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My first pieces sold in a tiny fish-market café at the edge of the old town, pinned up between the counter and the shelf of salted cod. Nothing framed the way you'd frame for a gallery, just paper and clips. A woman bought one while her coffee went cold. It meant more to me than my first proper show, I think, because nobody there had come to look at art. It just got caught in their day. These days I still do a couple of spots like that, on purpose. A surf shop, a little restaurant with its windows open to the harbour. People who'd never step into a gallery. Am I alone in this, or do some of you keep a foot in the non-gallery world too? Where was the oddest place one of your pieces ended up?

I had a gallery once, small, nice enough people, and after looking at my portfolio they sat me down and said, very gently, "you know what sells here, na? Lighter colours. More cheerful subjects. Maybe try that." I understood what they meant. My work is all old Bangalore houses and morning shadows, and I know it's not exactly commercial. But I also couldn't shake the feeling that I'd be painting someone else's idea of what I should make. I didn't go back. Still wonder sometimes if I was too precious about it. Maybe a compromise isn't the end of the world. Anyone else been told to tweak their work for a gallery? Did you adjust, or hold your ground, and do you regret it either way?

I just finished an edition of 25 screenprints that took me four months from the first drawing to the last pull. Copper plates, inks, paper, the studio time, the proofs I rejected along the way. Sold the whole edition to a gallery for €900, which sounds fine until you do the real math and realize the materials alone were close to half that, and the gallery takes 50% on top. So I made 25 objects by hand and I think I netted something like €6 an hour. The gallery is happy. The collector is happy. I'm the only one who knows the number. The part I keep turning over is that I priced it like a print. Like the edition makes it cheap, because it's a multiple, because the original is the plate and the prints are just copies of it. But each one of those copies took my hands on it. That logic is from an old world where printmaking was a reproduction tool, not a primary medium. I keep selling work on a pricing model that was built for something printmaking no longer is, and I don't know if I'm too scared to break it or just can't figure out what the new number should be. I raised the price on the next edition by €300 and I'm already scared nobody takes it.

I have a rule now: two emails, then I stop. First follow-up after two weeks, second after another, and then I let it go. Because I've had galleries ask for studio visits, get excited, ask for more images, and then just vanish into the void. And the chase after that starts to feel undignified, you know? But sometimes I wonder if I'm too quick to drop it. The art world is chaos, people forget, maybe the third email is the one that lands. A friend of mine got her first solo show because she emailed the same curator five times over two years. Where's the line for you? Two and done, or do you keep nudging until you get a word?

I got turned down by a well-known Berlin gallery back in the early 2000s. Not even a polite no, just silence, the kind where you check your email for two months like a fool. Then the following year that same space closed down. The director went into consulting or something. Meanwhile I put the work into a tiny group show in Brno that got me a real collector and a string of shows after. I think about that a lot. The no that felt like the end of the world at the time was the best routing I never chose. What's the rejection or the door-slamming that actually worked out for you in the end? The one you'd thank now if you could.

had a piece in a small group show last month, nothing fancy. yesterday the gallery emailed me saying a buyer wanted to contact me directly. nice, right? turns out she's an interior decorator. she loves the color palette. she wants to know if i can do something "similar but a little warmer" for a client's dining room. the piece she bought is a collage made mostly from a torn-up book about the 1918 flu pandemic and some pages from my brother's old copy of the odyssey. i worked on it during a two-week stretch where i barely left the apartment. it's about loss and contagion and maybe a little about odysseus being an idiot. but sure. warm tones for a dining room. i can do that. i said yes obviously. i need the money. but i feel weird about it. like i'm selling something under false pretenses even though she owns the actual piece and likes it for her own reasons. maybe that's just what selling art is? you put something dark out in the world and someone hangs it over their sofa and that's fine. anyway i'm going to make the warm dining room piece and try not to resent it. we'll see.