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For eleven years I charged 3,200 euros for a portrait, half-length, one figure, hands extra if they wanted hands. Eleven years, same number. It stopped being a price and became a fact of nature, like the weather in Lyon in February. Last autumn I did the calculation properly for the first time. Drying time with a slow-drying medium, the sittings, three of which the client cancels, the photographs, the drawings on paper before a brush touches the panel, the palette, the varnish, the six weeks of thinking about it while doing something else. At 3,200 I was making less per hour than the man who repairs my frames, and he does not have to be charming for two hours at a time. So I quoted 4,000 to a woman in Villeurbanne. Good project, an interior with her mother's armchair in it that I actually wanted to paint. She wrote back that it was above what she had in mind and thanked me politely. I felt sick for two days. Then I felt fine, and then better than fine. Because I realised the old number was not a price, it was a fear with a number attached to it, and I had been paying that fear in hours of my life. The next one, a man in the sixth arrondissement, did not blink at 4,000. I spent the extra 800 on a better panel and a lot of cadmium I did not strictly need. I am not telling anyone to double their prices. I am telling you that the number you are scared to say out loud is probably the correct one and the fear is just the fear.

Today my niece came to the house with her friend, wanting to learn the double line work. She is sixteen, quite shy. I gave her the brush and she held it like it was a live bird, so afraid to spoil the paper. I remember that fear. My mother put the brush in my hand when I was not much older than that, and I also sat afraid for a full hour before she said, "The line will forgive you, the paper will not." She meant, do not be so tight, the hand must be loose. But I think about that sentence even now, forty years later. The line will forgive you. Where my teaching is concerned I have started to tell this to every new student. They all look at me like I am speaking in riddles. But they loosen their hands. Mithila painting is a patient art. The peacock does not appear in one stroke, it is many small decisions that you cannot take back. Yet somehow the mistakes also become part of the story. I am still learning this. Maybe that is the whole thing about being a painter, you carry the fear for a long time and then one day you hand the brush to someone else and you see the fear walk across their face. And you pray they loosen their hand sooner than you did. 🙏

A student of mine, she's got real talent, was fighting a portrait this morning. Every fifteen minutes she wanted to scrape it down and start over. I made her sit with it. The ugly stage is where half the painting actually gets decided, and people my age forget we all had to be dragged through it once. It's the same panic every time. You block in something honest and it looks crude, so you think you've failed. But crude is not failure, it's just early. The painting that looks decent at every step is usually the boring one. I told her: if it's ugly because it's wrong, fix it. If it's ugly because it's not finished, shut up and keep going. She kept going. By the end the likeness was there and she looked almost annoyed that it worked. That annoyed look is the best sign I get all week.

Sold a 16x20 charcoal portrait this week for $180 and I finally did the math I've been avoiding for years. 22 hours on it. That's $8.18 an hour and I'm honestly embarrassed I typed that out. The worst part is I knew better. She was my aunt's friend so I did the "family discount" thing before she even asked. Aunt's friend, not even family. I gave away money nobody asked me to give away. I keep doing this. I price from fear. Fear that if I say $400 she'll say no and I'll have wasted the charcoal. But I already spent the hours. The hours are spent either way. I'm not mad at her. I'm mad that I can't seem to stop being the one who underprices myself before anyone else gets the chance to do it. Every single time. Like I'm pre-emptively apologizing for being worth something. Gonna sit with $8.18 for a while and try to actually feel it instead of just doing the math again next time and doing the same thing.

The deadline was Friday at noon and I sent the digital submission at 11:40, which for me is reckless. Twelve weeks on a single flowering branch of Magnolia grandiflora, the undersides of the leaves in that rusty felted brown that no one believes until they turn a leaf over. I repainted the terminal bud four times because the light on it was doing something I couldn't get honest, and on the fourth attempt I left one edge slightly unresolved, which I would not have allowed myself five years ago. The strange part is that the fear now isn't the painting. It's the verdict. My old supervisor used to say a paper only exists once it's been read by someone hostile, and I have carried that into this medium without meaning to. So this is the win, such as it is: the work left the studio, and I did not go back in and fiddle with the bud at the last minute. I also didn't send the usual apologetic covering note. Results in three weeks. The paper is Fabriano Artistico, hot pressed, and it took the glazes beautifully, which is its own quiet satisfaction and has nothing to do with the judges.

The piece was 30x40, acrylic wash and torn paper over a photo of somebody's grandmother's kitchen. Client found me through a friend of a friend. 900 felt generous when I said it out loud. Then I actually sat down with the receipts. Panel 62. Mediums, call it 140 because I wasted a whole tube of a grey I ended up hating. The photograph was a scan and a print, 34. Frame, because it needed one and I didn't trust them to pick it, 210. Shipping 55. That's 501 gone before I touched it. What was left was 399 and maybe 60 hours. I don't work fast. I re-tore the same paper corner four times. So roughly 6 an hour, and that's before the gallery takes a cut if it ever shows. The part that actually bothers me isn't the number. It's that I knew it was low when I said it. I said 900 because I could hear myself about to say 1400 and it scared me. Fear has a price and mine is 500. Quoting a new one next week. Same size, same materials. I'm going to say the higher number and just sit there.

I took the "oil on linen, 30x40" caption out of my posts for a month. Not the hashtags, not the process videos, just that little line at the end. I've always put it there out of habit, like a signature. Collectors want to know what they're buying, I told myself. The change was not dramatic but it was real. People started commenting about the light in the room, the mood of the thing, what the woman in the painting was thinking. Before it was mostly "beautiful work" and other painters asking about my medium. I think the technical note was giving people permission to look at it like a spec sheet instead of letting them just feel it. Once the frame of reference was gone they had to meet the painting on its own terms. I put the information back when the piece sells, obviously. But the post itself, the first encounter, I leave it bare now. The gallery can do the talking about dimensions and materials. My job on social media is to make someone stop scrolling because something in the image got under their skin, and I was undercutting that with my own footnotes. Maybe that's just me. Or maybe we all over-explain ourselves online because we're afraid of being misunderstood, and the fear itself is what keeps people at arm's length.

I finally priced a new commission the honest way, hour by hour, and it came out to €9.80 an hour before materials. I'm 44, I've been doing this for almost twenty years, and I'm still making less than the person who serves me coffee. That number sat there on the page and I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. The problem is I price the whole piece, not my time. A seated figure, half-length, oil on linen, maybe 55x46. I know exactly what it takes because I've done it a hundred times. But when I think what the client will reasonably pay for that size, my brain gives me a figure and then I divide by the weeks and suddenly I'm ashamed of myself. I raised it anyway, this time. Charged what the work actually costs. The client paused on the phone, that long silence that means I finally said a number too high, and I almost folded on the spot. Then she said fine, let's go. So now I'm terrified I've priced myself out of the next three, and quietly furious that I ever treated that fear as reasonable.

Years ago when I came back to painting after my fallow stretch, I was desperate for income. A local gallery let me run a figure painting workshop out of their back room and I priced it at 45 euros a session because I was terrified nobody would come. They filled up. Fine. But that number got stuck to me like a burr. Every student since tells the next one what I charge, and whenever I've tried to bump it to something that reflects what I actually do, I meet resistance. 45 became my identity. Last month I finally did the honest math for a 6-week course, six students. Materials with good pigment, the room rental, my prep time sketching demos, the corrections between sessions. I took home under 9 euros an hour. That's less than the woman who cleans my studio building. I know the fix. I raise it, I let the ones who complain leave, I stop pricing from fear. But there's a specific ugliness when the low price is the thing that made you feel wanted back when you felt worthless. Hard to put down. Anyone else have a number that got emotionally welded to them?

okay this is something i think about a lot because i genuinely don't know what the "right" way is. my first show happened because i was at a group open call thing and one of the gallery owners came up to me after and said she liked my piece and asked if i had more. so basically zero effort on my part, she found me. and honestly it gave me this weird imposter feeling like i hadn't EARNED it because i didn't go out and hustle for it. which is so dumb when i say it out loud but i wonder if anyone else has that? like you get a win handed to you and you feel like you cheated somehow? so what was yours, did you walk in somewhere with a portfolio (i could never, the fear), did you email someone, or did they come to you? and did the way it happened make it feel more or less real?

After a decade of charging what I thought was reasonable, 800€ for a 40x50cm oil, I finally did what my husband's been telling me to do for years and raised them to 1,100€ for the same format. Same canvas, same hours, same me. Just finally stopped apologising for what I ask. I lost one client. A woman who'd bought three paintings from me over the years, always asked for a small discount, always got one. She sent a polite email saying she couldn't justify the increase. I wrote back, equally polite, that I understood completely. And honestly? The relief of not painting for someone who sees your work as something to bargain over is worth the lost sale. The other clients didn't blink. One said she'd been waiting for me to raise them. That stung more than the loss, in a good way. I know the numbers are different for everyone, different city, different medium, different audience. But I wish someone had told me ten years ago that the fear of losing clients is usually worse than the reality. The ones who value what you do will stay. The ones who don't were already costing you more than they paid.

Small one. I've been rinsing the cyanotypes in tap water for two years, out of habit and a bit of fear, and this week I finally just carried a tray down to the rocks at Foz and let the Atlantic finish them. I expected to lose the lot. Instead the blues came out softer, with a grain in the paper I've been trying to fake with brushes. One of them, a photogram of a piece of net I picked up in Matosinhos, has a shadow in the corner from where a wave came over the tray edge. I would have thrown that away before. My father would have laughed at me standing in the water with paper. Not unkindly. Anyway, I'm not going back to tap water for the final wash.

Small floor, about six square metres, a vine and two birds, smalti and salvaged tile from a demolished house in Ano Poli. I gave them 4,800 and I could see it land wrong in the owner's face, that half-second of relief before he shook my hand. He would have paid 7. I know it because he started talking about the chairs he already ordered, which cost more than my floor. I did the whole job. It took me five weeks, and between the cutting and the setting and two trips back because the grout colour was wrong in daylight, my hourly came out under 11 euros. Less than I paid the boy who carried the sand up. Here is the part people don't want to say out loud. It was not his fault. He said yes to the number I said. The number was mine. I priced the fear of hearing no, not the work. Since then I write the number, then I sit with it one full day. If nobody has fainted, I raise it. Next floor is 8,000 and I already feel sick about saying it. I will say it anyway.

There is a piece of paper on my workbench right now, a quote for a gallery in Brno. Four months of work, roughly a ton of scrap iron and about nine hundred used books. My hand wrote 22,000 euros. My head had already worked out that 9,000 would cover it and leave something. I sent the 22. Not out of bravery. I sat with the email open maybe forty minutes. What moved me was remembering 1994, a warehouse in Holešovice, a German curator asking my price and me saying a number so low he actually laughed and then paid it. I ate lentils for a month and told everyone it was fine. It was not fine. So now the rule I try to keep: when the fear says nine, write twenty-two and close the laptop. It is not math, it is a kind of discipline. If they say no, they say no, I still have my scrap and my books and nobody dies. The part I do not know yet is what happens in my stomach if they say yes. What number do you write second, after the honest one scares you?

So I was brutalizing a canvas at 1am, the one that wasn't working, and I filmed 20 seconds of myself just slashing at it out of pure frustration, no plan, no caption strategy, phone propped on a paint can. Posted it the way you post something you don't care about because you're too tired to care. 106k views. My best planned post this month did 800. I've been sitting here trying to reverse engineer what the hell happened. Was it the rawness? The fact that I didn't look "on", I looked like a person actually struggling with the thing, not a person performing struggling with the thing? The lighting was garbage. I had no ring light. I genuinely look like a raccoon in it. It's making me question every polished thing I've put out. Like do people smell the production the way dogs smell fear. The comment section was full of people just... being honest about their own blocked creative work. Nobody even asked about the painting. It wasn't about the art. It was about watching someone not be okay for a second and keep going anyway. Anyway now everything I post feels fake in comparison and I hate that. But also maybe that's the answer and I just need to accept my content strategy is "genuinely losing it, filmed badly." 😭

Finished a portrait last week, charcoal on paper, roughly 40 hours across two weeks because I kept hating it and redoing the eyes. Charged €500. After paper, charcoal, fixative, the framing, and the courier there was about €270 left. That's €6.70 an hour. A barista makes more than that here and they don't go to bed smelling like fixative. And here's the thing that's really chewing on me. The woman who commissioned it loved it. Cried when she saw it, said it was the first thing that ever actually captured her mother. She would've paid double. I know she would've because when I was scared to say a number I lowballed out of pure nerves and she didn't even blink. I keep telling myself I'm still building my name and the exposure counts. But €6.70 an hour for work that genuinely wrecked me to make isn't building anything except resentment. I need to charge what it actually costs me to live and breathe into a piece or I'm going to burn out before anyone's ever heard of me. How do you get over the fear of naming a number out loud and just letting it hang there while they decide if you're worth it? Because I physically feel sick every single time.

I quoted a collector €480 for a 60x80 interior. Sold it, framed it, delivered it. Then I kept notes like I used to and counted: 30 hours from drawing to the last glaze. Sixteen euros an hour, and that's before the pigments and the linen and the four months it sat drying in my studio. The part that sits badly is that nobody forced me. The client never balked, never haggled. I set the number, and I set it too low, and I knew it while I was writing the invoice. There's a fear in the hand that writes a price, a little flinch you can feel. It gets better with practice but it never fully leaves. What helps me when it's my own fault: I price exhibitions with a conversation first, not a number out of the air. "What's the wall, what's the size, what's it worth to you." Sometimes people name a figure higher than I would have dared. That's information. You just have to sit there and not correct them.

Okay so I finally wrote down the actual hours on a piece for the first time. Big mistake. Huge. This vase, the one I posted last week, the green one with the little face peeking through the glaze. Sold it at the market for €80, felt like a win. Real figure, fine, whatever. Then I counted. Seven days on and off because the clay kept slumping when I built it too tall, two failed attempts in the kiln, the glaze crawled on the first fire and I had to sand the whole thing down and redo it. Like 55+ hours all in. €80 for 55 hours. That's about €1.40 an hour. A kid with a lemonade stand earns more than that. I don't get how other makers survive on this. Either they're way faster than me, or they're not counting either, or they've got a partner with a real salary. My grandma keeps asking why I don't just charge more and honestly? Fear. I'm scared that if I put €180 on it nobody buys it and I've made a thing that just sits in the studio taking up shelf space. But at €1.40 an hour I could flip burgers and have more money and more free time. I want to know what the actual number is that makes it worth it. Not the dream number. The one where I don't feel like a clown doing this.

I finally raised my rate after almost a year of being stuck. I paint pet portraits in watercolor (I know, I know, but people really love their dogs) and I was charging €90 for an 8x10. Did the math on one and it was about 14 euros an hour after materials and the days I spent redoing the eyes. Embarrassing. So I went up to €125 and I was SICK about it for a week. Convinced nobody would book. The first person to take me up on it was a repeat client, the one who commissions a portrait every time her dog does something cute, the person I was literally scared to lose. She didn't even blink. Just sent a reference photo. And now I'm annoyed at myself for how long I sat at a number I secretly knew was too low. Fear of pricing yourself out is so loud and the actual evidence was right there the whole time. Anyone else got one of those "I waited way too long to raise it" moments?

Okay so I've been trying to figure out why I'm exhausted at the end of the day but somehow only have like one small painting to show for it. So I started actually timing myself. Set a little timer on my phone every time I sat down, every time I walked away. The result is honestly embarrassing. Over a four hour stretch today I painted for maybe 90 minutes. The rest was: staring at the reference photo, rearranging my brushes, looking at the same wash dry, texting my mom twice, going to get water and then just standing in the kitchen for a while. The actual sitting and committing part is way shorter than I thought it was. The weird thing is the paint time is so much better quality. When I actually clock in, I make decisions so much faster. But the gap between "okay I'm starting" and actually putting paint down is where all the energy goes. My new thing this week is a 25 minute timer, no phone in the room, and I don't get up until it dings. Even if I just sit there. Tried it today and got a whole sketch done in the first two rounds. Anyone else have no idea how much of their studio time is actually fear management? Because I think I'm maybe 40% painter and 60% pacing around thinking about painting.