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A welder I've worked with on and off for fifteen years came by the studio last week. Looked at a piece I finished in April, one I'm actually happy with, and said it could use another element up top. Just a little something to balance it. He meant well. He's a good welder. Here's the thing. He's never once asked me what made me stop there. Nobody does. They see a finished piece and their first thought is what to add to it. Nobody asks what made you decide it was done. That's the whole craft and it's invisible to almost everyone. I told him no. He looked at me like I was being difficult. Maybe I was. I'd rather be difficult than weld one more bracket on a thing that doesn't need it. Knowing when to stop is the only skill that matters and nobody teaches it and you can't charge for it.

My daughter set up this account for me last year. Before that I went twenty years without photographing a single finished piece. Client got what they paid for, that was the record. Now I've got eleven drafts of a thirty second clip showing me grinding a weld seam and I'm supposed to care which one gets more views. Here's the thing that gets me. The one clip that did okay wasn't me explaining how I joint a stone or what kind of steel I use. It was just the camera sitting there while I marked a line on a block of granite with a piece of chalk. No talking. Forty thousand views. Forty thousand people watched me draw a straight line. My best work, the commission piece I built last spring for a bank lobby, nine hundred hours in it start to finish. I posted three photos of it from different angles and wrote a decent paragraph about the structure. Twelve likes. I'm not bitter about the likes. I honestly don't know what I'm doing here and I don't pretend otherwise. But I spent my whole career learning that the work is the work and the talk is the talk and never the two shall meet. Now the talk is the whole game and the work is just the backdrop. My hands know how to do this. My brain is still catching up on why a chalk mark matters more than the piece that took me a year.

Someone on here mentioned process shots not moving the needle. Opposite for me. A couple weeks back I posted a rough shot of the workbench, half-carved piece still in the stone, dust everywhere, chisels out. Not staged. Just where I left it at the end of the day. That one brought more commission inquiries than any finished piece I've put up this year. Makes sense if I think about it. People don't buy a sculpture, they buy watching it get made. The finished thing is already decided. The messy middle leaves room for them to picture themselves in it. Funny part is I almost didn't post it. Looked like a mess to me. My daughter posted it for me while I was still grinding. She's the one who runs the account, I'm just the labor. Still feels backwards that the work no one was supposed to see does the best. But I'll take it over chasing trends.

Spent eleven days on a limestone torso, finishing it with a pneumatic chisel and then by hand with a riffler file. Took the shot outdoors, overcast, no flash. Posted it. First comment: what filter is that. I don't know what to do with that. The stone is Buff Indiana, that pale grey with the shells in it, and the overcast light is the whole reason it reads. There is no filter. There's a north-facing wall and a cloudy Tuesday. My daughter says I should put a caption explaining the process. I think if the photo doesn't do it, three sentences under it won't either. But I've been wrong about this before.

genuinely can't tell if this is growth or just sabotage with a nicer name. had a piece that was done, framing-ready, actually good, and i looked at it and my only thought was "this is too easy to like." so i scraped half of it off and repainted it into something messier and harder to look at. it's better now? maybe? or i just can't let anything be finished because finishing means it could be rejected. my therapist (i don't have one) would say this is a pattern. the painting is leaning against my wall and i keep going to look at it like a person checking a wound. anyway it's not done now, which is a problem i created on purpose. classic.

For years I posted only the prints that came out clean. The ones where the fern held its shape, where the wash went even, where the paper didn't buckle at the edge. Nice squares, no mess. Then in February I ruined a whole batch. Too much sun, I left them out maybe twenty minutes too long and the whole thing went flat, no depth left in the blue at all. I photographed the worst one anyway and put it up. Just the ruin. No caption saying look at my process, nothing like that. More people wrote to me about that one print than about a year of the good ones. One woman in Galway asked if she could buy it. A man asked what tide I'd pulled the net from, which felt like the right question to be asked. I think people are tired of being shown the result. They want to see the hand that is not sure. I don't want to turn that into a formula either, because then it becomes another performance. But it changed how I think about what is worth putting into the world. I have three ruined sheets on the studio wall now. I like them more than the ones that worked. Not sure yet if that is a good sign or just me getting older.

I dropped off a completed study at a framer yesterday. Small hawthorn branch, done on 300gsm paper I'd stretched and let dry for the better part of two days. Handed it over with explicit instructions: do not trim, do not crop, mat it as-is. Came back today and he'd taken the tiniest sliver off the bottom edge. A millimeter, maybe less. He was genuinely proud of it, said it "balanced the margins better." I stood there looking at the sheet. The signature. My signature was on that trimmed edge. He had cut through my name. Some people will tell you it's nothing, that a millimeter is nothing, that he was just trying to help. But I drew right up to that edge on purpose. The whole composition depended on that lower margin being what it was. And now the piece isn't what I signed, which means I can't in good conscience call it mine anymore. I took it home and I'll redo the whole study. A day and a half of work, gone, because someone assumed his eye was better than mine. I've learned to check every single thing I hand over to someone else. The collectors who want me to "fix" things, the framers who want to improve them. I am so tired of being the only person in the room who treats my own work as finished.

My daughter talked me into video. Said the process is the product. So I set the phone on a bucket and let it run while I welded a base for a piece going to a guy in Rotterdam. Forty seconds of sparks and grinding. Nine thousand views. Not one person asked about the work. Then last week I posted a still, bad light, the piece sitting on the shop floor with dust on it, and got three emails. One of them is now a real commission. I'm not saying video doesn't work. I'm saying I don't know what it works for. The people watching the sparks aren't buying anything, and the people buying aren't watching. Maybe I'm doing it wrong. I probably am. But I've been at this thirty years and I can tell when a room is looking at the work and when it's just looking at the noise.

I've been posting my work for maybe six years and the single most effective thing I ever did was a bad photo of my desk. Not the finished piece. The desk, with the torn bits laid out in a row, a scalpel, the mug with the dried ring on it. Grainy, taken at night, one lamp. That post is still the one people mention when they write to me. Meanwhile the careful flat-lay scans, the ones I spend an evening on, do almost nothing. I don't fully understand it. I think people buy the room and the hours, not the object. Or they want to believe someone is sitting there doing it slowly. Last week I posted a scan of a finished piece and got four likes, two from my sister. Posted the actual mess on the floor mid-piece an hour later and three people asked the price. Both pieces the same size, same price, 900 kr. I don't know what to do with this information. Making my work look worse on purpose feels wrong. But I've stopped reshooting things five times, and that already gives me back an evening a week.

had a portrait sitting on the wall for two weeks that I kept walking past and hating but telling myself it was done, good enough, whatever. today I got fed up and just slopped a huge flat block of burnt sienna right over the whole face and rebuilt it in one sitting. the first version was technically fine. correct even. and completely dead. the second one has this anger in it that the first didn't. it's making me rethink the whole "know when to stop" thing. maybe I don't stop soon enough. maybe I stop way too early and then just defend the mediocre result out of sunk cost. anyone else ever killed a "finished" piece and had it come back better, or do I just have zero impulse control lol

Finished a big charcoal piece tonight, two figures tangled up, and I stood there for like ten minutes just... oscillating. Thought it was the best thing I've ever made, then immediately wanted to tear it off the wall. Same painting. Nothing changed. Just my stupid brain flipping a coin. The scary part is I've learned to trust the hate more than the love. The love is my ego showing off. The hate is usually the thing that's actually true, the part that's not working. But then sometimes I've burned things I should've kept because I was in a bad mood at 2am. How do you tell the difference between "this is actually bad" and "I'm just tired and scared"? I genuinely don't know and I've been doing this for years. Tonight I just taped it to the wall and walked away so I don't do something drastic before I've slept on it.

Finished a limestone piece in 2009, 300kg, sat on the client's porch in Vermont ever since. Four years ago I was up there for something else and saw a crack running out of the bottom left corner, about six inches, following the bed plane. Nobody else noticed. I've thought about that crack maybe twice a month since. Here's the part that bothers me. I knew that stone had a seam there when I blocked it out. I could feel it under the chisel, that slight give. And I set the piece so the seam sat in the least loaded corner and called it fine. It was fine. It's still fine. That's the problem. Nothing teaches me anything. I have a new block in the shop now, Indiana limestone, 180kg, and there's a seam in it in almost the same place. I've been walking past it for three weeks. I know the correct answer is to cut the block down and lose the mass, or send it back and eat the freight. What I actually want to do is set it the same way and tell myself I'm being practical. I've done that before. So this is me saying out loud that I'm not going to do it. I'll report back when I've ruined a smaller piece instead.

Daughter talked me into posting the installs. So I post them. That part actually works, in a way I didn't expect. Two commissions this year came from a guy who found me through a photo of a finished piece in a courtyard in Vermont. What doesn't work is everything after the photo. I posted a shot of a limestone piece I finished in March, 400 pounds, four days of rigging to get it set. 1,100 views. Two comments. One was a bot selling something, the other was a guy telling me I should do reels. I did one reel. Thirty seconds of me chasing a chisel with a mallet. Took an hour to edit and I still don't know what a hook is. Nobody watched it. The commissions come from the phone calls, the guy who saw the piece in person and called me. That's still the whole business. The photos just remind people I'm alive. I don't think that's a problem with my account. I think it's the medium. A photograph of a sculpture tells you almost nothing. You can't walk around it, you can't see the scale, you can't feel the weight of the thing. What I'd want to post is the sound of the grinder or the way the light moves across a rough face at 4 in the afternoon, and I can't put that on a screen. So I keep posting the stills because the daughter asks me to, and because twice now it's paid for a truckload of stone. But I'm not going to pretend it's doing more than that.

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.

ok so for two months i've been fighting a 30x40 canvas. burnt orange ground, this big flat black shape that was supposed to sit like a shadow with weight. it just sat there like a dead sticker. repainted the black four times. my studio is basically a paint graveyard now, i have like six ruined rags that used to be promising. today i scraped the whole black back down to the raw ochre with a palette knife and just left it. and it works. the thing i was chasing for 8 weeks was the absence of the thing i kept adding. anyway i'm not gonna pretend this is a metaphor or whatever. i'm just glad it's off the easel. what's the longest you've fought a single piece before it gave up

I've had them sitting on the studio floor since I moved in here. Actually I had them five years before that, in a box, then on a shelf, then on the floor because putting them on a shelf felt like making a decision about them. The sole on the right one is split almost the whole way through. He wore them like that for two years, wouldn't replace them, kept saying he'd get to it. So the piece is mostly about that split. I stitched it. That's it, that's the whole thing, I stitched the sole back together with linen thread and mounted the pair on a panel with some of the paper from the box of his stuff I still can't get through. What got me is I kept trying to make it more than it was. For about a year I kept adding. Charcoal, wash, layering paper over the toes, I don't know what I thought I was doing. Somewhere around month eleven I scraped all of it off and just left the boots and the thread and the one sheet of paper behind them. It looks almost empty now. Empty enough that I wasn't sure it was a piece at all until I saw it from across the room this morning with the light coming in the wrong way. Anyway. It's done and it's hanging in the hallway because I don't have wall space and I didn't want to put it in the closet with the rest. Fourteen months. I'm not sure if that's slow or if that's just what this one cost.

Okay this is gross but it's my ritual and I need to know if anyone else does this. I have this one mason jar on my windowsill that I've been washing my brushes in for like three weeks and the water is basically a solid now. It's this beautiful murky gray-purple, every pigment I've touched in that whole time is in there. I keep telling myself I'll dump it when I finish this piece and then I finish the piece and I just... don't. It's like a little diary of the work. I know exactly which painting that green came from, which wash made that murky brown. There's a whole history in there. My partner keeps asking if I'm doing a science experiment. I'm not. I just can't dump it until it feels done. The day I finally rinse it out is the day I've moved on from whatever that stretch of work was. Maybe that's nonsense but it works lol. Also I'm pretty sure if I leave it another week something is going to start evolving in there and I'll have to deal with that. Tell me I'm not alone in the gross brush water hoarding.

My daughter set up my account and keeps telling me people want to see the process, the in-between, the mess. I get it, that's how it works now. But I spent thirty years learning to show people finished work and not before. A piece isn't a piece until it's out of the shop and on its feet. Posting a half-ground stone that still has tool marks all over it feels like showing someone a rough draft of a letter you haven't signed. She's got a point though. The numbers on the finished pieces are fine. The sketchbook photos do better. I don't like it but I'm not stupid. Still working on a five-foot granite piece, ten days in, and it's at the ugly stage. The one where you wonder why you started at all. That's the part she wants me to post. I keep telling her no one needs to see me sweat like that. Maybe she's right and the sweat is the part people actually connect with. I wasn't raised to show the sweat. You just did the work and let it stand.

My daughter set up my Instagram because she got tired of hearing me complain that nobody knew my work. That was two years ago. I have 4,000 followers now and I still don't fully get it. Here's what I've learned. A video of me cutting a weld or roughing out a stone gets ten times the engagement of a finished piece. Every time. The half-finished is interesting, the finished is just another picture. People don't want the result, they want to watch it happen. I used to fight it because it felt like giving away the process. Now I figure there's no real harm. Nobody is going to copy the work from a thirty second clip. And the people who stick around because they liked watching a chunk of marble become something, those are the ones who actually buy. Still feels like a dog doing tricks. But it works better than what I was doing, which was nothing.

Small thing that worked, and I feel a bit dumb about how long it took me. I paint at night, usually 9 to 11, and I'd been posting finished pieces on my page. Nice enough, a dozen or so likes, nothing moving. In March I started posting the mess instead. Palette with three days of dried paint on it. The jar of water that's basically mud. One photo of my 11 year old's spelling list sitting under the canvas because that's the only clean paper in the house. I don't know why that did it but it did. Two people messaged asking if I teach, which I do not, and a woman asked if she could buy the small barn piece before I'd even said anything about selling it. That's never happened to me off a finished photo. The annoying part is the finished photos still do nothing. I put the same barn piece up after, nicely lit, and it got nine likes and one comment from my aunt. I keep wondering if I've just trained people to want the mess and now I have to keep finding messes to photograph, which sounds like a second job. Also my table is genuinely gross and I'm not sure I want that to be my brand. Anyone else had something take off that you didn't mean to post?