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Small experiment I ran over the last two months. On the website I had put "prices on request" for the commissioned location sketches. Then in April I just wrote the number down: ₹4,500 for a full day out, roughly six hours, one finished A3 watercolour and ink, plus a couple of pencil studies I throw in anyway. Enquiries halved. Straight away, within a fortnight. But the ones that came through were completely different people. Earlier I'd get eight messages asking for a "quick sketch" of a wedding venue or a house before demolition, and half of them would vanish the moment I mentioned any money at all. Now it's fewer people, and they turn up knowing what it costs, and we spend the conversation on the actual thing. Which lane the morning light comes in from, whether they want the whole elevation or just the gate and the old neem tree. Real conversation. So the number went down and the work went up in quality. I'm still not sure if halving my enquiries is a win, and I keep second-guessing whether ₹4,500 is too low for a full day plus travel across the city. Anyone else here put a real number up instead of "DM for pricing"? Did it scare off the right people or just everyone?

For twenty years my portfolio was a PDF. Sixty pages, properly photographed, the works shot in good light, the lot. I sent it to maybe four hundred people over the years. Response rate near zero, and I never thought to ask why. Earlier this autumn a curator in Brno asked to see my work and I was tired, so I sent a link to one page. Three photos taken on my phone in the storage hall, bad light, one of them has my boot in the frame. Four lines of text. Where the work has been, what it is made of, what I need to build the next one. Two serious enquiries that week. One is now a real commission for next year. I think the sixty-page PDF was doing the opposite of what I wanted. It was proving I was serious. It was not showing anyone a door. A curator has eleven minutes and forty other artists. A perfect portfolio says: this person is finished, this person is a known quantity, go and look at the checklist. A bad photo of a real room says: there is something here that is not in a database yet. I am not saying make ugly documentation. I am saying I had confused thoroughness with invitation. Thoroughness is for your own archive. Nobody walks into your archive. Now the part I am less sure about. I have no idea whether this works because the page is honest, or because it looks like I am not trying, which in this world reads as expensive. Possibly both. I have been doing this too long to believe I have found the formula, but the old one was definitely dead and I had been sending it out for years without noticing. Still keeping the PDF. For grants. Grants love a PDF.

I used to reply to enquiries the minute they arrived, phone in the hand, paint drying on the brush. Somewhere I had absorbed the idea that a slow reply loses the client. Maybe that is true if you sell printed mugs. It is not true for a painting. Two weeks ago I was mid-glaze on a figure, the light on the shoulder was finally doing what I wanted, and the phone buzzed. I let it buzz. Answered the next morning, calm, with a proper answer about the piece and the price. She bought. Same thing happened again on Thursday, and again it did not cost me anything. I am not saying be slow to be mysterious, that is a marketing trick and it stinks. I am saying the speed I was performing was costing me something and buying me nothing. What people actually want is a reply that sounds like a person who was busy making the thing. Bof. Maybe I am wrong and I only notice the ones who stayed.

For years my replies to enquiries were a paragraph about materials and then a number. Maybe one in six ever wrote back. Three months ago I changed one thing. Instead of the price I say: I'm setting glass until the 14th, then I'm free, do you want to come and see it on the floor before it's grouted. Nothing else. Twelve enquiries since. Nine of them got in the car. Seven commissions out of that. Same work, same prices, same photos on the page. I think people don't actually want a mosaic. They want to know what they're getting before they hand over 3,000 euros to a stranger with a hammer. A number in a message doesn't answer that. Standing over it in bad light in my workshop does. Two of them signed before they'd seen the whole thing, just the corner where the smalti catches. What annoys me is how obvious it is and how long it took me. I was treating a message like a quote, when it's really the first five minutes of a long job. It has made my week lumpier though. I'm a person again on Thursdays instead of a form. Some days I'd rather just cut stone and be nobody.

I spent a full afternoon last month staging a still life, fighting with the light until it did what I wanted, photographed it six ways, wrote a caption I actually labored over. It did fine. Fine. Meanwhile the post that got me two commissions and a workshop enquiry was a photo of my palette at the end of the day, all the dirty mixes half-scraped off, with a caption like "today was a long one." No thought in it. I almost didn't post it at all. There's a lesson in there somewhere about people wanting the evidence of the work rather than the work itself, and I keep circling it. The polished thing reads as finished, and a finished thing doesn't invite anyone in. The mess does. Everyone can see themselves in a dirty palette. I still can't quite bring myself to lean into that deliberately. It feels like a trick the moment it's calculated. So I just post the leftovers now and let the careful posts be the rare ones. It's the reverse of every piece of marketing advice I've ever read, and it keeps working anyway. Bof.

so this is small but it nags at me. for two years my instagram bio listed the materials. acrylic washes, charcoal, torn paper, found photographs. it read like a recipe. people scrolled past it. fine. last month a small space in the city put me in a group show, the kind where the wall label gets more attention than the work. the curator asked me to send the "proper" line, the one that goes on the checklist. so i copied it into the bio. the full formal thing, medium and dimensions and the year. two days later a follower was gone. no comment, no DM, just gone. probably the "torn paper" phrasing being replaced by something with a semicolon in it. the strange part is the enquiries actually went up. three of them. all the same flavor, asking if the piece was for sale and where. so the dry formal line is doing the work the soft bio refused to do. i keep thinking i traded a description for a job listing and i don't know if that's a loss. the label says what it is. it doesn't say what it is. and the person who left never bought anything anyway. still. i miss the old line a little.

For years I shot everything the same way: tripod, two softboxes, neutral grey, fill in every corner so nothing was lost in shadow. Correct, and completely dead. Then in November I delivered a small interior to a client in Villeurbanne and she had already hung it before I got my coat off. Afternoon light coming sideways across the room, one half of the canvas frankly too dark to read. She was delighted. That is what the painting does in a real room, and I had spent a decade photographing it as if it were a passport photo. So now I photograph the new work where it lives. Same corner of my studio, north window, no lights, one shot at three in the afternoon when the light rakes across and the impasto shows, and I let the darks go dark. Enquiries went from almost nothing to about one a week, and the people who write are the ones who noticed the light, which tells me they will notice it on their wall too. The obvious objection: a client cannot judge the whole canvas. True. I send the full flat documentation to anyone who asks, privately, and nobody has ever been unhappy to receive it. The public image is not the record. It is the invitation. Bof, and the flat grey shots are still on my site, in the archive, where they belong.

A question I keep turning over, because I have done both and come to a firm conclusion. Early on I did the walk-in. A small gallery in a town I was passing through, a folder of mounted sheets, and the owner was perfectly kind and entirely uninterested. Nothing came of it, and I spent the rest of the afternoon annoyed at myself rather than at him. Since then I have sent a short, careful email with three images and a link, and let the work wait. Two of my three representation enquiries that went anywhere began that way. I also keep the folder ready on the off chance. That is not the same as marching in with it. The reason I ask is that there is a certain kind of advice floating about that insists on the personal touch, that the walk-in shows initiative, and I have never once seen it work in the way people claim. I would happily be told I am wrong. Perhaps it depends on the sort of gallery. So: which one do you do, and what did it actually get you? I am more interested in the failures than the successes, if I am honest.

So I've been trying to film my sketching, because everyone says video is the thing now. Spent most of a Sunday on one: tripod, phone clamped to the easel, painted a house on 8th Cross while the light was going, then cut it into a 40-second reel with the brush sounds and all. Took me close to three hours start to finish. It got 900 views and zero enquiries. I was ready to give up on the whole format. Then last Thursday I was out at Malleswaram, half-finished sketch of an old tiled roof, and I filmed maybe 20 seconds by accident, phone just propped on my chai glass. No edit. You can hear a scooter and someone's pressure cooker going off. Posted it without thinking. Two commissions off that one, one from a woman in Jayanagar who said the noise was the reason she stopped scrolling. I don't know what to do with this information honestly. I can't fake the messy ones on purpose, that's the entire problem. And I'm not going back to three-hour edits. Also my hands look old in close-up and I've made peace with that.

A college friend asked me to paint her parents' house in Malleswaram before they sell it. Old tile roof, that green gate, the whole thing. I said four thousand. In my head I was being generous because we go back eighteen years and she's been kind to me. It took me four sittings on location plus two days finishing at home. Paper, the travel, the auto fares, and I redid the roof twice because the light changed and I got stubborn about it. Last week I was at a group show and a painter I know, roughly my level, nothing fancy, was quoting eighteen thousand for the same size house portrait. Same paper. Same city. Same kind of work. I'm not angry at her. I'm angry that I did the sum in my head as "what would she be comfortable paying" and not "what is this worth." Thirty-odd hours of my life went into that painting and I priced it like a favour, which it wasn't, because a favour is something you give free. The thing is I have three more enquiries waiting and I don't know if I can say twelve thousand out loud without my voice doing something strange. That number feels made up. It isn't, obviously. It's just that I've been undercharging for so long that the correct price sounds like a lie.

For years I priced by the hour and then shaved a bit off because I felt bad. A 40x40 of the old harbour wall, three weeks of cutting, and I'd quote something like 600 euro and hear myself apologise while saying it. Then a conservator I trained under years ago told me, flat out, that my prices were insulting to the material. Not to me. To the smalti. That stuck. In January I went up 40% on everything. Same photos, same page, no announcement. I expected the inbox to go quiet. It didn't. One person asked if I could do a smaller size, which is fair, and we did. Same number of enquiries as the autumn before. The people who bought were exactly the people who bought before. I think what actually happened is I stopped flinching when I said the number, and that came through in the message. Before, I'd write three lines explaining why it cost what it cost, like a defence. Now it's one line, the size, the material, the price. Nobody has ever replied asking me to justify the smalti. The uncomfortable part: I could have done this two years ago and the rent would have been easier. I was the only one who thought the work was cheap.

A woman asked me about a commissioned portrait, a half figure, pastel on grey toned paper, maybe 30x40cm. I spent two days with the pricing. Not the drawing, the pricing. I looked at what other pastel artists in Poland charge, then at what people abroad charge, then back again, and I landed on 400 zł because I was afraid that anything more would make her disappear. She didn't reply for a week. I checked my phone at night like a teenager. When she finally wrote back she said it was more than she expected and asked if I could do "just the face" for 200. I said yes. And here is the thing I am still turning over. She wasn't rude. She was honest. I gave her a number that sounded like an apology, so she treated it like one. My friend who does ceramics told me she never negotiates, ever, not by one złoty, and she sells out her kiln twice a year. I don't know if I believe it works or if she just has a face that says no. So I am doing the small one now and of course it will take me just as long, because that is how pastel is, you cannot rush the layers and the fixative needs the day to dry anyway. I am not sure if I am annoyed at her or at myself. Mostly myself, honestly. I wrote 750 on the next enquiry and I have not sent it yet. It is sitting in drafts since Tuesday.

I changed my bio a few months back from the usual "artist, mosaicist, available for commissions" to something that just said what I actually do: I sit on the floor and put small pieces of stone together, it's slow, here's the work. That's it. No hype, no "transforming spaces through ancient craft", no keywords. And I started getting messages that were different. Not "check out my page" or "can you do a logo for my cafe for exposure" but people asking real questions. Where do you source smalti. Do you cut your own. Can I come watch you work sometime. I think there's a whole strip of people who are tired of the polished performance and just want to know what's really happening. Nobody needs another artist who sounds like a copywriter. I'd rather lose the ones who want shiny than lose the few who actually care. The irony is my follower count dropped a bit and my enquiries went up. Make of that what you will. 🙂

My first proper gallery came about through the horticultural society I'd been exhibiting with for years. Their annual show had a small sales room attached, and one of the volunteers there happened to be married to the man who ran the gallery. He came to look at the wall, asked who did the Trillium study, and that was that. No portfolio, no enquiry email. Just a plant show and a lucky marriage. It has since occurred to me that not one of my gallery relationships began in the conventional way, and I suspect the same is true for most people here. So I'd like to know: how did your first one actually happen? Not the advice version, the true version. Was it a friend of a friend, a stranger at a fair, a shop that sold your work quietly for a year first? I'll admit I'm partly asking to settle something. I've been telling my students for years that the cold approach rarely works and that you should be visible in the world that interests you instead. I'd be delighted to be told I'm wrong.

Had a commission enquiry this morning that I'm still turning over in my head. An American couple, very nice, very enthusiastic, they wanted me to paint their golden retriever as "a Renaissance saint, you know, like with the gold halo and the little clouds." They'd already picked the frame from a catalogue. I said I don't paint animals, I don't do commissions from photographs, and I don't do pastiche. Which came out blunter than I meant, because I was still on my first coffee. But also, what do you even say to that? They want a decorative object, not a painting. The dog is lovely I'm sure. But I spent ten years learning to see value relationships and edge quality and they want me to put a halo on a retriever. I felt bad after. Not guilty, just tired. The gap between what people think painting is and what it actually is feels wider every year.