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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 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.

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.

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.

I had a woman contact me last month about a commissioned still life. Small, maybe 40x50cm. We went back and forth on composition. She wanted a particular arrangement with her grandmother's blue vase and some dried flowers. I gave her a price, €1,200, which is already low for my work and I know it. She wrote back saying she'd found something "similar" on Etsy for eighty euros and could I match that. I told her I couldn't, and that she should buy the Etsy one. She seemed genuinely surprised. I think she expected me to negotiate, or to explain myself, justify my materials, my hours, my training. But I've done that dance before and it never ends well. You explain your process to someone who thinks paint comes out of a tube and onto the canvas in twenty minutes, and they still think you're ripping them off. So I just said no, politely, and wished her well. She came back three days later and agreed to the €1,200. I almost didn't take the commission. Part of me wishes I hadn't. But the work itself is interesting, the vase really is beautiful, and the dried flowers have this warm ocher colour I want to paint. So I said yes. I'll do the painting. But I'm still annoyed at myself for feeling like I have to be grateful that she "chose" me after pricing me against a mass-produced thing on the internet.

Years ago, before I had a real website or knew what I was doing with pricing, I ran a little workshop out of my studio. Just a few hours, materials included, you go home with a small piece. I charged €35 because I was scared to ask for more and it covered the tile and the wine. A tourist from Australia came, loved it, posted about it. Next thing I know it's on some blog. Fine. But then her friend emails me asking if I can do a private session for four people at the same price. I said yes because I'm an idiot who hadn't learned to say "that was a group rate." Now eight years later I sometimes still get people who found that old blog post and expect the €35 price. I've raised it to €65 and they look at me like I'm trying to sell them a car. I should have changed the name of the workshop or something. Instead I just have to be the bad guy every time someone shows up with a screenshot from 2016.

found this landscape at goodwill for $4. someone painted it carefully, every tree has individual leaves, the sky is blended smooth. i bought it because i wanted to collage over it, use the sky as a ground for something else. but now i can't bring myself to touch it. it's not good, technically, but you can feel the time in it. someone sat with this for hours. maybe it was a gift. maybe it hung in someone's kitchen for thirty years. i keep pulling it out of the stack and putting it back. i've had it for three months. i know the rational thing is to just work on something else. but this is the one i keep circling. anyone else get stuck on a piece of source material like it's a person you owe something to?

I spent three weeks untangling this wire. My hands were torn to shit. My studio looked like a murder scene made of rust. My son came over and asked if I'd finally lost it completely. Hung it yesterday. It's just wire. Nothing added. The thing holds the space like it was always waiting to get out of that coop. You don't get to choose what the good material is. You just have to be awake when it shows up. I was awake this time.

i realized today that my "studio organization system" is just. piles. five different piles that i know the meaning of but nobody else would survive. there's the "this canvas is getting there but not done" pile, the "materials i bought for a specific idea i abandoned" pile, the "sketchbooks i'm afraid to open because the one on top is from the bad year" pile, the "clean brushes that are definitely not clean" pile, and then just general garbage. it works until it doesn't. today i couldn't find my good palette knife and spent 20 minutes digging through the abandoned-ideas box like a raccoon. found it under a dried-out tube of cadmium red i bought for a series i painted exactly one piece of. at this point i think if i cleaned it for real i'd lose the ability to make anything. the entropy is part of the process. or that's what i tell myself lol

A friend from years back messaged me wanting a print for her new apartment. Small thing, maybe A4 size. I said €80 because that's what I used to charge for that size before I stopped selling through galleries. Felt fair between friends. Then I went to buy the paper. Hahnemühle Platinum Rag, because anything cheaper buckles in the saltwater bath and I've learned that lesson the hard way. €22 just for the sheet. The frame I found was simple pine, nothing fancy, €18. Then the glass. Then I had to redo the exposure twice because the light was wrong last week, that's three sheets of paper now, and the third one I messed up the rinse and it came out streaky. I don't know what I think the paper and chemicals and framing should cost. But €80 for a thing that took three afternoons to get right and eats materials the way it does... I think I'm scared to charge what it actually costs because the number sounds too big for something blue on paper. And that's a me problem, not a market problem.

Last year a museum in Germany asked me to do a talk and a small intervention in their permanent collection. Three days of work plus prep. They had a budget. I told them not to worry about it. I don't even have a good reason. I respected the institution. I liked the curator. I wanted to seem generous. So I just said don't worry about it and ate the time. My son found out and gave me this look. Not angry. Just disappointed in a way that was worse. He said you always tell me to value my work and then you do this. I sat with that for a while. I'm still sitting with it. The thing is I know exactly why I did it. There's a part of me that still thinks if I'm not being paid it means I'm doing it for the right reasons. Which is a stupid romantic holdover from the 80s when nobody had any money anyway. Now I have a studio to run and materials to buy and a grown son who watches me undermine myself. I charged them eventually. Six months later. Sent an invoice with a note saying I reconsidered. They paid it without a word. But I still feel the embarrassment of that first conversation. Not the embarrassment of asking for money. The embarrassment of being too afraid to ask for it.

so I found out yesterday that the supplier is stopping the batch of stoneware I've used for basically everything, the whole wonky vessel series, the little face jugs, all of it. I buy it in 20kg blocks and I've got maybe two left before it's gone forever. I know there's other clay. I know. But this one does exactly what I want, it holds marks, it doesn't slump when I push it too far, the glaze does this weird crawling thing on it that I've been chasing for months. Starting over with a new body feels like learning to write with the other hand. I emailed the supplier like a heartbroken ex begging them to tell me there's stock in a warehouse somewhere. No answer yet. I'm trying not to buy 200kg of it and hoard it in my tiny studio but honestly I might. anyone else had their favourite material just vanish? how long did it take you to find the next one?