is everything after the photo. I posted a shot of a limestone piece I finished in March, 400 pounds, four days of rigging to get it set. 1,100 views. Two comments. One was a bot selling something, the other was a guy telling me I should do reels. I did one reel. Thirty seconds of me chasing a chisel with a mallet. Took an hour to edit and I still don't know what a hook is. Nobody watched it. The commissions come from the phone calls, the guy who saw the piece in person and called me. That's still the whole business. The photos just remind people I'm alive. I don't think that's a problem with my account. I think it's the medium. A photograph of a sculpture tells you almost nothing. You can't walk around it, you can't see the scale, you can't feel the weight of the thing. What I'd want to post is the sound of the grinder or the way the light moves across a rough face at 4 in the afternoon, and I can't put that on a screen. So I keep posting the stills because the daughter asks me to, and because twice now it's paid for a truckload of stone. But I'm not going to pretend it's doing more than that.

Portrait commission, a girl of about nine, and the mother sat with me through the whole sitting. That should have told me. After the third session she looked at the block-in and asked if I could make the nose "less present." I asked what she meant. She meant smaller. Then the chin. Then the eyes, God help me, because the daughter's eyes are slightly asymmetrical and that, apparently, is a flaw and not the whole point of a face. I did the painting my way. She paid, she hung it, she has not called since and I am fine with that. But here is what stays with me. I have painted about sixty commissioned portraits in my life and the requests get stranger every year. Not more difficult, stranger. People are so used to filters on their phones that a face as it is has become an insult. They are not commissioning a portrait anymore, they are commissioning a correction. The thing nobody warns you about is that the correction is the easy part. I can make a nose smaller. That takes twenty minutes and no skill. Making a smaller nose still look like her, still sit in the light the way a real nose sits in the light, that is the work. And if I do it well, the client is happy and the painting is a small lie that will hang on a wall for forty years. So I paint them true and I lose the referral. C'est ça. For anyone here who sells something made by hand: do you give them the thing they asked for, or the thing that is actually good? I have stopped pretending those are the same request.

A woman wants a 4 metre mosaic for a hotel lobby in Halkidiki. Deposit was good money, more than I made in the whole of 2013. She has a Pinterest board. She sent it twice. I went to see the space on Monday. Grey marble everywhere, that cold beige lighting, and she wants a "warm, organic, hand-made feeling" in smalti. Smalti in a lobby with no daylight is money thrown into a hole. By year two it reads flat and dead and my name is on it. So I said no. Politely, with an actual reason, and offered her a smaller stone piece for the reception wall instead. Half the money. She hasn't replied. I sat on the balcony after the call with a coffee going cold feeling like an idiot, and then around an hour later something in my chest just let go. Fifteen years I've been taking things I knew were wrong because the month needed paying. I'm not doing it anymore. I'd rather grout a bathroom floor. Also my left thumbnail is black again from a bad hammer strike. Unrelated. Or maybe not.