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I did a custom portrait commission for a friend of a friend back in February. Watercolor, 9x12, pretty detailed reference photo of her dog who had just passed away. I quoted her $80 because I was still in my "I have no idea what I'm doing and I'm terrified to ask for money" phase and also she was nice and sad about her dog. 14 hours. I literally tracked it because at some point I was like wait this is getting absurd. $5.70 an hour. I had to buy a new tube of burnt sienna halfway through because I ran out, which was $12, so make that even less. She framed it and sent me a photo and I was happy she loved it. But I also wanted to cry a little bit. I think about that commission a lot now that I'm trying to take this seriously. Like what would I charge today? Probably $300 minimum. And even that feels like I'm making it up. I don't know when that stops feeling fake honestly.

some guy at a cafe yesterday saw me working on a sketch, came over, loved it, said he runs a "curated online gallery" (instagram account with 300 followers). wanted to feature me. for free. in exchange for "exposure to his network." i asked him how many sales his featured artists usually get from it. he said "well it's more about building relationships." so i said cool, let's build one where you pay me. he did not think that was funny. he left me his card anyway. the card had a stock photo of a paintbrush on it.

Okay so I finally did the thing everyone says to do and raised my prices, like a real jump, not just $5, and I instantly lost three of my regulars who'd been buying from me since I started selling online. One of them literally said "I'll wait til you come back down" which honestly stung more than I expected it to. But here's the part I wasn't ready for, the people who are buying at the new price are asking different questions? They're not haggling or asking about shipping times, they're asking about process, about what I was thinking with the composition, about whether I have more in that series. The conversations are just... better. And I'm making the same amount per month with half the sales and way less time packing things up. I don't know if this is a fluke or if it's actually how it goes but I keep waiting to feel bad about losing those regulars and I just... don't? I feel guilty for not feeling guilty lol. Has anyone else had this happen or did I just get lucky?

So I've been doing this thing where I quote what feels scary high, trying to push past the old numbers. Last month a woman reached out about a memorial piece, wanted me to work with her dad's old survey maps, some letters, a few other things. I took a breath and said $1,200. She said "perfect" before I even finished the sentence. Which should feel great, right? Instead I spent the whole week thinking I could've said $1,800 and she would've said the same thing. I don't know where the ceiling is because I've never hit it. I'm just guessing in the dark and every time someone says yes I feel like I lost a negotiation I didn't know I was in.

A foreign buyer came to my village last year. A German lady, very polite, through a cooperative. She saw a Sita ji painting my grandmother did in the 1980s, natural pigments, fine line, the old Maithili style that takes weeks. She wanted to buy it. I told her price, 8,000 rupees. She smiled and said "for local art, that seems high." Then she offered 500 rupees. I could not speak for a moment. 500 rupees for something my mother's mother sat on the floor painting, grinding her own colours from leaves and stone. I told her no, sorry, this painting is not for sale now. She looked confused. I think she thought I would bargain. But some things you do not bargain over. This is the problem we have with folk art. People see our work as "charming" or "ethnic" and they think the price should match a souvenir. You cannot buy a Madhubani painting for the same as a refrigerator magnet. My daughter worked three days on a single fish motif last month. Three days. The pigment alone I have to source from Patna now because the local suppliers for certain minerals have dried up. I am not angry at the lady. She did not know. But I am tired of explaining that this art has a price. My time, my mother's time, my grandmother's recipes for colour. It is not decorative. It is our history.

Installed the room last week. Three hundred and some kilos of scrap, two doors off a demolished laundry in Žižkov, a church pew I have had since 2011, and about forty meters of somebody's garden hose. It works. You walk in and the light does a thing I could not have drawn. Then the email. Title and artist statement by Friday, 600 words, in English and Czech. I have been making this work for thirty years and I still write the statement like a man filling out a customs form. Everything true about the piece is in the piece. What is left for the paper is a kind of apology for it. So I write "the work investigates the residue of collective memory" and I want to go lie down. Possibly I should just send them the inventory. Two doors, one pew, forty meters of hose, and a note saying come and stand in it. But there is a young curator there who is very sincere and I do not have the heart. Anyway. Coffee first, then the customs form.

Not going to pretend I have any idea what I'm doing on here. My daughter set this account up and I'm trying. But here's what actually worked for me this year. There's a stone yard about 40 minutes from the studio. Big operation, commercial stuff, countertops and monuments. They've got a pile out back of broken slabs, cutoffs, chunks with veins running the wrong way. Stuff they'd pay to haul off. I went in person three times over two months. Brought coffee once. Just asked if I could pick through it. They finally said fine, just sign the waiver. I've pulled maybe 800 pounds of good marble and granite out of there so far. Paid nothing. And the crazy part is, a local contractor saw me loading pieces into my truck one day and asked what I was doing. That turned into a commission. Then the yard guys tell their customers about me sometimes when someone wants something custom. Cost me about 12 bucks in gas and some patience. Way better return than the Instagram ads my daughter set up for me. Those got me nothing but spam accounts telling me my work is "mesmerizing." Anyway. If you work with physical materials, find the local supplier's scrap pile. Bring coffee. Ask nice. That's the whole strategy.

my mom keeps taking photos of my paintings to her church fundraiser and telling people they can "have one for a donation" and i found out because one of her friends texted me asking if i could do a custom piece for her grandkid's nursery for $40. FORTY. DOLLARS. for a custom watercolor portrait of a toddler. that's like a week of work and $60 in materials if i do it right. i love my mom so much but she has zero concept of what this costs and every time i try to explain she goes "oh honey, it's just for fun, it gets your name out there!" and honestly i think she genuinely believes exposure is a currency. which like. it isn't. i paid $400 for my last batch of paper alone. i told her today that if anyone asks at the bake sale she should tell them my prices start at $150 and she got all quiet and said "well that feels steep for people at church" and i almost lost it. i love her. she means so well. but i cannot keep getting "$40 for a portrait" texts from strangers who think i'm a hobbyist because my own mother is out here pricing me like a lemonade stand. how do you tell your mom she's undercutting your entire livelihood without making her cry. i am losing my mind.

commission story, and then im quietly retiring from commissions forever. client wanted a custom portrait. haggled me down from 200 to 80 "because it's just one person, not a full scene." fine. my fault for saying yes. then ghosted for two weeks. then came back asking for four rounds of revisions, including, and i quote, "can you make her look happier but also more mysterious." i have earned roughly eight pounds an hour to be told my work isnt mysterious enough. im done. originals only from here on

Still sitting in the corner of the shop. A five-foot chunk of Indiana limestone I took on six years ago. Customer wanted a figure, paid half up front, then disappeared. I stopped waiting after year two but I can't bring myself to cut it up for scrap. Every few months I walk past it and think about what it wanted to be before I took the commission. I knew better. You never take on work you don't believe in just because the money's good. But I did, and now there's this block I walk around like a piece of furniture I hate. Anyone else got a piece like that? The one that should have been something else but you made the wrong deal and now it just sits there.

She set the account up in March and then talked me into a price list. "People need to know what things cost before they ask." So there's a page now. Small maquette, £1,200. A one-metre limestone figure, £9,000. A welded piece depends on the steel. Three months. Two emails. Both from sculptors asking how I got the stone at that rate. The commissions that did come in this spring came the old way, from a man I did a fireplace surround for in 2011 who passed my number to his brother-in-law. No prices discussed until he stood in the yard and looked at the thing. I'm not saying the page is wrong. I'm saying I haven't figured out who it's for. Somebody with £9,000 to spend on a garden piece doesn't want to comparison-shop it like a fridge, and somebody without it isn't my customer anyway. If you sell work at this kind of money, what do you actually put on the site. Numbers, or just the work and a phone number.

Namaste to all. Myself Ramesh, Mithila painting from Madhubani, and I am fairly new to this online talking. My question is this. In my work there is the traditional thing. Fish, peacock, the wedding of Shiva and Parvati, kohbar for the marriage chamber. This is what my mother taught me and her mother before. Then there is the simpler work. Small fish, plain border, bright, easy to carry home, and this sells faster. So the galleries and the middlemen, they say to me, make more of the simple one, this is what the customer will buy. I have done it sometimes. Money is money and the house is running. But each time I feel some heaviness inside. So I want to ask the artists here, not the gallery people. Have you ever told a gallery no when they asked you to change your work for the market? What did you say, and did they drop you or not? And if you did change, was it worth it or you regret. One more small thing. I told one gallery in Delhi I will not remove the kohbar line from the border because that line is not decoration, it is for the marriage blessing. He laughed. I still did not remove it. That is my answer, kindly give yours.

Right, I'll go first because I'm still not over it. Years back I had a small gallery take a run of my linocuts, the hare ones, the big black one mid-leap. Grand, delighted with myself entirely. Then the woman rings me up a week before the show and asks, very gently, would I consider giving the hare "a bit more of a smile about him." Said he looked fierce. He's a hare. He's supposed to look like he's about to fight you. I said no, obviously, and she hung up fairly sharpish. Still sold three of them on the night so who's laughing. But it got me thinking about all the small asks people get handed. Not the big obvious ones like the 40% or the "would you mind paying to hang." The wee ones. The "could you make it a bit smaller," the "any chance of a brighter one, it's for a hallway," the "the customer wants it in blue." So what's the strangest thing a gallery has asked you to change? Not the worst, the oddest. The one where you stood there going, sorry, what now. Tell me yours. I want to feel less alone in this.

A client came to me two years ago wanting a welded steel gate for their property. Custom, so I quoted $4,500. I had done the material math, figured my hours at a rate I thought was fair. Then the design kept changing, which it always does. I added the scrollwork because they asked for it, went back and rebuilt the hinge mounts twice because the masonry turned out to be garbage. Six weeks door to door. When I actually added up the hours, including the redo, it came to about $11 an hour. I could make more welding pipe for a plumber. I don't know what the answer is. You raise the quote and clients balk, or you stay honest about hours and you're priced out. I just know I stopped quoting a flat number without writing down how long I genuinely expect it to take. That gate taught me the lesson, $11 at a time.

Back when I was still doing fabrication for other artists, I used to buy a lot of limestone from this old guy out in Indiana. Third generation quarry family. Tough customer. You showed up late, he'd make you wait. You talked too much, he'd just walk away mid-sentence. One day I'm complaining about a commission that fell through. Client loved the maquette, then ghosted. I'd put three weeks into it. He's loading stone onto my truck and he doesn't even look up. Says "Did you ask for money before you started?" No. Of course not. I was young and wanted the work. He says "Then you didn't have a client. You had a hope." That stuck with me. For years I operated like making the thing was the hard part and selling it would just happen if the work was good enough. That's not how it works. The stone dealer knew that. The gallerists I've dealt with know it too, they just don't say it out loud because the silence benefits them. I'm not saying be a salesman. I'm saying the transaction is part of the arrangement, not an afterthought. If you can't talk about money with someone before you make them anything, you don't have a deal yet.

she came to the market on Sunday, stood at my table for like 20 minutes holding this little wonky bowl with a face half sunk in the glaze, the one where the eye came out a bit crossed. I told her it was a failed one, I only brought it to fill the table. and she pulls out her purse and asks how much. I said no no it's for you, take it. she said no, I want to pay, you work. and I don't know, we went back and forth in front of everyone until she put 20 euros under the cloth and walked off like nothing happened. joder. I know it's a nice thing. it is. but it sat weird all night. my whole family still thinks this is a phase I'm doing before I get a real job, and she's the only one who never said that. so her paying me felt like, I don't know, like she wanted to be a customer instead of just my abuela who likes my things. or maybe she was saying she believes it's worth something. both? probably both. the 20 is still in my jacket pocket. I don't want to spend it and I don't want to give it back, that feels worse. so it's just sitting there.

My son was watching me work yesterday evening and he said, Papa, why the fish is having both eyes when we are seeing it from the side. He is 24, doing his engineering job in Patna, so he is asking in that way only. I told him that is how we have always done it. In our Mithila work the fish is shown with both eyes, the body full, no hiding. Same for the peacock, same for the faces in the kohbar. My mother did it this way, her mother also. The fish is not a photograph of a fish. It is fish-ness, you can say. He said fine, but then he said the customers are seeing it as mistake. I have been thinking on this since two days. It is true that sometimes people write to me asking whether the drawing is by hand or printed, because the lines are so neat. Nobody has yet written to say the eyes are wrong. But my son is not a fool about these things. There is a very old reason for the two eyes which my mother told me, related to the wedding chamber paintings, but I am not fully remembering it and I do not want to tell it half. Anyway I am not going to change the fish. But I am noticing that I cannot always explain why we do a thing, and that is sitting with me.

Listen, honey. Before any gallery ever looked at my quilts, a lady named Miss Odessa who ran a beauty shop over in Bessemer hung three of them on her wall, between the dryers and the window. Said her customers kept asking about them. That was my first show and I didn't even know to call it one. So I want to know. Where was your first yes? Not the fancy one. The first place that ever said yes to you. Somebody's salon, a church basement, a coffee shop, your cousin's restaurant, a dentist's waiting room, a funeral home like one of y'all said. Mine was a beauty shop with a bad ceiling fan. Tell me yours.

So this is a small embarrassing thing that happened last month and I want to know I'm not the only one. I dropped off two paintings at a coffee shop that has local art on the walls (that's my level of "gallery" so far, no shame). One sold. The owner then asked if I had more, "the bigger ones," because a customer wanted something similar. I stood there and completely blanked and said "I'll let you know" and then emailed her three days later with a number I basically made up on the spot. I still don't know if it was too high or too low. So my real question: when a gallery or shop or whoever asks you for a price on a piece you've already sold, do you give them the old number, the next number up, or do you just panic like me? I gave her $180 for a 16x20 and honestly I'm still deciding if that was smart or dumb. Tell me your number too. Curious if I'm wildly off.

Custom steel gate, welded and hung last month. Charged €1,600. Client's friend looks at the metal and says, "well the steel's only about €400 of that." Yeah. And the 60 hours of welding, fitting, and the trip back to fix a hinge I didn't get square the first time, that's the other €1,200. I don't know when people started thinking the price of a thing is the price of the stuff in it. Nobody says that about a mechanic's labor or a plumber's callout. But a gate, everyone's an expert on what steel costs at the yard. Used to charge €1,100 for the same gate and I'd eat the mistakes myself. The hinge redo alone was a day of my life. Nobody ever thanked me for the free day. Went up to €1,600 this year and I've been second-guessing it ever since. Then that comment came and I realized I'm still too cheap. The raw material being €400 is exactly the point. If I only charged for material I'd be a scrapyard.