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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.

I sold a piece last year through a gallery in Berlin. Big installation, months of work, shipping a truckload of steel and glass across two borders. The collector paid 18,000 euros. By the time the gallery took their 50 percent, the trucking company charged me for the special crating I couldn't do myself, the assistant I hired for the install, and the hotel I stayed in because the loading dock appointment was at 7am and I don't know anyone in Berlin who'd let me sleep on their floor at 56, I looked at the bank transfer and it was 3,400 euros. The framer who built the crate made more than I did. I know because I asked him what he charged. He told me. Nice guy. He earned it. I'm not telling this as a sob story. I agreed to the terms. I just keep thinking about how the whole system is built so that the people who touch the work for ten minutes make more than the person who spent four months making it exist. And we all nod and say that's how it works. But it's funny, no. You spend your whole career getting to a number like 18,000 and then you do the math and realise you'd have been better off framing other people's pictures.

Started pulling the boxes down in March. Four of them, mostly paper: a pay stub from 2009, a parking ticket, a birthday card I wrote him in shitty handwriting, two photos of a kitchen nobody lives in anymore. They've been in my studio since he died, moving from shelf to shelf every time I needed the space. Today I drove them to a framer. Just for one piece, not the whole archive. A photograph with a water stain spreading up the left side. I asked him to float it, no mat, so the stain and the torn corner sit there in the open. He said most people want that cropped out. I said that's the part I want. On the drive home I had the radio off and I felt something I did not expect. Not the sad thing. Relief. Like I'd finally let one small object out of my custody. I don't know yet if that's a win or if it's me giving something away that I'll want back later.

Took a piece in to get framed this week. Older guy, been doing it forty years, probably knows his stuff. He looks at the work for a long minute and goes "this is interesting, but why not just commit to canvas? you'd probably sell more." And I stood there going... what does that even mean. Commit. Like torn paper and acrylic washes and a few layers of charcoal is me chickening out. Like there's a correct material and everything else is me being indecisive. Didn't say much. Paid for the frame. It's a nice frame, he did good work. But I've been chewing on it for three days. There's this whole school of thought that if a thing isn't easily categorizable it's not finished. That mixed media is a phase before you find your real medium. Nobody says that to someone who only paints. They say "strong palette" or whatever. But the minute you're not pure, you're just... hedging. Ma'am I'm 45. I'm not hedging. I've been at this long enough to know exactly what I'm doing and it is not a compromise.

So I'm after getting the quote back from the framer for a batch of six, and it's 160 a frame. The print inside it is 145. I priced that print maybe four years ago and never touched it since, because the ones who buy it buy it at the market and they know the price, and changing it felt like a whole thing I didn't want to have. Meanwhile the lino went up, the paper went up, the ink went up, and the glass of a Saturday morning when I'm standing in the rain in Salthill went up too if you want to count that, and I do, because a wet market day is four hours of my life. The mad part is the framer is dead right to charge it. He's got the same problem as me only he's after solving it. I'm not raising it to 200, that's a jump too far and I'd lose the regulars. I'm thinking 175 in the new year and just eating the flak for a month or two. My wife says I should have done it two years ago. She's not wrong but she says that about most things. Anyone else sitting on a price they set back when diesel was cheaper and the head was lighter and just never getting round to it?

Sold a 140x140 oil and cold wax piece to a regular collector for €1,100. Then I saw the invoice from the framer. He'd paid €400 for the frame, plus delivery, plus the wall hanging rig. I did the math on my end afterwards: between the stretcher, the oil, the cold wax, the months of drying time sitting in my studio, and the actual painting hours, my rate came out at around €14 an hour. The frame he chose costs more per square meter than my painting does. I'm not saying the price was wrong. He's passed on two smaller pieces since, he's serious, and €1,100 for a painting that size from a mid-career artist in this country is roughly where the market sits. But there's something slightly absurd about a piece that took me a year of thinking and painting being worth less than the aluminium profile holding it up. The real problem is I'm the one who has to be the one saying the number. The framer never flinches. I do, every time. I keep asking myself what the actual number should be, and the honest answer is I don't want to find out by losing the collectors who made this a living in the first place. That's the trap, and I know it's the trap, and I'm still sitting in it.

I have spent two years being told I need to show the process. Reels of the underpainting, close-ups of the brush loading, all of it. It does bring people. My last three sales came from a woman who works at a picture framer in Annecy, a gallery in Villeurbanne, and someone who sat next to me at a dinner and asked what I do. Not one from the internet. The reels do bring something, to be fair. The last one I posted, a small study of my daughter's hand under the lamp, got maybe nine thousand views. Two emails about it. Neither asking to buy anything. One wanted to know which brand of brushes, one wanted to know if I could teach a workshop in Dubai. So voilà, the reach is real. It just has nothing to do with the painting leaving the studio. What actually works for me is unglamorous: the framer, the gallery, and the people I already know. That is the whole strategy. It feels like a strategy from another century and I suspect it is one. I keep the account going anyway. I am not sure why. Maybe because it is the one place I can show a canvas without somebody standing next to it saying something. But I have stopped pretending it is a business tool. It is a window. Windows are not doors.

I'm curious how a first gallery connection really happens for people. Mine was almost embarrassingly unglamorous. After years of sending polite portfolios into what felt like a void, a small botanical gallery took me on because I'd delivered a commissioned piece to a neighbouring framer and the owner happened to see me carrying it through the door. She asked to look, and that was that. All the careful mailing, and it was a coincidence on a Tuesday afternoon. Was anyone's first gallery a deliberate strategy, or did most of you stumble into it the way I did? I teach a class on this and I'd rather tell students the truth about how it actually works than the tidy version.

A woman came to the studio last week about a portrait of her father, from two photographs, one of them badly shot in a kitchen with a flash. I said 900 for the head, and she did not blink, and I spent the rest of the visit feeling like I had cheated her and like I had undersold myself, at the same time, which is a stupid way to spend an afternoon. The sitting itself is three hours. The rest is not. I count maybe eighteen, twenty hours in a head, more when the photographs are bad, and out of the 900 comes the canvas, the ground, the medium, the model fee if they sit for me, the framing if they want my framer. It comes out near 30 euros an hour on a good one. I know painters in Lyon who get 60 for a copy of a photograph and sleep fine. So it is not the number that troubles me. It is that I cannot say it without a small apology in the voice. I hear it. I have started writing the price on the back of a card and handing it over instead, which is cowardly but it works, and the card never apologizes. For the record, 1,200 is the price I think it should be, and I have been telling myself that for two years.

Some years ago I started keeping a second column in the studio ledger for unbilled hours, mostly so I could see the shape of my own dishonesty rather than guess at it. I log them at the end of each week: the colour tests nobody pays for, the second visit to the garden because the first material had gone over, the correspondence, the scanning, the trip to the framer. This year it stands at 61 hours. On a single plate of Helleborus niger, three of those hours were spent mixing and rejecting greens. Three hours on leaves that never went near the board. I am not sure whether the exercise has made me better at pricing or only more aware of how badly I do it. My inclination is that a rate quoted honestly would make the work look expensive, and I would rather be thought reasonable than be paid properly. That is not a flattering thing to write down. But it is the most useful number in the book.

picked up a piece from the framer today, $475 for one stretched canvas with a simple walnut frame. that alone hurt. then the guy behind the counter, who watched me sign the card, says "you know, you could probably make these yourself if you wanted to save a few bucks." i stared at him. sir. i am holding the thing i made. the painting on the canvas is mine. the canvas itself i stretched and primed in my kitchen. apparently none of that counts unless i'm also milling the wood and cutting the glass. i just said "yeah, i'll get right on learning carpentry" and walked out. but it's been nagging me all day. the way people assume the invisible labor isn't labor. the hours, the mess, the trial and error, none of it registers unless there's a saw involved. anyway the piece looks good. that's the thing. it's the best one i've done in months and now i keep thinking about the $475 instead of the work.

I finished a specimen sheet this afternoon that has been in the drawer, unfinished, since 2013. A single Rosa gallica, and the delay was never the rose. It was the red. Alizarin crimson was the standard for that particular depth of petal and every serious painter knows what it does over time: it fades, browns, quietly betrays you in a frame twenty years on. I could not bring myself to send a sheet out into the world carrying a pigment I knew would fail. So I kept putting it off, then putting it off became a habit, and the habit became twelve years. The answer, when I finally sat down with it, was unglamorous. Permanent alizarin crimson, layered thinly over a quinacridone base, tested on scrap for a fortnight before a single mark went on the good paper. Two weeks of testing to solve what twelve years of avoidance had been circling. I am not proud of the arithmetic. It is dry, it is signed, and it is going to the framer on Monday. Small thing. It has been sitting on my conscience longer than most of my actual mistakes have.

I got my first real gallery because my framer's assistant happened to be married to the woman who ran it. That's it. No portfolio, no proposal, no clever approach. She saw two canvases leaning against the wall when she came to pick him up. I was thirty-one and had no idea what I was doing, and I said yes to a show I wasn't ready for. Now I watch people write these careful emails with ten images and a statement and get nothing back, and I wonder how many doors actually open that way. So tell me honestly, how did yours happen? The intro from someone. The open call you nearly didn't send. The walk-in. The one that came from a conversation at a bar. The one that came from a friend of a friend. I want the real version, not the one for the website. And if you're still waiting for yours, say that too. It took me a decade of nothing after that first show, so I'm not pretending it's a formula.

I got my start the long way. Knew a fabricator who knew a framer who knew a gallery owner who needed someone to fix a broken piece of sculpture on a Saturday. Did the job, didn't charge, came back Monday with a portfolio of my own work. They hung three pieces. Took two years to sell one. No residency, no MFA, no cold call. Just asked a guy who owed me a favor for an introduction. How did you get your first gallery? Cold email, walked in, referral, someone saw your work somewhere? Curious if anyone actually landed one through the front door, because I never did.

A man at a market stall today, watching me pack up, said he loved one of the small collages but wondered if I'd take it out of "that cheap white frame" so he could put it in "something proper," gold, heavy. He meant well. That's the thing, they always mean well. I charge the work, not the frame. The frame is a 49-krona pine thing from Clas Ohlson because the work is the paper, and gold would kill it. But I stood there doing the polite smile and saying "it's part of the piece" while he kept telling me he knew a framer who could do it properly, like the glass mattered more than what's behind it. Didn't tell him most of my work isn't even framed. It's pinned. The paper breathes. Anyway. Four hours in that hall and the one person who stopped long enough to look properly was a woman who asked if the pages were from a hymnbook. They were. She got it. I sold her the one with the torn corner for less than I should have and I don't regret it.

Finished a big piece today, got it photographed, sent it off. Felt good for about four hours. Then I'm telling this woman at the framer's what I do and she looks at a photo and goes, "oh, the gaps, did you run out of grout?" No. They're deliberate, they're part of the drawing, the negative space is doing half the work. But I just said "no, it's a choice" and smiled and paid for my frame. It's the ones who think they're being kind that get me. Nobody walks up to a painter and asks if the brushstrokes were a mistake. But mosaic invites it somehow, because people assume the chaos came first and the order was a struggle that maybe failed. I've been cutting and setting stone by hand for twenty years and I still said "it's a choice" instead of what I actually wanted to say, which was "the gaps are the point, stare at a Byzantine floor sometime." I know I should let it slide. I'm still annoyed at myself for the soft answer more than at her. No question, just needed that said out loud where someone might get it. 🙂

4 500 kr for a 24x30 collage. Sold it in November to a woman who'd come to the studio twice before she decided, which should have told me something. Six weeks of evenings on it, and I don't mean six weeks of solid work, I mean six weeks of moving one torn corner of a 1930s ledger page two millimetres and going to bed. I did the sum on the kitchen table. Works out around 40 kr an hour. The paper cost me almost nothing, that's the thing I tell myself, the material is basically free. But I spent 380 kr on a tube of the one grey I keep running out of, and I drove to the framer twice, and the frame was another 600. I'm not upset about it exactly. I knew what I was doing when I said the number. What bothers me is that I said it fast, before she finished asking, the way you do when you're scared of your own price. I've made that same move on three commissions now and I can date all of them. The next one is already half-built on the table. Same size. I think I'm going to say 7 000 and just sit with the silence after it.

So I sold a small head study last week. Toned grey paper, maybe A3, one of the ones I did in a single sitting because I was trying to loosen up. I had it priced at 450 euros and honestly I typed that number and then went and made tea so I would not have to look at it. The woman wrote back asking whether the price includes framing. And I said no, framing is separate, I can recommend the place on Gołębia. Then I sat there feeling like I had cheated her somehow. Because the paper cost maybe 6 euros and the pastels I used were already here, so in my head the material cost is almost nothing and I forget the eleven years of doing this badly before I could do it this way. But here is the part I cannot get past. A frame at that shop is 300 euros. So the frame now costs two thirds of the drawing it holds. I do not know what to do with that information. Do I raise the drawing so it looks like a proper thing next to a 300 euro frame, or do I start recommending the cheap framer and hope nobody notices the difference at the edges. I am not even sure this is a pricing question. Maybe it is a "what is a drawing worth when the thing around it is worth more" question. But it is keeping me up, and my partner says I should just be glad it sold, which I am. I am. Just also not.

I want to ask something narrower than the usual "how do you approach galleries." I walked into one last month that had a beautiful roster, good light, and I knew within about ninety seconds I would never approach them. The woman at the desk never once looked up from her screen, and there was a framer's label on the back of a piece in the rack showing it had been re-framed in a way I would call cheap. Both of those told me plenty before anyone said a word to me. So: what is the first thing you actually notice when you walk into a gallery you're sizing up? Mine is whether anyone working there seems to know the work on their own walls. Tell me I am being too harsh about it, but I have found it a reliable signal.

A friend from the old logistics job, someone I genuinely like, asked me to make her something for her mother's 70th. Something small. She said she'd pay for materials. So I did. Torn paper and a wash over a photo of her mum's old house on Rua do Almada before they knocked it down. I framed it. And when I handed it over I said no charge for the work part, because it was for her mum and because I'm an idiot. Turns out that was 40 hours. Not 40 hours of pure magic either. 40 hours of me redoing the roof line because the paper kept lifting, and driving to the framer twice because they cut the mount wrong. She gave me 60 for the materials. Materials were 90. I didn't say anything and I'm still thinking about it a month later, not because of 30 euros. Because she'll tell people she got it for free and now the next person assumes that's the price. Anyway. I'm not writing this to be told I'm too soft. I know. I'm writing it because I finally worked out my rule and it's late: materials up front, and the labour is a gift only if I'm the one who chose to give it. If I offered it out of guilt on the doorstep that's not a gift, that's me avoiding an awkward minute. No idea how to walk the 30 euros back with her though.