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I'm not allowed to leave the studio without making the first mark on the next thing. That's it. One mark. Usually it's a line I don't even like, just to break the white. Because the white is the whole problem. I can stand there for an hour rearranging jars like the jars are the issue. They are not the issue. The issue is that an untouched sheet of paper is a promise and every mark I make on it is a disappointment for about twenty minutes. Today it was a shoulder. Just a shoulder, no head, no body, nothing that made sense yet. Took me about four seconds. Sat back down and suddenly I had something to argue with, and arguing is the only way I actually work. The rule sounds so dumb written out. But it's the only thing that's gotten me into the studio seven days in a row this month. What's the dumb thing you do to get started? I want to steal it.

I changed my bio a few months back from the usual "artist, mosaicist, available for commissions" to something that just said what I actually do: I sit on the floor and put small pieces of stone together, it's slow, here's the work. That's it. No hype, no "transforming spaces through ancient craft", no keywords. And I started getting messages that were different. Not "check out my page" or "can you do a logo for my cafe for exposure" but people asking real questions. Where do you source smalti. Do you cut your own. Can I come watch you work sometime. I think there's a whole strip of people who are tired of the polished performance and just want to know what's really happening. Nobody needs another artist who sounds like a copywriter. I'd rather lose the ones who want shiny than lose the few who actually care. The irony is my follower count dropped a bit and my enquiries went up. Make of that what you will. 🙂

I am totally lost on how to price my art confidently. What system or equation do you use? I understand the process of raising prices if you are selling consistently and investing in your art career. But I am looking for some guidance to get started.

I am totally lost on how to price my art confidently. What system or equation do you use? I understand the process of raising prices if you are selling consistently and investing in your art career. But I am looking for some guidance to get started.

For years I kept prices off my site. Gallery habit, I suppose: you don't discuss money in public, the buyer asks, you reply discreetly, c'est ça. In March I finally put a range on the site, honestly, with a note that the small studies start lower and the large things are not cheap. What I expected: fewer inquiries. What happened: the opposite, and better ones. Someone wrote last week that she had assumed everything was out of her reach, saw the range, and bought a 24 by 30 study. I sold three of the small ones in two months. The questions I get now start at "is the light in this one from the window or from the lamp" instead of "how much." The thing I got wrong was thinking discretion protects the work. It mostly protects the awkwardness of the person asking. People want a number. Give it and you both stop circling. The part I still dislike: a few painters in my circle think it is vulgar. Maybe. But I spent a decade painting little and talking much, and I prefer this.

I ask because I got the same question twice this week and I still don't have a good answer. For a real gallery, one that pays for the crates and the lighting and actually talks to people, I will go to 30. Above that I start to get stupid about it, even when the math works. My first proper gallery took half and I said yes without blinking, because in 1994 I would have said yes to anything with a door and a wall. Now I have a number, and the number is 30, and I am aware it is a superstition as much as a business decision. So, what is yours. Not the principled answer you give at a panel. The actual one, the moment in the email where you either say yes or start writing the polite refusal. And has anyone walked away because of it, or is it always you who folds.

Fella from an agency emailed me. Wanted to shoot a short video of me roughing out a limestone block, said it would help me "reach the collector demographic." Three thousand dollars, he'd bring the crew, I wouldn't have to do anything but work. I told him no. He seemed confused, like I'd turned down free money. Here's the thing. Chasing a chisel around a block for two days is not content. It's loud, it's slow, and half of it is me standing there deciding where the next cut goes. That's the part that matters and it's the part nobody wants to watch. What he wanted was the eighty seconds where the dust flies and the shape shows up. Which is real. It's just not the work. My daughter says I'm leaving money on the table. Maybe. But I've watched what happens to guys who start performing the making instead of doing it. They get quick, they get cute, they start reaching for the angle instead of the stone. I've been at this thirty-odd years and I'm not going to start taking direction from somebody who's never held a mallet. Anyway the block is still there. Half roughed. I'll finish it when it tells me what it wants.

The algorithm pushed my old Mysore palace sketch from 2019 to 40k people this week. Four hundred likes on a painting I did sitting on a park bench with wobbly perspective because I was too lazy to walk around to the other side. Meanwhile the piece I spent six weeks on, the one where I measured everything twice and worked the light properly, is sitting at 31 likes. Three. One. I know the answer is supposed to be "just post more, the algorithm is random, consistency consistency." But I've been doing this long enough to notice a pattern now. The stuff that lands is never the stuff I sweated over. It's the throwaway morning sketch, the wobbly bench one, the half-finished thing I almost didn't scan. I don't know what to do with that honestly. Do I keep painting for the craft and accept the algorithm doesn't care? Or do I get smart and start churning out the loose quick ones that perform, and keep the serious work for prints and shows where it actually gets seen properly? Right now I'm doing neither and it's making me a bit cranky. Anyone else found a way to hold both, the work you care about and the work that works?

Decided this week I'd start painting at six, before the light gets ugly and the phone starts. Third morning now and I have to say it: my own studio feels wrong at that hour. Too quiet, maybe. I need the day to have happened a little before I go at the canvas. The room makes a certain sound after noon that isn't there at dawn. Also the coffee situation is meaningless at six. I'm drinking espresso to wake up so I can paint about patience. There's a joke in there somewhere. Tomorrow I go back to ten o'clock and stop pretending I'm a morning person. The discipline isn't the hour, it's showing up at all. I knew that. Forgot it for three days.

Okay so I have this one ceramic mixing tray, no divisions, just a flat white rectangle, and I have not fully cleaned it since maybe March. It's got this crusted ring of dried gouache around the edges, layers of it, and somewhere under all that there's a stain of a green I mixed once in April that I have never been able to hit again. Cerulean + a touch of burnt sienna + something I've forgotten. It's just a ghost of a green now, sitting there mocking me. And here's the thing, my old teacher would lose her mind. We were taught to scrape down to bare white after every session, palette knife, damp sponge, the whole ritual. And I did it for years, like clockwork, felt virtuous about it. Then I went full time and something in me just stopped. Now I mix into the dirty areas on purpose because the residue does something, it warms everything a quarter step, keeps me from hitting that chalky dead zone you get when you start fresh every time. Is that insane? I honestly can't tell if it's a genuine technique or if I've just gotten lazy and invented a philosophy to cover it. The window I keep painting (the one with the fire escape) is on like attempt nine and the last three have all been ruined by the paper going grey and I think it's the rinse water, not the paper, I was so sure it was the paper. I bought a whole new block for nothing. Anyway. Does anyone else keep a gross palette on purpose or am I the only one lying to myself here

so I'm shipping a painting to a buyer, right, my first sale in like two months that's actually a decent chunk of change, and I've spent 45 minutes bubble-wrapping this thing like it's a hostage situation. I get to the UPS store and the guy behind the counter watches me put it on the scale and goes "you know, you really should be using a rigid mailer, not a box, the box is gonna shift around in transit." and I'm like oh okay thanks but it's already packed pretty tight, I've got foam corners, it's fine. and he just WOULD NOT let it go. he's like "I ship art all the time, you're gonna get a claim" and starts telling me about the proper way to do it while I'm standing there with my debit card out. like sir I did not ask. I did not come here for a consultation. I came here to pay you $18 to put a sticker on my box. I know he was probably trying to be helpful but I was this close to being like "okay and how many watercolor paintings have YOU shipped that were still wet this morning and you stayed up too late stressing about the corners", I didn't say it because I'm a coward but I wanted to. anyway it arrived fine. no claim. I'm gonna frame that delivery confirmation and put it on my wall.

ngl i'm starting to think my titanium white is actually immortal. i paint with it every single day. every day. and it's still like 2/3 full. what is this stuff. did i accidentally buy the neverending tube. is there a paint version of the hotel california situation going on inside there.

Six weeks ago I deleted the app off my phone. Not the account, just the app, because I kept opening it while standing at the sink and I couldn't tell you one thing I'd seen. Came back last week, posted a detail shot of the piece I've been chewing on since March. Somewhere around the fourth layer of acrylic the paper starts lifting and you get these little blisters that look like the surface is breathing. That's what I photographed. 11 likes. Two comments, one of them from a guy who wants me to check out his print-on-demand service. Here's the part that surprised me: it didn't sting. Usually I'd post, then check my phone forty times over two days, then feel like a vending machine that nobody was putting coins in. This time I posted it, closed the app, went back to the studio and tore a page out of a 1970s phone book for the next layer. I did lose something though. A woman who'd bought a small piece in 2022 messaged asking where I'd gone. I hadn't seen it for three weeks. That one actually bothered me. So now I'm trying to figure out if the account is worth keeping at all, or if I should just have an email list of eleven people and a note on the wall. Anyone else cut back and find the math worked out better than they expected?

Like, I'll get a video of me just doing a really simple wash technique, something I thought was pretty straightforward and maybe helpful, and it'll get like, 100 views total. Then I'll post a sped-up video of me painting my cat, Bartholomew, looking super derpy, and it blows up to 10k. Bartholomew, of all things! haha. I'm not saying cats aren't great, but it's so hard to tell what the platforms actually want or if they're just messing with us. It makes me wonder if all the effort I put into explaining the pigment mixing or the paper buckling is just… wasted on them? It’s frustrating because I want to share the skill of it, you know? Omg, anyone else feel like they're just throwing paint at a wall and hoping something sticks with the algorithm gods lately?

Ok so I need to say this somewhere. I spent almost two hours yesterday filming a reel of a wash going down, and you know what the wash looked like by the time I checked the footage? terrible, because I'd been half-watching my phone propped on a stack of books instead of actually painting it. the paper dried uneven where I lifted the tape early to grab a better angle, and I have a whole sheet now with a big ugly bloom right in the middle of the sky. real painting, ruined, for 11 seconds of video. and the wild part is it got like 200 views. my last actual painting got 2.3k and sold in four days. so what am I even doing. I think what's getting me is that I started this because of the light on my kitchen wall at like 4pm and now I'm learning about hooks and trending audio and I feel so dumb for caring about both at once. like I want people to see the work and also the entire system is built so the only way they see the work is if I become a content person, which is genuinely the opposite of the thing that makes me good at painting. I zone out for three hours and that's the whole point. you can't zone out with a tripod. my partner keeps telling me to just post the painting and let it be boring and I know they're right but there's this voice that's like ok but what if nobody sees it. and then I remember I have 700 followers which is not a business, it's a group chat. so the stakes are kind of imaginary. anyway I'm going to paint today and not film any of it and if the sky blooms I'll keep it. maybe I'll post the wrecked one, honestly it's more interesting than the reel.

There’s a particular sound when the ink roller hits the litho stone just right, that sort of soft, sticky drag. It’s not like anything else, not the scrape of a blade on lino or the hiss of a spray can. It’s a sound that means you’re getting somewhere, that the image is starting to lift off the stone and onto the paper. Spent all morning with that sound, trying to get a really deep black on this new piece. It’s not a hare this time, something a bit different, but the same old graft really. You get lost in it, you know? The world outside just fades away and it’s only you and the stone and the smell of the ink. Grand way to spend a Tuesday, I’ll tell you that for nothing.

Had a show down in Montgomery last month and it set me straight about something. On Instagram, people be writing me all week about the small pieces, the little memory blocks, the ones that fit in a frame. Those sold out quick, no fuss. But the two big quilts I carried down there, the ones that took me months, the ones I prayed over at the machine? Those got all the looking and none of the buying. Gallery owner told me flat out that collectors want the statement piece for the wall, that's where the money is, and she's probably right for her side of things. But here's what I told her. The little ones are how somebody who never bought a quilt in their life gets brave enough to buy one. That's how the young folks start. That's how the next generation of collectors gets made. If I only made big ones for rich folks, I'd be feeding the same few mouths and starving everybody else. Funny part is, the two big ones did end up finding homes. Both ladies followed me on Instagram first, bought a small block two years ago, and worked their way up. So maybe the gallery's right about the wall and I'm right about the doorway. You got to have both.

Started this charcoal portrait this morning, big 18x24, just a woman's face emerging from black. Was fighting it for hours, everything going wrong, the nose kept drifting into a different face entirely. Almost shredded it like three times. Then around 4pm something clicked and I put this one mark in, just a hard diagonal through the cheekbone, and the whole thing SNAPPED into place. Like it had been waiting for me to stop overthinking. I literally yelled "THERE you are" at an empty room. This is why I do this. Those moments where the drawing starts drawing itself. Nobody else gets it but I know you guys do. What's the last mark you made that saved a whole piece?

Hey everyone! Okay so I'm still pretty new to this whole gallery thing and trying to get a feel for timelines. Like, after you started seriously submitting or approaching galleries, how long did it actually take you to get that first real 'yes' or even a solid offer? Was it like months, a year, longer?? I'm trying to manage my expectations haha. My first approach felt like a total shot in the dark and I'm still waiting to hear back, so just curious about what others' experiences have been! 🙂

I sharpen my own chisels. Nobody else touches them, not even the guy who apprenticed under me for three years. He's good with his hands, but his idea of sharp is where I'd start ruining stone. People don't get it. They think a chisel is a chisel. The edge is everything. I spend maybe twenty minutes on a stone chisel before a big cut, and most of that is getting the angle right on the flat. You can feel it in your wrist before you make the first strike. Dull is safer than bad, but neither one does the work. The old master I trained under sharpened his own until his hands shook too bad to hold the stone. Then he had me do it, but he watched every pass. Never said a word. Just stood there until I got it right. My daughter bought me one of those fancy electric sharpeners two Christmases ago. It's still in the box. Some things you don't hand over to a machine.