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A gallery I have worked with for eleven years asked me in March for three small, easily shippable pieces for a fair booth in the autumn. "Something that sells itself," was the phrase. Which in practice means the same painting I have made fifteen times already, in a size that fits a car. I said no. Not out of pride exactly. I am 52 and I have done the years where saying yes to everything was the only way to keep the lights on. But I know how that ends: you make the easy thing, it sells, and then the easy thing is what you are known for, and every year after that you are asked for more of it in slightly different colours. What I offered instead was one large canvas, one mid-size, and one small. He was quiet on the phone for a while and then said the large one would never sell at a fair. It did not, at the fair. It sold four months later, to a private collector in Basel, at more than the booth piece would have brought. So in the ledger I am ahead. But the relationship is cooler now, and I am not naive about what that costs. The market does not reward the refusal, it just eventually forgets to punish it. The honest part is I do not know if I was right. I know I did not want to spend five months of my life on something I could have painted in my sleep. Whether that is integrity or just stubbornness at my age I could not tell you.

Just had the weirdest one. A collector found me through a gallery friend, saw my charcoal work on Instagram, wanted a large piece on commission. I quoted $1,400 half up front, half on delivery. We agreed. Six hours. That's all it took. Six hours of actual work and it's honestly one of the best things I've ever made. Every mark landed, nothing fought me, the whole thing just came out of me like I was taking dictation. And I sat there after they picked it up feeling like I'd robbed them. $1,400 for six hours. That's $233 an hour and my brain short-circuited on that number for two days. I've sold pieces that took me 40 hours for less than half that. The thing is I know the hours don't matter. The years of bad drawings matter. The self-teaching and the burnouts and the figuring it out alone matter. But I still couldn't shake it. I almost messaged them to say "hey that was actually fast, want me to add more?" Like I'd been caught cheating. My therapist asked what I'd have charged if it took 40 hours and I said the same, and she said "so which one is the fraud, then?" and it broke my brain a little. I don't know who priced the honest one. I just know I can't keep pricing by my own suffering and calling it integrity.

A friend asked me last week what my process is, and I tried to explain the two-week one. The one where I kept failing at getting the seaweed to sit right, burnt three sheets, ruined the fixing bath, got it eventually and it's the piece I'm proudest of all year. And then I told her about the other one, the one that sells consistently: a print I made in eleven minutes during a rain break, tossed a piece of net on a wet sheet, didn't even think about it. That one sells. Over and over. People comment on it constantly. The careful one sits in a drawer. I don't know what that says. Maybe the fast ones carry less effort and more luck and people feel that. Or maybe the thing I fought for two weeks has all my doubt baked in, and you can see it even through the Prussian blue. Some prints just breathe easier than others. I keep telling myself the slow one is the better work, and maybe it is. But the market keeps telling me something else, and I'm old enough now to wonder if ignoring it is stubbornness dressed up as integrity.