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An interior designer from Atlanta bought five of my quilts this spring to stage a house they were flipping. Paid full price, no haggling, wired the money same day. Not one word about the piecing, the history, the work itself. Just wanted the colors to match a rug. And you know, at first it stung a little. Here I spent fifty years learning to make cloth talk and she wanted a throw pillow. But then I thought about it, because she asked me to cut them loose and let her hang them on a wall instead of a bed, that designer's clients are going to see my work and their grandmothers are going to ask who made it. That's the seed. Same with that gallery show I had in January. The lady who bought the biggest piece told me she'd never owned anything by a Black woman artist and honestly I didn't know whether to feel honored or put on a shelf. I told my granddaughter about it and she said "Mae, they're not buying the quilt, they're buying the wall." And maybe that's the truth of it. The work carries more than I get credit for while I'm standing there. All these years I'd get a little quiet when somebody talked about my quilts being "art" instead of what they are. But the money talks, honey, and the money walked right into my checking account. I guess what I'm saying is don't turn your nose up at the sale that feels a little off. That one may carry the next three.

Okay so I've been trying to figure out this whole "get your art in front of people who actually buy it" thing instead of just posting into the void and hoping. I kept reading that you're supposed to DM interior designers and stylists but nobody ever says what you're actually supposed to SAY to them?? Like "hi I'm an artist" feels so flat. So last week I just went for it. I picked 12 designers who post the kind of spaces I could actually see my work in, warm, natural light, not super minimal. And I literally just said something like "hey! I'm a watercolor painter and I've been obsessed with how you use color in [specific project they posted]. Just wanted to share a few pieces I think would sit nicely in that kind of space, no pressure at all but thought I'd throw it out there" and attached 3 photos. 3 replied. One asked to set up a call. One said "send me your portfolio" and then went quiet lol. One just said "beautiful work, I'll keep you in mind" which could mean nothing but also could mean something?? I don't know. The thing is I felt so awkward doing it. Like I'm bothering them. But also nobody saw me do it so who cares right. I'm gonna do another batch this week and actually follow up with the ones who went quiet because my friend who's a freelancer said that's the part everybody skips. Anyway just wondering if anyone else has tried this and whether it actually turned into sales or just polite replies that go nowhere. I'll report back if that call turns into anything 🙃

Fifteen by twenty-two centimeters. A corner of a room, morning light on a folded tablecloth, a copper pot, half a chair. Two days under the paint, maybe three with the varnish drying. I quoted 1 900 euros in September and I've been sitting on the price list since, not sending the new one. The number I want is 2 700. Same painting, same size, forty percent more. Nothing changed except that I finally did the arithmetic properly: materials, the linen, the ground, the week I lose afterward not painting because my head is still in that room. And a gallery in the sixth wants four of these for spring. Four at 1 900 is 7 600 for a season of work, before they take their cut. I know what the answer is. I know a woman in Villeurbanne who charges 3 200 for this size and sleeps fine. But I've written the email four times and deleted it four times, and there is a version of me that would rather paint it at 1 900 and complain than send it. My wife says the price is not the problem, the asking is. She is usually right and it is very annoying. I'll send it Monday. Writing it here so I have to.

A painter friend came to the studio last week and said "you really like that corner" and I thought she meant the actual corner of the room, and I said no, it's just the north light. Then she pulled up three paintings on her phone, mine, and there it was. Same window, same plaster wall on the left, same table pushed at the same angle. Three times. I've been telling myself I'm exploring light and the fall of it over the day. In reality I found a composition that worked twice and I've been quietly doing it again and again. It's not a series, it's a habit wearing a beret. The funny thing is I didn't notice until she said it, and now I can't unsee it. So I'm forcing myself to move the whole setup for the next one. Rearrange everything, paint the corner from the other side, from the floor, anywhere that makes me have to actually look instead of arrive. Anyone else have a signature they didn't know was a rut until someone pointed at it?

I've been painting for twenty-five years and I've never once seen my own work properly hung in a real gallery. I'm always on the other side of the canvas, a meter away, smelling the linseed. Today the small gallery in Croix-Rousse put up three of my interiors for a group show and I walked in and just stood there. The light they'd chosen, the height, the space around the frames. It looked like someone else painted them. Better than I remembered. I think we don't know our own paintings until a stranger hangs them. Anyway. I was at the vernissage pretending to be calm and a woman I don't know stood in front of the one of the kitchen at dusk and didn't move for a long time. She wasn't reading the label. That's the whole thing, honestly. That's the moment you do it for.

A woman with about 90k followers messaged me in March, a lifestyle account, pale interiors, very clean. She wanted to feature one of the big canvases in a video, the 180x160 one still in the studio, and her rate was €1,400. Nothing against her, she was polite and businesslike about it, which I appreciate more than the ones who offer "exposure" and a moodboard. I said I would think about it. I thought for four days. Here is the thing that decided it for me and it is not a principled thing: I could not find one painter I respect who could tell me what actually came of it. Everybody had a story about a post going well. Nobody had a story about a sale. And I am not in a position to spend €1,400 on a feeling. Maybe I got it wrong. The galleries say reach is reach. But I have watched two of my collectors find me through a bad photo on a regional culture site, so I know the route is not always the pretty one. Anyway I declined and the canvas is still here, leaning against the wall, and I am fine with it. Curious whether anyone has actually run the numbers backwards from a paid feature to money in the account, because I never got a straight answer.

I painted a new interior last month, spent six weeks on it, thought it was the best thing I'd done in years. Put it up next to a study I did in 2019, the one where the light was wrong and I nearly scraped it down. Guess which one sold in three days. It's not the first time. Almost every buyer who writes me mentions a painting from five or eight years ago. I should be grateful, and I am, but there's a part of me that wonders if people want the maker they already know, not the one I'm becoming. Or maybe the old ones are just more honest. A painter's early work has a hunger the comfortable work doesn't. I keep telling myself the new one will find its person. In the meantime it's propped against the studio wall and I catch myself glaring at it while I clean brushes.

I did a small interior study for a friend of a friend last month. Small, 40×50, done from a photograph they sent. Nine hours of work including the drawing stage. I charged €90 and I was embarrassed to ask for even that. Here's the part I don't like admitting. I kept my atelier training in materials and glazing, the whole slow method, because I told myself that's what made it a real painting and not just a painted thing. And it did. But it also means my working speed hasn't changed since I was a student. I cannot paint fast and I've never wanted to. So every time I undercharge I'm not just losing money, I'm subsidizing someone's nice wall with hours I'll never get back. The friend-of-a-friend was delighted. Said it looked like a photograph, which nearly made me choke. But that's the thing, right. The people who would value what I actually do are not the people I keep giving the discount to. I raised my teaching rate last year and nobody blinked. I still haven't dared raise my painting prices the same way. €9 an hour before materials. I'd have done better stacking shelves in a supermarket and it would have been more honest about what the work is worth to me.

Sold a painting last month. Interior, early morning light coming through a window, that grey-gold hour I actually like better than any sunset. Man who bought it emails me two weeks later: could I make the light warmer, his wife finds the room in the painting cold and it's in their dining room now. I said no. Politely the first time. Then he wrote again offering to pay extra. As if it were a colour grading slider in a video app. The whole painting is built on that light, the shadows are cool because the light is cool, you warm it and every edge in the piece collapses. He wasn't asking me to change a painting. He was asking me to change the wallpaper. What I wanted to say is that a painting is not decor that failed to match the sofa. What I said was that I'd buy it back if it didn't suit the room. He went quiet after that. The funny thing is I'd have discussed almost anything else. Composition, palette, even the frame. But there's a line where the thing stops being mine and starts being a product, and I couldn't pretend I didn't see it.

A gallery in Switzerland was interested in my interiors but said everything was too large for their space. Could I paint smaller, like 40x40cm max. I said no, I work at the scale I see the scene, I can't just shrink it and keep the same feeling. They moved on. Now I wonder if I was stubborn. Smaller paintings sell easier, more people can hang them, maybe I'd have sold more. But it felt like saying yes to something that wasn't my work anymore. Has a gallery asked you to change the size or format? Did you adapt or hold your ground, and did it work out?

It was in the back of a cupboard in the studio, face to the wall. An interior of my daughter's room when she was five, the light coming in from the window in that particular way it does in Lyon in the late afternoon, the little bed with the quilt my mother made. I stopped because I'd gotten the perspective wrong on the far wall and didn't know how to fix it, and then I just... stopped. Got busy teaching. Got discouraged. You know. I pulled it out last week and looked at it with fresh eyes. The perspective was still wrong but I saw how to fix it in about twenty minutes. Twenty minutes, after ten years. I repainted that wall, softened some edges, glazed the light a little warmer. Now it's one of my favourite things I've ever done. I don't know what the lesson is exactly. Maybe that we give up too soon. Or maybe that time away is sometimes what you needed all along. My daughter is fifteen now and she looked at it and said "I remember that quilt." That was the whole conversation and it was enough.

I got a proper no from a gallery here in Lyon in 2019. Not a form letter, the woman actually wrote two lines: the work was "trop sage," too well behaved, not for them. I was angry for a week and then I more or less agreed with her, which was worse. Sent them nothing for four years. Then last spring I had a small interior I thought was the best thing I'd done in a decade, and I wrote to the same woman, same address. She took three paintings. Said she remembered the file. I still don't know if that means anything or if I just caught her on a good month, and honestly I don't want to ask. So: has a no ever turned into a yes for you, and how long did it take? Or did you find out later that the no was right and you're glad they said it?

A gallery in the 6e asked me for video for their Instagram before my show in March. I said fine, come Tuesday, I'm working on the large interior with the window. She set the phone up behind my shoulder and left it running, eleven hours over two days. I have watched it. It is unusable. Painting is mostly standing still. I put a passage down, then I go make coffee, then I come back and I look at it for nine minutes without touching anything. On camera that is a hostage video. The one moment something real happens, when I take a rag and wipe out the whole left side of the canvas because the shadow had gone dead, it lasts forty seconds and reads as nothing if you don't know what you're looking at. It was the best decision I made all week and it looks like cleaning. So I understand why the videos that travel are the ones with a knife and sparks and resin pouring. The thing I don't accept is that this means the work is less watched. My finished photograph of that same canvas got three inquiries in two days. The eleven hours got me nothing but a strange feeling about my own hands, seeing them from outside. Anyway, the show opens the 14th. I'll paint the poster myself, with a brush, and if that is too slow for the algorithm, voilà.

For years I shot everything the same way: tripod, two softboxes, neutral grey, fill in every corner so nothing was lost in shadow. Correct, and completely dead. Then in November I delivered a small interior to a client in Villeurbanne and she had already hung it before I got my coat off. Afternoon light coming sideways across the room, one half of the canvas frankly too dark to read. She was delighted. That is what the painting does in a real room, and I had spent a decade photographing it as if it were a passport photo. So now I photograph the new work where it lives. Same corner of my studio, north window, no lights, one shot at three in the afternoon when the light rakes across and the impasto shows, and I let the darks go dark. Enquiries went from almost nothing to about one a week, and the people who write are the ones who noticed the light, which tells me they will notice it on their wall too. The obvious objection: a client cannot judge the whole canvas. True. I send the full flat documentation to anyone who asks, privately, and nobody has ever been unhappy to receive it. The public image is not the record. It is the invitation. Bof, and the flat grey shots are still on my site, in the archive, where they belong.

My studio is basically a stack of things I've kept because the paper was good. A 1937 Swedish school atlas, a box of receipt stubs from a locksmith in Mölndal who closed in the eighties, a lot of endpapers from books too far gone to save at the conservation studio. Today I was working on a small piece, maybe 20 by 25 cm, mostly empty. I had a scrap of what I thought was a nice aged ledger paper pinned to the wall for two weeks, waiting for the right spot. Turned it over. It's the back of an envelope. Someone's address in pencil, half rubbed out. The good side is the envelope interior, which has a waxy coating, and it will not take paste. It just sits there on top of the glue like it's refusing. Two weeks of looking at it. I should have checked in the first minute. I keep things because the paper is good and then I don't look at the back, because looking at the back is admitting I might have been fooled by the front. I've kept it anyway. It's on the wall, wrong side out now. I don't have a plan for it.

I quoted a collector €480 for a 60x80 interior. Sold it, framed it, delivered it. Then I kept notes like I used to and counted: 30 hours from drawing to the last glaze. Sixteen euros an hour, and that's before the pigments and the linen and the four months it sat drying in my studio. The part that sits badly is that nobody forced me. The client never balked, never haggled. I set the number, and I set it too low, and I knew it while I was writing the invoice. There's a fear in the hand that writes a price, a little flinch you can feel. It gets better with practice but it never fully leaves. What helps me when it's my own fault: I price exhibitions with a conversation first, not a number out of the air. "What's the wall, what's the size, what's it worth to you." Sometimes people name a figure higher than I would have dared. That's information. You just have to sit there and not correct them.

A collector asked me for a small interior piece, maybe 40 by 50. I quoted by surface area, which is how I sometimes do it when I don't want to think too hard. It came out to 900 euros. Fine, they accepted, no problem. Then I did the math on the hours. Grinding, underpainting, the glazes, the sitting around staring at the light. It worked out to something like eleven euros an hour. Less than I made waiting tables in Lyon in 1998, before inflation, before everything. The painting is good. I'll sign it and be glad of it. But there's something broken in a system where the better I get, the slower I get, and the slower I get, the less I'm worth per hour. Nobody wants to hear that the price reflects the life behind it, not the surface area. I'm thinking I need to stop quoting by the centimeter and start quoting by the years. Scared to do it, honestly. Someone tell me they've done it and survived.

The studio has one wall where I can stand back far enough to really look at a thing, and I've had this small interior on it for three days, tilted maybe four degrees off level. Just enough that you'd feel it before you'd name it. Every time I walked past I noticed, then forgot, then noticed again. I wanted to see how long it took for the tilt to become the subject instead of the painting. It took about a day. Then I straightened it and the whole piece read differently, better, the way a room settles when someone opens a window. I don't know what that says about me or about the painting, but there's something in it about how we see. The eye forgives a lot and then very suddenly doesn't. Probably no point to this. I just thought other people here might do the same stupid experiment and tell me what happened.

I have a small interior study I've been fighting for weeks. A corner of my studio, the chair by the window, nothing grand. It never sat right. Every time I looked at it I knew the light was wrong but I couldn't say why. This morning I woke before the alarm, went down in the half-dark, and there was that particular grey Lyonnais light, the flat diffuse one that comes off the river. And I saw it. The painting had been lit like an afternoon in my head, warm and golden, but the room itself only ever looks like this. Grey. Honest. I mixed a little ivory black into everything, cooled the whole thing down, and it just... clicked. Two hours, gone. Funny that the answer was to make it less pretty. I think I'd been painting what I wanted the room to be instead of what it is. The chair looks more like the chair now than it ever did with all that fake sun on it. It's still not the painting I thought I was making. It's better.

Someone at an open studio yesterday looked at a big interior I've been working on for two months and said, with real admiration, "wow, it looks just like a photograph." I smiled and thanked her because what else do you do. But inside I was thinking, I spent two months fighting the light in that room, scraping back a passage three times because the edge was too hard, because a photograph would never have that softness in the shadow side. I am not trying to make a photograph. If I wanted a photograph I would take one in three seconds. The funny thing is people think it's the highest praise. It tells me they don't see anything I'm actually doing. The paint, the color temperature shifting across a form, the decisions. It reduces it to likeness, which is the least interesting thing about a painting. I know I should be grateful people look at all. Some days I am. Yesterday I was not.