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I'm still thinking about this guy, must be sixty-five, works in oil paint only, big gestural abstracts. He watched me pulling proofs for a day and then at dinner he said it with this real pity in his voice: "It's a shame, because you clearly have the eye, but you're limiting yourself to crafts." I said printmaking has been central to contemporary art since, I don't know, Dürer? And he said Dürer was a painter who also did prints. Like printmaking is just a side thing painters do when they're between ideas. The thing that gets me is the hierarchy. Oil painting = serious. Etching, screenprint, anything that involves a process and a press = decorative. It's so nineteenth century. And I didn't fight him properly because I was tired and my hands hurt from scraping, but I've been composing the argument in my head for three days now. You know when the perfect retort arrives too late?

I had a booth at a local craft fair Saturday and a woman picked up one of my acrylic landscapes, looked at it for a good minute, and said "oh this is nice, I could probably do this with my daughter's $5 watercolor set." And I just stood there like... okay. So do it then? I'd love to see you mix titanium white into a puddle of Crayola paint and get that kind of coverage on canvas. Please. Film it. I didn't say any of that of course. I smiled and said "you should give it a try, it's really relaxing!" and she moved on. My husband said I was too nice and I probably was but also what's the point. People who think art supplies are all the same are not people you're going to convince in one conversation at a folding table. Still felt like packing up my easel and going home though.

I did a craft fair a couple weekends ago and made $64 total, but $40 of it came from two people I stopped being "the seller" with and just talked to like a normal human. One was a woman who asked a technical question about how I get the sky so smooth in acrylics, which turned into a 15 minute conversation about gesso and soft brushes, and she bought two small prints before she left. The other was a guy who told me his mom used to paint and we just stood there talking about her for a while. He bought one. I'm not saying this is some genius insight. But I spent the other five hours half-smiling at people and getting ignored, and the money came out of the two actual conversations. Kind of makes me wonder how much of my online posting is the equivalent of that half-smile at strangers. All these process reels and behind the scenes stuff I do, and it's the one-to-one stuff that actually moves anything. Anyway, back to my day job tomorrow. The fair was fun but I came home with more unsold inventory than I know what to do with lol.

So I did the fall craft fair at our church hall last Saturday. Table was $35 for the day, which is why I keep doing it. I had a stack of small 9x12 acrylics, mostly the field and barn scenes I do when I don't have the brain for anything bigger. Priced them at $65 each. Sold four. Felt great until I got home and actually added it up. Eleven hours behind the table plus the framing plus the mats plus the booth fee, and I came out at maybe $9 an hour for work I did over about three months of Sunday afternoons. The thing that gets me is the woman who bought two and said "these are so reasonable." She meant it as a compliment. And I just smiled and said thank you because what am I going to do, argue with her in a church hall? I keep telling myself $65 is what the market here will bear for a small piece. But I've never actually tested that. I've never once put $110 on a painting and seen what happens. I just skip straight to the number that feels safe so nobody walks away from my table. My husband asked why I don't just try it at the spring fair and I didn't have a good answer.

I was at a local craft fair last weekend, had a small table with some of my landscape paintings. Nothing fancy, just trying to sell a few and maybe get some commission interest. This woman comes up with her daughter, spends a good minute looking at this painting I did of a marsh at sunset, it's one I was actually proud of, the light came out right for once. She says "oh that's lovely" and I'm thinking oh cool. Then she turns to her daughter and goes "see, you could do that, couldn't you sweetie? with your little watercolor set?" I just smiled and said "she should definitely keep painting" because what else are you gonna say. But man. That one stung more than it should have. I spent like 12 hours on that painting. My 11 year old asked me why I looked grumpy when we got home and I didn't even know how to explain it without sounding ridiculous.

I sat with that all evening after I got home. That quilt took me three weeks, hand-pieced, hand-quilted, every scrap of fabric out of my grandmother's scrap bag and some from my own mama's housedresses I'd been saving. $350 is already low if you figure materials and time. But she patted my hand like I was a sweet old lady doing a little hobby. I didn't say anything to her. I smiled and thanked her and wrapped it up nice. But I been thinking, folks see the quilts and they see me and they think "bless her heart" instead of seeing the work. I been doing this since I was seven years old. That's 56 years. You don't get to call that cute. I raised my prices $50 after that. Felt wrong in my chest but I did it anyway. Anybody else have to fight the urge to apologize for what you're worth?

One of my girls, she has been learning from me since she was eleven, she is now nineteen. This year I told her, apply for the state handicraft exhibition, what is the harm. She was so nervous she almost did not send the form. Yesterday the list came and her name is on it. When I saw it I felt more happy than the day my own work was first selected, I cannot explain it. She comes from a family where they were telling her, why you are wasting time painting, learn tailoring, make some money. Now her mother called me and she was crying a little, saying thank you ji. I told her, no thanks needed, your daughter did the work. Her fish border is very fine, the line work is steady like someone much older. She will go far. I am thinking also it is important for the other girls in the village to see this. When one of them goes, the path opens for all.🙏

A small thing I want to ask you all, since it has been sitting in my mind. Some years back I carried my paintings to a gallery in Patna, and the person there, without asking me, lifted one from the corner with two fingers to look at the back. Natural colour on handmade paper, it can smudge, and he did not ask. I said nothing, I am sorry to say. I was younger and I needed the sale. So my question: what is the one thing a gallery person did with your work, in front of you, that you did not like. Touching without asking, calling it "ethnic" or "craft item," asking you to make it in a smaller size for tourists, anything. Myself I will say the "craft item" word hurts more than the finger. Tell me yours ji.

I've been charging $75 for a 9x12 acrylic landscape for about two years now. Small canvas, usually a marsh or a treeline, the kind of thing that sells to somebody's aunt at a fair. Feels like a fair price, people don't blink. Then I did the actual math in the car on the way home Sunday. Canvas and paint maybe $12, frame $18 from the craft store when I catch a sale, and I don't count the varnish or the brushes. So $45 left. That piece was four evenings, probably six hours with drying time and reworking the sky twice. Seven and a half an hour, before I count the drive or the $40 booth fee. I know I'm not going to get $30 an hour at a church craft fair. I'm not trying to. But I sat in my driveway for a minute and thought about how I could just skip the frame and sell it on a panel and keep the $18. The thing is I like the frames. They make it look finished. Anyway, next fair is in October. I'm thinking $95 with the frame and seeing what happens. That's the whole post, I don't have a clean ending for it.

Working on a half-length figure, a girl at a window, morning light coming in flat and grey. The ear is the problem. Four times I've laid it in, scraped it back, laid it in again, and each version is more correct and less alive than the first one, which was wrong in every measurable way and had the light in it. I know exactly what I did the first time and I can't get back to not knowing it. So the ear stays in the corner of the studio facing the wall and I'll look at it tomorrow with worse eyes, which is usually the fix. Bof. Some days the craft is the whole point and some days the craft is what's standing between me and the thing.

I have been making mosaic 20 years and today I mixed the grout green. On purpose. It is a small panel of olive branches, 40 by 60, for a woman who lost her husband last spring and asked for something for her kitchen, nothing sad, she said, just something alive. I set the tesserae two weeks ago. Grey grout would have been correct. Grey grout is always correct, it lets the stone speak, I have said this to students like a prayer. But the olives are green smalti and the leaves are green and the background is a warm off white, and every time I looked at it I saw a cold grid pulled over the whole thing. So I sat with a bit of pigment and a yogurt cup for an hour like an idiot, testing on scrap, and then I grouted the real panel green. It looks like light coming through a canopy. I keep going into the studio just to look at it sideways. I have spent half my life learning the rules of this craft from people who were dead before I was born, and the craft is patient, it will wait for you to be ready. Today it felt like the waiting paid out. Twenty years to do a thing wrong on purpose. She collects it Friday. I have not told her. I am a little afraid she wanted grey.

Spent Tuesday in the hall with a lighting tech, a nice patient man named Vojta, and we moved four spots around like we were arranging flowers. The piece is eleven metres of scaffolding, old window frames and about two hundred kilos of scrap sheet metal. In my studio, under one bad bulb and a north window, it is a thing that has weather. In the gallery, lit evenly, beautifully, professionally, it is a display. Everything readable. Nothing to walk into. I know the correct answer. The correct answer is the light is part of the work and I should fight for the light. But I have fought for the light before and lost, and then the work went out into the world looking like a showroom sample and people wrote nice things about the craft. The craft was never the point. What I actually wanted to ask, and what I have been avoiding asking for twenty years: how many of you build the piece for the room you know it will be shown in, and how many build it for the room in your head and then spend the install week apologising? I have done both. The first one sells better. The second one is the only reason I still do this. Vojta is coming back Thursday and I have to decide which man I am this time.

So for about a year I was making these short videos, nothing fancy, just my phone propped against a grout bucket while I cut smalti or set tesserae. No music, no voiceover, just the sound of the hammer and the tile nippers. Sometimes ten seconds. Sometimes two minutes. I posted them because I liked the rhythm of them, but they'd get maybe 40 views. I kept doing it anyway because I'm stubborn and I had the footage. Last month a journalist from a design magazine in London was researching mosaic technique for an article on craft revival. She found my videos. Not my finished pieces, the raw ones, the ones nobody watched. She said they showed the actual process in a way her readers never see. So now there's a four-page spread about my work and I got paid for the photos and she quoted me saying nice things about patience and it's lovely. But the thing is, the algorithm was right. Those videos were dead content by every metric. They just happened to be exactly what one specific person needed on one specific day in another country. I don't know what the lesson is. Maybe that "what works" is sometimes just persistence aimed at nobody until the right somebody shows up. Or maybe it's luck dressed up as strategy. I can't tell yet.

Trying to finish the left hand of a seated figure, the one that rests on the knee, and I have wiped it out three mornings in a row. Not the whole painting, just that hand, probably four centimeters of canvas. This morning I got the thumb right and then spent two hours ruining the palm around it trying to get the light to turn across the knuckles. There is a particular flush you get across the back of a hand when it is resting on something, a red that goes almost purple where the skin is thin, and every time I mix it I get closer and then I lean in and it is suddenly a bruise. Wiped it out with a rag at noon, no regret. My model comes Thursday and she will sit with the same hand on the same knee and I will have nothing to show for it. Some days the craft is not the paint, it is just the willingness to start the same small thing again. Anyway. Back in there.

I've been fighting this piece since March. Charcoal on paper, 40x60, my mother at 29, which is two years younger than I am now. I used a photo I hadn't looked at in probably a decade, one where she's laughing with her whole face and you can't tell anything was wrong yet. Drew it four times. Burned the second one, actually put it in the fire pit out back, which felt dramatic and then felt correct. The thing that finally did it was stopping trying to make her look like the photo and just drawing the mouth from memory. Her real mouth, the one she got when she was tired. Not the smile. I cried a little, which is embarrassing to type but there it is. It's hanging now. Cheap black frame from the craft store, nothing fancy. And every night I get up around 3 to pee and walk right past her face in the dark and I still don't know if it's good. But it's UP. It's on a wall, in my house, where people will see it. Some work you make to show people and some work you make to put something down. This one was the second kind and I'm only now figuring out that counts as a win too.

I've been doing the fall craft fair in my town for three years now and I always did the thing where you write "reasonable offers" or just leave the small tags off half of it because I hate the moment someone asks and I have to say a number out loud. This year I priced everything properly. No "DM for pricing." Little handwritten tags on the back of each one with actual numbers. My 8x10s at $65, the 16x20 landscape at $240, and the two I was scared to price at $400. What happened is I sold less. Four pieces instead of the six I moved last year. But I also spent the whole day talking to people about the paintings instead of apologizing for them, and one woman told me the $400 one was worth more than that and I should be charging by size and not by how nervous I am. She didn't buy it. But she was right and now I can't stop thinking about it. The other thing, and this is the part that bugs me. A guy picked up the $240 one, said "nice," put it down, came back twice, and bought it. I don't think he would've come back twice if I'd had a "make me an offer" sign up. Maybe? I don't know. I'm not good at this part. Anyway if you're like me and you price low because it feels rude to ask, that's the conversation I'm having with myself this week.

Spent two hours grinding out a weld on the back side of a joint today. Nobody will ever see it. It gets covered with stone. My old boss would have said leave it, the grinder is for what shows. I ground it anyway. Not for the piece. I just can't leave a bad weld in something I made even when it's buried. I know that's not rational. Been at this thirty-some years and I still don't know if that's craft or just a tic. Maybe they're the same thing.

There's a small 8x10 landscape sitting on my dining table right now, one of the ones I did of the creek behind my parents' place, and I've been sitting on it for three weeks because I don't know what to put on the tag. I sold two pieces at the fall fair. The 16x20s went at $150, which felt fine, honestly, that's what I've always done. But the small ones I let go for $45 and I knew while the words were coming out of my mouth that it was wrong. My husband did the math on the last one. Twelve hours, plus the frame which was $18 at the craft store, plus gas to the fair, and I made less than I would have covering a shift. And I still said $45 because I didn't want the lady to wince. The thing is, I'm not in this to get rich. I have a day job, this is my thing. But $45 for a finished painting with a frame is not a bargain, it's me practicing saying no badly. I'm going to write $65 on this one. That's the whole plan. It sounds so small written out. But I've been standing in my kitchen practicing the sentence in case someone asks why, like I need a reason prepared.

I keep seeing this advice everywhere now: show the process, not the product. People love a time-lapse of hands pulling a print, the ink going down, the registration being slightly off. Fine. It works. I know it works. But here's the thing nobody says. The process is the part I actually need to be alone with. That moment when a screenprint is failing and I'm over-inking and the paper is curling and I have no idea if I should finish the run or throw it out, that's not content. That's thinking. I cannot perform it and also do it. So I post the okay version of the process. The ones that look like a craft video. And the real thinking stays off-camera, and I wonder if what gets seen online is just the choreography of the work, not the work. I've been going back and forth about this because the numbers are real. The 40-second pulling-a-print clip gets ten times the reach of the finished piece. But I started printmaking because of what the printed image says about copies and originals, not because I wanted to be an ASMR account for paper. Maybe the answer is boring: post the process that's already done. The work in the frame, not the work in the moment. Or maybe I'm just old-fashioned and the performance is part of it now and I should get over myself. What do you all do when the thing that gets attention isn't the thing you're doing?

Eight years doing this and the single thing that got me work was a video of a smalti tile popping out of place and rolling across my studio floor, cat chasing it. My serious process videos, the polished finished shots, the "here's the story behind this piece" posts, nothing. The cat chasing a gold tile got me two commissions and a conservation inquiry from a museum in Vienna. I've stopped trying to figure out the algorithm. It's not a craft, there's no skill to learn, it's just weather. Some days the light hits your post, most days it doesn't. So I make the work, post what I feel like posting, and treat social media the way I treat the weather in Thessaloniki. I don't argue with it, I just dress for it. The people who do well on here spend their whole day on here. I don't have that in me and neither does my back. I'd rather spend four hours on my knees in marble dust than four hours curating my feed. Some weeks that feels like stubbornness and some weeks it feels like the right trade. Mostly it's a wash. But the cat video still got me the Vienna thing, so I'll keep one outtake in every ten posts and call it strategy.