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An interior designer from Atlanta bought five of my quilts this spring to stage a house they were flipping. Paid full price, no haggling, wired the money same day. Not one word about the piecing, the history, the work itself. Just wanted the colors to match a rug. And you know, at first it stung a little. Here I spent fifty years learning to make cloth talk and she wanted a throw pillow. But then I thought about it, because she asked me to cut them loose and let her hang them on a wall instead of a bed, that designer's clients are going to see my work and their grandmothers are going to ask who made it. That's the seed. Same with that gallery show I had in January. The lady who bought the biggest piece told me she'd never owned anything by a Black woman artist and honestly I didn't know whether to feel honored or put on a shelf. I told my granddaughter about it and she said "Mae, they're not buying the quilt, they're buying the wall." And maybe that's the truth of it. The work carries more than I get credit for while I'm standing there. All these years I'd get a little quiet when somebody talked about my quilts being "art" instead of what they are. But the money talks, honey, and the money walked right into my checking account. I guess what I'm saying is don't turn your nose up at the sale that feels a little off. That one may carry the next three.

Okay so I've been trying to figure out this whole "get your art in front of people who actually buy it" thing instead of just posting into the void and hoping. I kept reading that you're supposed to DM interior designers and stylists but nobody ever says what you're actually supposed to SAY to them?? Like "hi I'm an artist" feels so flat. So last week I just went for it. I picked 12 designers who post the kind of spaces I could actually see my work in, warm, natural light, not super minimal. And I literally just said something like "hey! I'm a watercolor painter and I've been obsessed with how you use color in [specific project they posted]. Just wanted to share a few pieces I think would sit nicely in that kind of space, no pressure at all but thought I'd throw it out there" and attached 3 photos. 3 replied. One asked to set up a call. One said "send me your portfolio" and then went quiet lol. One just said "beautiful work, I'll keep you in mind" which could mean nothing but also could mean something?? I don't know. The thing is I felt so awkward doing it. Like I'm bothering them. But also nobody saw me do it so who cares right. I'm gonna do another batch this week and actually follow up with the ones who went quiet because my friend who's a freelancer said that's the part everybody skips. Anyway just wondering if anyone else has tried this and whether it actually turned into sales or just polite replies that go nowhere. I'll report back if that call turns into anything 🙃

was just debugging a client's landing page and it's like... the ugliest thing i've ever seen. basic html, like, zero styling, just text and a button. and it's converting like crazy. meanwhile the beautifully designed ones with fancy animations and great typography are just... crickets. lol. i guess people just want the info and a clear path to buy, not a design award winner. took me years of design school and freelance hell to learn that lol.

ok so this is the thing that's been eating me all week and I need to say it somewhere. My cousin asked if I'd do a watercolor for her save-the-dates. Not a print, an ORIGINAL, one painting, and then she'd scan it and print however many she wanted. I said 40 dollars. Because she's family, because I panic-quote family, because I've been doing that since I was 19 and did my uncle's anniversary piece for a bottle of wine. It took me nine hours. TWO full evenings of layering washes so the olive branches didn't go muddy, plus the gouache accents on the lettering, plus two rounds of "can you make the green less green." Nine hours. Forty dollars. That's a bit under four and a half an hour, which, cool, great. And THEN. She posted it on facebook and told everyone her cousin does commissions "super cheap." And now my aunt is asking for one, and a friend of hers is asking for one, and I can feel the whole thing calcifying into my actual reputation. Like I've made myself into the discount. I set a number and now the number is me. The worst part is I can't even be mad at her, she was being sweet about it. I'm mad at myself. I have a real rate now, 38 an hour for commissions with a deposit up front, and I completely ignored it the second someone in my family asked. My partner says I need a flat number I say out loud instead of "oh whatever's fair" and I know they're right and I hate it. Anyway I'm painting the same window again this week because it doesn't ask me for a discount. Has anyone actually fixed this or do you just outlive it.

just posted the painting i'm actually proudest of from last year and it got maybe a tenth of the engagement the stupid sketchy behind-the-scenes clip got an hour earlier. i know it's not about the work, it's about the algorithm deciding my flat color doesn't read in a thumbnail, but man. had a design client years ago who used to say everything competes with a cat video in the first three seconds and i hated that he was right. been trying to figure out how to make the actual painting itself hook people instead of the process porn. cropping tighter helps. showing the corner before the whole thing helps. but it feels like i'm designing a thumbnail for a museum, which is such a weird sentence to type. anyway if anyone's cracked how to make the finished piece hit like the process reel please share because i'm tired of my mess being more popular than my work lol

Yesterday I was sitting in the shop of the paper supplier on Station Road, waiting for my order, and the young boy there, maybe nineteen years, was watching me sketch a peacock on the back of a bill. He asked, very innocently, why I do not just make one good design on computer and print many copies. Same time, same money, no strain on the eyes. I did not get angry. He is a boy, he has only seen printed things. But I sat there and I could not make him understand that the peacock I draw today is not the peacock I drew last Tuesday. My hand was not in the same mood. The line goes thin here, thick there, according to how the brush is feeling that morning. That is the whole thing. That is the only thing. Then I came home and thought, honestly, is he wrong? Because the cooperative gives me the same rate whether I take two days or six. My son says the buyers in Delhi cannot tell the difference on a phone screen anyway. So some days I also ask myself why I am doing this slowly, and I have no clean answer. I only know that when I copy my own design neatly, twice, I feel like a photocopy machine and I do not want to feel like that. Thirty eight years of this work and one boy in a paper shop has put the whole question in front of me in two minutes.

i don't have a routine, i have a superstition. i can't start painting until i've made the first mark with a color i don't care about on a surface nobody's going to see. usually it's the back of whatever panel is closest or a scrap of gessoed cardboard, just a dumb flat wash of raw umber or whatever's already mixed and dying on the palette. once that's down i can actually work. if i sit down intending to start on the real thing i'll stare at it for 40 minutes and then "organize" my brushes. i know how this sounds. it's basically a warm up lap. but i've been doing it for like two years now and i can't skip it, tried last week and ended up cleaning out my entire tab drawer instead of painting, so. the muscle has to move before the brain believes it. anyway the actual thing on my mind is that i'm three panels into a series where i'm deliberately ignoring the design part of my brain, and it's going terribly, and i keep thinking about how every single thing i make eventually becomes design. like i can't not compose. someone tell me you can unlearn that part or i'm gonna start believing the dropout thing was a mistake

so i did the thing everyone says to do. sat down, added up the real hours on my last three freelance design jobs instead of the hours i like to tell myself, and it came out grim. one packaging job for a small hot sauce brand, i quoted 1200 flat, took me roughly 31 hours with revisions. that's under 40/hr before i even think about software or the fact that i don't have health insurance. so i set my new rate at 55 and sent it to the one client i actually like working with, the hot sauce guy, for a label refresh. he went quiet for two days and then said it was more than his budget. which is fair. it's not a dig at him. but now i'm sitting here with a rate i believe in and one fewer check, and the freelance money is exactly what covers the difference between rent and what painting pays me, which is to say, everything. the annoying part is i know 55 is still low. i've seen designers with worse work than mine charging 90 and getting it. i just can't make my mouth say the number out loud yet. anyway the hot sauce label is up for grabs i guess. hmu if you know a brand.

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.

I took on a commission last year that I was genuinely unsure about. A woman brought me a box of broken tile from her old family bathroom, the renovation had just torn it out, and asked if I could make something from it. Not a mosaic of something, she said. Just... the tile itself, made into something that feels like it means something. I said yes because I liked her face and I needed the work. Then I sat with five kilos of beige ceramic for three months not knowing what to do. Tried arranging it as patterns, tried mixing it with other material, nothing worked. It just looked like broken bathroom tile. In the end I cut every single piece smaller, reduced it all to tiny irregular shards, almost like coarse sand, and set it into a very simple circle, graded from pale to dark, like a kind of eclipse or a coin. No image. Just the material, transformed by being reduced and rebuilt. Took weeks of just cutting and placing, cutting and placing. She picked it up yesterday and cried. Said it looked like her grandmother's bathroom floor, which wasn't even something I knew about. I don't know if I'll ever do that again, but I'm glad I did it once. Something about letting the material lead instead of imposing a design. Hard to describe. But it worked.

ok so this was not a design decision. my tabla de amasar, the board I've wedged on since the course, finally split down the middle last month. it was pine, my uncle made it, I'd oiled it maybe twice in three years like an idiot. so it's gone. and I have not replaced it. I've been sitting on the floor of the studio with the clay between my feet and honestly? better. I feel the whole piece through my legs now, I catch a wobble in the wall before it becomes a problem. my back hates me by hour three but the vessels are coming out straighter in the foot and weirder in the belly, which is exactly the trade I wanted. everyone who comes in tells me to go buy a new table. my madre has offered me money for one twice. I keep saying vale, vale. tell me I'm not the only one who's given up furniture for a reason this dumb.

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.

Sold a piece last month. 4 feet tall, welded steel plate, took me about 90 hours counting design and grinding and the finish. I charged $3,800. Buyer was happy. I should be happy. But I broke it down after. Material was $620 in steel and welding gas. Gallery takes 40%. So I cleared about $1,660 for those 90 hours. Thats $18.44 an hour before taxes. I know guys who frame houses for $35 an hour cash. My nephew does HVAC and clears six figures. I'm not saying I want to do HVAC. But I've been at this 30 years and I still cant figure out how to charge what the work is actually worth without pricing myself out of the market. The gallery tells me $3,800 is already pushing it for a sculptor nobody's heard of outside the region. I look at that hourly rate and it feels like I'm working backwards.

My granddaughter sent me a link this morning to a little design blog that ran a picture of my Red Hollow quilt. Now I don't mind a picture being taken, that's fine, but whoever wrote it said the color arrangement was "unexpected and deliberately off-balance, a bold subversion of traditional form." Honey. I was working around a hole. That's the whole story. The blue corduroy came out of my uncle's work shirt and there wasn't enough of it, so the strip runs wide on one end and narrow on the other. Nothing bold about it. I needed to cover a gap and I did. Spent about an hour this morning wanting to be mad, then went out back and looked at the quilt through the window where it's hanging on the line, and I couldn't even stay mad, because it does look good. It always did. Just not for the reason they said. I do wonder how many of the old quilts in those books got wrote up by somebody who never once sat at a frame with a woman who was just trying to make her cloth stretch.

got the same email everyone gets. gallery "adores" the piece, three sentences of lovely, then: would I consider a version that fits a smaller wall. so you mean a different piece. you mean the one you like but cheaper. the thing is 19 by 24 and half of it is a torn photograph of my grandfather's shed that I only have one copy of. I can't scale that. it's not a design I can resize, it's a specific piece of paper with a specific stain on it. anyway I was mid-glue when it came in so now the bottom right corner has a wrinkle in it that I'll either fix or decide is "intentional" by tomorrow morning. and I know the correct answer is to just say no and move on. I know that. I'll probably say yes and hate myself for two weeks, which is a thing I'm aware of and do anyway.

went out to a mall that's been half empty since 2009. security guy found me crouched in the food court taking close-ups of the carpet. he wanted to know if i was with the demolition crew. i wasn't. i just wanted the carpet. 1970s orange and brown, that pattern that pretends to be geometric but is really just chaos with a ruler. it's worn down to nothing along the path people walked to the old Sears. you can literally read the foot traffic from 40 years ago in it. nobody designed that. it just happened. he let me stay. sat on a bench and watched me for a while and then said his wife used to work at the Orange Julius there. i got maybe 30 usable frames. most of it's garbage, the light was flat and the place smells like wet carpet and nothing. but two of them are the actual thing. the good stuff is almost never in the interesting place. it's in the hallway you walk past.

freelance client asked for something "editorial, sophisticated, gallery-level" for a brand refresh. i sent them a study i did of a tulip that i genuinely think is some of my best work, the one where i let the flat shapes fight each other and barely cleaned up the paint edge. they said it was perfect. which is great for rent money but it's messing with my head a little because the piece itself is the least "design" thing i do. no grids, no thinking about hierarchy, just me and the color. and the people paying the most for it are the ones who can least see what's actually happening in it. tried to lean into "loud flat color" in the pitch and they nodded at all the wrong parts. whatever, invoice got paid in full today and that's the real editorial. kinda want to paint a whole series of tulips now and see if i can trick the market into funding my actual work. feels gross. probably gonna do it.

People keep asking me how I sell paintings, and they seem disappointed when I tell them it's not the social accounts. I run a modest Instagram for the studio, maybe 4,000 followers, and it's pleasant enough. But the collectors who have actually commissioned work from me over the past few years nearly all came from my newsletter. The plain text one. No templates, no design, just a note every month or two about what's on the easel and which pieces are about to be released. I started it back in 2016 out of frustration, because I was tired of watching a carefully composed post disappear into the feed after an hour. Today it has 700 subscribers. Last year three commissions and two gallery introductions came directly from those emails. That's a better conversion rate than every platform I'm on combined, by a wide margin. The social accounts are fine for visibility and for students finding my classes. But if you want someone to spend real money, you want their inbox, not their feed. The feed is a hallway. The inbox is a sitting room. I'd rather sit with seven hundred people than wave at four thousand.

Had a gallery talk me into a pretty big commission a few years back. Sign nothing, deposits are the insurance. Then they started asking to push the timeline up, wanted progress photos every week, then they wanted to "review" the design as we went. That's not a commission, that's a job. I walked. What's the red flag that made you pull out of a gallery before it cost you?

Sold a large piece last month, 140cm square, oil and cold wax, three weeks of solid days in the studio. €1,400. I did the math after because I couldn't not. Between the good linen, the cold wax, the pigment, the turpentine, and what I'd have paid anyone doing the carpentry on the stretcher frame, materials alone ran close to €380. That's before a single hour of my time. Stack the hours on top and I'm somewhere around €7 an hour for the year of this trade I've been inside since 1992. Then yesterday a woman from the opening asks, very bright, what I'd charge for one of my "quicker, smaller ones." As if the speed is the variable. As if the three weeks is where the cost went. I said the same price per square metre and she laughed like I'd made a joke. She hadn't understood it was the price. I don't know if I'm undercharging or the whole enterprise is just bad math by design. Probably both. I've been afraid to raise prices for four years because the gallery says the market here is what it is, and the market is what it is partly because we all keep saying that to each other.