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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.

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

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.

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.

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.

My brother's girlfriend works at a small museum in Verona, the kind with a decent contemporary collection and a shop that tries. She asked if I'd do an edition of risograph prints for them, small run, 50 copies. I said yes because family, because I liked the museum, because I told myself it was exposure with a little money attached. I charged €80 per print. My cost per print was about €4 in materials, so I felt fine about it. Generous even. I signed and numbered them, packed them myself, paid for shipping. She sent me a photo yesterday. They're on the shelf at €180. With a little acrylic display stand I didn't know about. And I sat with it. I get it, the museum has overhead, the shop has margins, the frame around the print is worth something. But I did the math on my time and it came out to something like €12 an hour including the design work. The museum is making a 125% markup on my labor and I'm the one who did everything but put it on the shelf. I don't know what the right number would have been. €120? €150? I'm scared to ask for that because I'm not a name yet and I keep thinking, what if they just say no and I lose the connection? But also, what's the connection worth if it's structured like this?

I had a piece in a group show maybe five, six years ago. Collector came around, liked it, asked the gallery for my contact. Wanted it for his private collection, he said. But the price, could I do better if we went direct, no gallery cut? I was between shows, rent was due, so I said yes like an idiot. Knocked off almost forty percent. He paid in two installments, took his time on the second one. Six months later I see the same piece at a design auction in London. Estimate was three times what he paid me. Sold for above estimate. I should be angry but mostly I respect the play. Guy saw me coming from across the room. I was the one who said yes.

A gallery reached out last year about a piece I had in a group show. Wanted to know my price for a commission in that range. I said $400. They said great, we'll list it at $1800. That's when it hit me. I wasn't pricing my work, I was pricing my materials and time like I was still doing fabrication for other people. I'd welded it myself, designed it, sandblasted it, patinated it, figured out the base so it wouldn't tip in wind. Three weeks start to finish. $400. I told my daughter about it and she just stared at me. She said dad you're not a contractor. She was right. I raised my studio rate after that but I still catch myself lowballing. There's a voice in my head that says who's going to pay that for something you made. Thirty years in and it's still there.

Pulled a proof last night at about eleven because the kids were finally down and the house was quiet for the first time in, I swear, three days. Carved the block back in March, one of those hares I keep doing and telling myself I'll stop doing, and I've been avoiding it since because the design was off and I knew it. So I sat there with the light on over the sink, rolled the ink, and pulled it. And you know what, it was grand. Not perfect. The ear's still bothering me. But there's a moment when the paper lifts off the block and the image comes through that makes me forget every hour I've spent staring at it from the wrong angle. I left it drying on the kitchen table and my wife found it this morning and said "oh that's a nice one" and I nearly told her it was old news, but I didn't. I just said thanks and made the tea. Still think the ear is wrong though. Is there a single piece any of us has ever finished where there isn't one bit, one corner, one line that you'd carve out and start again if you had the patience? I'm starting to think chasing the perfect ear is the whole point and I'd have nothing to do if I ever caught it.

Reading the thread about galleries that love your work and sell nothing and I have to ask. What did you do when you realised the gallery believed in you but nobody was buying? I had one like that. Lovely woman, genuinely understood the paintings, showed them properly. Eight months of encouragement and not one red dot. I finally took the paintings back and hung them in the salon of an interior designer friend. Sold three within a month. But I still wonder if I left too soon. Maybe galleries are slow by nature and I was impatient. What's your version? Did you stay and wait it out, or pull the work and try something else?

I've got this one block of a hare I first cut maybe six years back. Must have printed it fifty, sixty times. Different papers, different inks, couple times I've gone back and recarved bits that were wearing down. It's not even my best design, honestly. But there's something about the way the years settle into a block, the little cracks, the soft spots where the lino's starting to go, the way it catches ink different than it did fresh. I can tell you which edition was the summer my daughter was born, which one was the year I was in a bad way and every print came out muddied because I wasn't paying attention to pressure. I know lino's cheap enough, I could cut a fresh one any time. But I don't want to. That block's got my life in it now. The dog's chewed one corner, there's a coffee ring on the back, the registration marks are all scratched up from me rushing. It's like an old pair of boots. You don't replace them, you just keep wearing them till they fall apart. Anyone else holding onto a tool or a block way past its prime for no good reason?

was set up at the little sunday market in russafa, selling some of my smaller pieces, little jugs, a couple of those face vessels i've been working on, some bowls with this turquoise glaze i finally got right after like six fails. and this guy walks up, picks up one of the face vessels, turns it over in his hands for a while. and he goes "so, this is 3D printed, right? the texture's very uniform." joder. i wanted to hand him a ball of clay and say "here, try making a face with your bare hands, see if it comes out uniform." but i just laughed and said no, it's hand-built, you can see the fingerprints if you look. and he goes "oh, so you designed the file and printed it and then painted it?" i told him the only file involved is the one i'm gonna use to file down my patience after this conversation. he did not buy anything.

Okay so I've been telling myself for months that I'd approach some local shops about carrying my prints and cards, just small ones, the cute plant shop on my corner, a bookstore I love. And I kept chickening out because sending a cold email with prices feels so much scarier than just posting on Instagram where people come to you. But last week I finally just walked into the bookstore with a little portfolio and asked if they had five minutes. The owner was so nice she almost made me cry?? She said yes on the spot, picked four designs, and I spent the weekend hyperventilating over formatting a proper invoice. Sent it this morning. Then my partner found me on the kitchen floor and I had to explain that no I wasn't sad, this is just what success feels like apparently. Anyway if anyone else has done the wholesale thing for the first time, how long until you stop feeling like you're going to get caught doing something you're not supposed to?? Asking for a friend who is me.