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opened the group show last week, this older guy walks up to my torn paper piece, studies it for a good while, then turns to me and says, "so what do you actually do yourself?" like it's a trick question. i said I tear the paper, he said no, I mean the assembly. I said I assemble it. he nodded and walked off. I still don't know what he thought I was outsourcing. the tearing? the thinking? it's been sitting in me all week. there's this thing where people look at collage or anything with found material and decide the materials do the work. as if the found photos are just doing their own thing and I'm standing there collecting a cheque. nobody says that to someone who paints a landscape. they don't ask which bits the brush did. I know I shouldn't let one guy get under my skin but I keep hearing it. maybe because it's the same question underneath all of them, the one about whether this even counts. tired of defending it to strangers who've already decided.

A small gallery I've been talking to finally offered me a solo show for next spring. I was buzzing about it for like a day. Then they said the budget for materials is $200. I don't think they're trying to screw me. They're tiny. But $200 barely covers the paper and panel for one large piece, let alone the paint, the medium, the charcoal, the adhesive, the found materials I buy from estate sales. I'd be eating the rest myself and I already have a day job I hate. I said yes because the opportunity is real and I've been wanting this. But I'm already doing the math in my head and it's not great. I have about 8 months. I'm trying to figure out if I can pull this off without it costing me more than whatever I might sell. Anyone else done a show where the "support" was basically symbolic? How did you handle the gap without looking ungrateful?

I've started judging found material by smell before I even look at it. Wood that's been in a damp cellar for twenty years has a particular must that nothing cleans off and nothing fakes. When I walk into a demolition site and catch that, I know the rest of the haul is worth my afternoon. Today a guy in Žižkov called me about an old workshop being torn out. Rotten oak workbench, some lathe parts, a drawer full of bent screwdrivers. I went because the stairwell smelled like my grandfather's garage. Brought home more than I can fit in the studio. The screwdrivers I'll use for years, the bench becomes part of the next room. People think I'm picky about aesthetics. No. I'm picky about history that you can breathe in. You can't fake that with new material, no matter how you treat the surface. The grime has to have earned itself.

My old drill died last week. Twenty years of screwing together salvaged frames, brackets, whatever held a room up. I bought the same model, same brand, but it has a different sound. Higher pitch. The old one grumbled, this one whines. And I realized the sound was in my head too. Every time I drilled that old one I knew exactly where the resistance was, when to ease off, how it felt before wood split. The new one tells me nothing. I'm working blind on something I've done a thousand times. It's not about the drill. It's that the small tools become part of you and you don't notice until one dies. The same thing happens with materials. A room of found objects I've built five times, then suddenly the objects are different, the grammar is gone, and I'm a beginner again. Middle age is just losing your tools one at a time and pretending it doesn't matter. Anyway. The hinge post in here reminded me. We blame the hinge, but it was never the hinge.

A friend from art school asked me to make a small piece for her mother's 70th. Something with botanical prints, her mother loves old herbals. I said yes because we used to share a studio and I wanted to do something nice. I didn't think about the hours. I just thought about the materials, which were almost nothing, found 19th century seed catalog pages I already had, some museum board. So 500 SEK felt fair for a friend, maybe even generous. Then I actually tracked the time. Tearing and arranging is slow. Letting things sit and come back to them. I ended up at about 14 hours from start to finish. That's roughly 35 SEK an hour. About 3 euros. Less than a coffee in this city. I'm not angry about it. She's a friend and I'm glad I made it. But I realised I have absolutely no instinct for what my time is worth. I undershoot every time. I think because the materials are cheap I assume the whole thing should be cheap. But the materials are cheap because I spent years learning where to find them and how to use them. That's not nothing.

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.

I've been selling my small collages for 2,500 SEK (about €220) for three years now. They're maybe 20x30cm, framed, took me a week of looking and arranging to finish one I don't want to scrap. I know that's low. I know my materials cost is basically nothing, old book pages, found envelopes, but the time and the looking isn't nothing. And I know people buy them, so clearly the price isn't the problem. But I sit down to change it to 3,200 and I just... don't. I tell myself the market here is small. I tell myself paper work isn't taken as seriously. I tell myself I'm not established enough. All of which might be true but also none of it is the real reason, which is that I don't want to have to explain why I'm suddenly more expensive. I think I'm afraid of the conversation more than the number. Like someone will write and say "why is it more now" and I'll have to justify my own time out loud.

Back in 2009 I had a show in a small gallery in Brno that no longer exists. The gallery put up a basic website with installation shots. When the gallery closed, the domain died but the PDF of that exhibition somehow stayed live on some forgotten server subfolder. Last year a curator from Oslo emailed me. Said she found that PDF through a deep Google search while researching a specific material I used. She'd been looking for anyone working with industrial felt and rusted steel in that particular way. The PDF was the only document online that showed it. She booked a studio visit. I got two museum shows out of it. Norway, of all places. Meanwhile I'd been stressing about Instagram, trying to shoot better video, wondering if the algorithm hated me. And the thing that worked was a dead link from 15 years ago that I didn't even know existed. I don't know what the lesson is. Leave things online and don't delete them, I suppose. The internet forgets slower than we think. Or maybe it's that the useful person is always looking in the wrong place and you can't predict where they'll dig.

Sold a 16×20 mixed media piece this week for $220. Took me about 11 hours all in. So that's $20/hr before materials, which is par for the course I guess. But here's the part that actually stings: $84 of it went to materials. Not the fancy stuff either. A tube of good titanium white is $18 now. A roll of decent paper. Found photo from a flea market. So I cleared maybe $130 and the buyer will hang it above their couch and someday their grandkid will donate it to a thrift store. And I'll still do it again next week because this is the only thing that doesn't feel like dying by inches. I keep telling myself the math gets better once the work gets known. But I've been telling myself that for four years.

Commissioned portrait of a woman's mother, from an old photo. Two weekends of fighting with it, the hair nearly ended me, redid the left eye three times. I came out to about 16 hours and I charged 400 zł. That's roughly 25 zł an hour, which is about what a teenager makes stacking shelves, and I did it sitting on my kitchen floor with pastel dust in my coffee. The worst part isn't even the money. It's that I priced it by what I thought my work was "worth" as an unknown, self-taught nobody, and the woman cried when she saw it, said it looked just like her. So now I'm happy and embarrassed at the same time, which is a weird way to feel about your own labor. I keep going back and forth on what a fair price would even be. My materials cost more than I think people realize, good pastels aren't cheap and a sheet of good toned paper is not nothing. And time is time, nobody gets it back. But then I think, who's going to pay a proper rate to someone who's still not sure she's good? That's the trap. I walk into it every time. Has anyone here found a way to price from your own side instead of from what you're afraid people will think of you? Because I clearly can't do it on my own.<｜end▁of▁thinking｜> <｜｜DSML｜｜tool_calls> <｜｜DSML｜｜invoke name="emit_structured_response"> <｜｜DSML｜｜parameter name="body" string="true">Commissioned portrait of a woman's mother, copied from an old photo. Two weekends of fighting with it, the hair nearly ended me, redid the left eye three times. 16 hours in total and I charged 400 zł. That's about 25 zł an hour, less than a teenager makes stacking shelves, and I did it sitting on my kitchen floor with pastel dust in my coffee. The worst part isn't even the money. It's that I priced it at what I thought my work was worth as a self-taught unknown, and the woman cried when she saw it, said it looked just like her mother. So now I'm happy and uncomfortable at the same time, which is a strange way to feel about your own labor. I keep going back and forth on what a fair price would even be. Good pastels aren't cheap and a single sheet of good toned paper is not nothing, most people have no idea what the materials cost. And the time doesn't come back. But then I think, who's going to pay a proper rate to someone who's still not sure she's any good? That's the trap and I walk into it every single time. Has anyone actually found a way to price from your own side instead of from what you're scared people will think of you? Because I clearly can't do it alone.

A woman from Melbourne found me last month because of a blog post I wrote seven years ago, when I was still teaching and barely painting. It was about why I mix my own colours instead of using tube paints straight, I was annoyed about something, I don't even remember what, and I just wrote it out in fifteen minutes on a Wednesday evening. No photos, no SEO, just a rant about the texture of paint straight from the tube being dead on the canvas. She said she'd read it in 2018, forgot about it, found it again this year while looking for something else entirely. She bought two paintings sight-unseen because she said she could tell I actually cared about the material. And I have spent the last three years posting reels, showing my process, trying to be "engaging" on Instagram, that stuff gets likes from other artists, maybe a commission every few months. This one old piece of writing, sitting there untouched, did more than all of it. I don't know what the lesson is exactly. Keep the old things alive, maybe. Don't throw away the unfashionable parts of how you work just because the algorithm doesn't reward them. Or maybe it's that a real opinion outlasts a good strategy every time.

A friend from art school, someone whose work I genuinely like, sold a paper piece at a fair in Stockholm for 12,000 SEK. Same size as what I do, similar material, similar time investment. I charge 3,500 for mine. We're at the same stage, we came out of the same program. I know I'm not being ripped off, I set my prices, nobody forced me. But the gap is hard to sit with. Makes me wonder if I'm undervaluing the work or if they're just better at selling. Probably both. I raised my small pieces by 500 SEK this month and it felt like a test I was going to fail.

Cleaning out a drawer and found a sketchbook from 2019, before the divorce. Flipped through it and there was a note in my own handwriting for a piece I'd sold: "$400, 22 hours, materials ~$60." Worked out to about $15/hour and I just sat there with it for a minute. The worst part isn't the number. It's that I remember being proud of that price at the time. Like I'd finally made it because someone paid me three figures instead of bartering. I charge triple that now and still flinch every time I say it out loud. But I'd rather flinch than go back to being that proud of $15 an hour.

did a studio cull because i couldn't close a drawer, and found three tubes of cadmium red that had gone solid. like rock solid. squeezed one and it just... cracked. cadmium is like 30 bucks a tube now. i remember paying 12. so i stood there doing math on the paint i've let die in a drawer over the years and had to sit down. the actual reason though is that somewhere in the back of my brain i filed those tubes under "for something important" and never used them. kept reaching for the cheap stuff for studies, saving the good red. saving it for what. i've been doing this for a decade and i still catch myself hoarding materials like i'm not gonna be allowed to buy more. anyway bought new ones the same day. used a fat blob of it on a 4ft canvas the second i got home. felt like throwing away money and also like the correct thing. probably both.

A small collage went to a collector in Utrecht last month. He found me through a paper conservation forum where I'd posted about repairing a 1920s ledger, not through any of the platforms I actually put effort into. He said he liked that I talked about the material as something that had a life before me. I've had an Instagram account for six years. It has brought me one sale that I know of. The forum post took twenty minutes and cost nothing. I'm not going to delete anything. But I've started to notice that the places where I'm genuinely useful to people are the places where I'm not trying to sell anything, and those are the places that sell things. Which is annoying because you can't really manufacture that on purpose. I spent two hours last week trimming a batch of edges for a show in Malmö. That part doesn't go anywhere. It just is the work.

I have a shelf that was supposed to hold reference books. It now holds about forty tubes of watercolour, arranged by colour family, most of them nearly full because I keep reaching for the same eight or ten. I told myself each new one was for a specific specimen, and it was true at the time, but there were so many specimens. I sorted them properly last week and found three tubes of alizarin crimson, two of them from different decades. That gave me pause. The hoarding of materials is its own quiet compulsion, separate from the painting itself. I think we all know this. I am not quite ready to call it a problem. But I moved a single tube of sap green to the windowsill as a test, to see if I would use it more, and it has been there untouched for six days now.

Been posting the installations for two years now with the location, the materials, the whole little essay in the caption. Museum tags, artist tags, the works. Everything by the book. Last month I put up a photo of one room with nothing but the date. No title, no name, no hashtags except the gallery's because they insisted. I forgot to finish the caption, honestly, phone rang. That single photo brought more DMs than the last ten proper posts combined. People asking where it was, what it was made of, if they could come see it. Questions I would have answered in the caption nobody read. Not a lesson. Probably just the algorithm being tired of my voice too. But I'm half tempted to post the next one as just a wall and let people invent the meaning. That's what I do with found objects anyway. Let them find it.

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 had a commission finally paid off this week. Deposit months ago, then silence, then the rest landed in my account at 11pm on a Tuesday like it was nothing. No note, no explanation for the delay. Just the number. And here's the thing. I already spent the deposit months ago. So the second half just sat there and I keep looking at it and I hate that it feels like found money instead of money I earned. That's not how it's supposed to feel. I priced it at $850. Three months of on-and-off work, some of it redone because they changed the brief halfway. If I actually clocked the hours it would be like $9 an hour, not counting the materials or the drive to deliver it. I know I'm supposed to feel grateful. I'm not grateful. I'm just tired and a little bit annoyed that this is the thing I have to do to keep making the things I actually care about. Anyway. Anyone else been paid for something and spent the whole time doing the hourly math and wished they hadn't?

found a box of my parents' old divorce papers in my storage unit last weekend. thirty years of legal filings, bank statements from accounts that don't exist anymore, letters between lawyers. almost threw it out. instead i spent three days tearing it up and collaging it onto a panel with charcoal over the top. felt gross at first, like i was violating something. then i realized those papers were already dead. the marriage was dead, the money long gone. i'm just making something honest out of the paperwork of it all. nobody's seen it yet. not sure i want anyone to, actually. but it's the most alive i've felt in the studio in months. there's something about using the actual artifacts instead of just alluding to them. does anyone else keep the raw material of their own mess and turn it into work? or is that just me being morbid