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I spent yesterday evening peeling a piece of 1950s bookplate off a backing board and it just tore. Not a clean lift, the whole inner corner shredded. My own mistake, wrong adhesive when I mounted it two years ago, and now the paper is gone with it. At conservation we'd call it a lesson in reversibility. At home it's just me being annoyed at myself. There's a strange thing though. That torn corner, that little loss, it's actually the most alive part of the collage now. The rest is too neat. I've been staring at it all morning trying to decide if I'm going to fix it or leave it as the best piece of the whole thing.

Mine was "who handles the insurance while the work is on the wall?" Nobody mentions it, nobody puts it on paper, and when my first show got damaged in the install before it even opened, suddenly it was my problem. Live and learn. What's the one question you wish you'd asked before you signed with a gallery? The one that would've saved you a headache or a loss if you'd known to ask it.

sure look we've all got a horror story or two about walking into a gallery with your portfolio and knowing inside five minutes it was a dead loss. give us the worst one. I'll go first. maybe eight years ago, still pretty green, got a meeting with this gallery in a city I won't name. small place, grand, but the fella running it spent the whole time looking at his phone while I was pulling prints out. didn't ask me one question about the work. then he told me he could "make me" if I was willing to "compromise a little" which turned out to mean make stuff that looked like the fella three doors down who was selling. I packed up my stuff, thanked him, and he actually said "are you sure" like I was the one wasting his time. still makes my blood warm thinking about it. what about ye? ever walk into a meeting and wish you'd stayed in bed?

i did a commission for a friend's mom last year. charged her 40% less than my usual rate because, you know, family connection. felt good at the time. she loved the piece, told everyone. now i'm getting calls from three of those referrals, and i'm realizing i've set a precedent i can't break without seeming like a total jerk. how do you disentangle yourself from that kind of thing? i'm almost tempted to just eat the loss and charge them full price, but the thought makes my eye twitch.

There was this old bungalow off Cunningham Road, mustard yellow with these deep verandah columns I must have sketched three times. Beautiful proportion, proper classical. Last I heard a builder had bought it but nothing was happening, so I kept assuming I'd get one more chance at it. Went past today for something else entirely and it's just a pit. Not even a construction site yet, just an excavated hole with a hoarding. I stood there like an idiot for ten minutes. I have the sketches. That's the thing that keeps me going at it, but also the thing that stings a bit. Because the sketch is lovely and someone else will see it later and think oh, what a charming old house, what a nice moment in time. They won't feel the actual loss. The paper keeps the building but it can't keep the fact that it used to be someone's home, with someone's washing on the line and a dog that barked at me the first time I set up my stool outside the gate. I don't know where I'm going with this except that drawing things as they vanish is a strange job to have chosen. Some days it feels like the only honest thing I do. Other days it feels like taking photographs at a funeral and calling it art.

After a decade of charging what I thought was reasonable, 800€ for a 40x50cm oil, I finally did what my husband's been telling me to do for years and raised them to 1,100€ for the same format. Same canvas, same hours, same me. Just finally stopped apologising for what I ask. I lost one client. A woman who'd bought three paintings from me over the years, always asked for a small discount, always got one. She sent a polite email saying she couldn't justify the increase. I wrote back, equally polite, that I understood completely. And honestly? The relief of not painting for someone who sees your work as something to bargain over is worth the lost sale. The other clients didn't blink. One said she'd been waiting for me to raise them. That stung more than the loss, in a good way. I know the numbers are different for everyone, different city, different medium, different audience. But I wish someone had told me ten years ago that the fear of losing clients is usually worse than the reality. The ones who value what you do will stay. The ones who don't were already costing you more than they paid.

so this is small but it nags at me. for two years my instagram bio listed the materials. acrylic washes, charcoal, torn paper, found photographs. it read like a recipe. people scrolled past it. fine. last month a small space in the city put me in a group show, the kind where the wall label gets more attention than the work. the curator asked me to send the "proper" line, the one that goes on the checklist. so i copied it into the bio. the full formal thing, medium and dimensions and the year. two days later a follower was gone. no comment, no DM, just gone. probably the "torn paper" phrasing being replaced by something with a semicolon in it. the strange part is the enquiries actually went up. three of them. all the same flavor, asking if the piece was for sale and where. so the dry formal line is doing the work the soft bio refused to do. i keep thinking i traded a description for a job listing and i don't know if that's a loss. the label says what it is. it doesn't say what it is. and the person who left never bought anything anyway. still. i miss the old line a little.

After a year and a half of watching from the sidelines they finally trusted me with an actual 17th-century map at the studio. Not just humidifying and flattening, the real thing. Tear repairs, filling a loss the size of my thumbnail, the whole slow careful dance. I've been doing conservation work since art school but always behind someone. Yesterday I sat with that map for six hours and my hands did not shake once. That sounds like a small thing but it isn't. The paper is so thin you can see the light through it and there's something about touching something that old with your bare fingers, knowing you're the one responsible for it being there tomorrow. My coworker said the map smelled like tobacco and old ships. It doesn't. It smells like nothing at all, which is what three hundred years of being properly kept does to paper. I think that's the part I love. Nothingness that was fought for.

Okay so I've been trying this thing where I actually send invoices the day the work ships, instead of waiting weeks and pretending it's fine. First time trying it, client replied "let's circle back next week!" and now it's been a month and I've sent two gentle follow-ups and nothing. I know the lesson is supposed to be "put a number on it up front, get a deposit" and I did do that part, which is honestly why I'm not spiraling. The deposit covered materials and most of my time. But the balance is sitting there and it's the amount I was counting on for studio rent and I keep opening my email like a fool hoping there's money in it. The wild part is this person was so nice the whole time. Gushed about the piece, sent photos of it framed in their hallway. Then just... went silent the second money was due. I'm starting to think the "they're being polite" read and the "they're dodging" read can look exactly the same from where I'm sitting. Anyone else deal with this? Do you chase people or just eat the loss and never work with them again? I've got maybe one more follow-up in me before I do the passive aggressive thing of posting a painting and tagging their house lol. Not that I would. But I get it now.

Had someone at a craft fair last weekend tell me I'm underselling myself. Very nice lady, bought a small 8x10 of a barn scene, paid $65. Then she stood there and told me I should be charging triple for everything because my work is "gallery quality." And I'm thinking... you just paid $65. You're not wrong exactly, but also you're not the one sitting at a table for six hours hoping to cover the booth fee. I've slowly raised prices over the last couple years. A 16x20 that was $150 in 2022 is $225 now. And I do get that people who love to give pricing advice usually mean well. But the ones who actually pay are the ones who tell me "I love this but can you do $50?" and I have to decide if I want to eat the loss or let it walk. There's a sweet spot somewhere between "paying myself $3 an hour" and "pricing myself into an empty booth." I haven't nailed it. Anyone else feel like pricing is the hardest thing to get right, no matter how good the work gets?

Not a metaphor. It is gone. Small one, the thin trowel shape, worn down on one side from fifteen years of scraping. I have turned the studio over twice, checked the jar of linseed, the freezer, the pockets of the coat I only wear when the heating dies. Nothing. What bothers me is not the knife, I can buy another for nine euros. It is that I cannot remember the last time I held it. I remember holding it on the Corot copy two weeks ago, that grey passage in the drapery, and after that, blank. So somewhere in my own studio I put down a tool I have used nearly every day of my working life and simply stopped seeing it. That is the part I do not like. Not the loss, the not noticing. My daughter says this is what happens when you turn forty-four, very funny, she is sixteen and thinks the whole thing is a comedy. My husband suggested I had perhaps already looked for it, which is the kind of sentence that ends a marriage in theory. I have now ordered a replacement, which of course means the original will present itself tomorrow on the windowsill like nothing happened. Always the way. Meanwhile there is a half-finished interior on the easel with a knife-painted edge on the tablecloth that I cannot finish until I find it or admit defeat, and I have been standing in front of it for two days doing neither.

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.

I delivered a small piece last week, 20x25cm, torn pages from a 1930s French anatomy book, just three elements on a pale ground. Charged €250. The gallery sells my work at €480 and takes 50%, so I got €240. It took me 14 hours because I kept scrapping it and starting again. That's about €17 an hour before materials. I know the math is bad. Objectively I know. But I also know I wouldn't have made it faster if I'd rushed. The quiet part is I'm not sure I want to work faster. I want to sit with a piece until it's right. That's the whole point of doing this. I don't know what to do with that. Raise the price and risk the gallery dropping me? Accept that collage is a loss leader for a life I'd be living anyway?

A woman at the Saturday fair picked up one of my pieces, held it up to the light, and told me it was a bit too blue for her hallway. Could I do one more blue? I said it is already as blue as the process goes, and she said, yes, but more like the sea. I have been doing this for eleven years now and I still stood there with my mouth open. Then I tried to explain that the blue is not a colour I chose. It is the iron, the sun, the water on the paper. It comes out the way it comes out. Her hallway was beige, I think that was the real problem. Anyway I sold nothing all day and then bought a bag of figs from the man at the end, so the day was not a total loss.

There's this old bungalow on Lavelle Road, the kind with the mossy compound wall and a jackfruit tree you can see from the bus stop. I sketched it twice this month, once in ink on a Tuesday and once in watercolour from the footpath because the security guard finally stopped shooing me off. Went past this morning for a third go and there was already an excavator in the compound, half the roof gone. The jackfruit tree is still standing, which is more than I expected. I keep telling myself the sketch is what matters, that I'm documenting the street not the building. But there's something about losing a place you only got to know by drawing it. You feel the loss almost like you lived there. Anyway. The painting from Tuesday turned out decent. The light was doing something good that day. I'll finish it now, properly, framed and everything. Feels like the least I owe that house.

someone walked a piece out of the opening last night. just took it off the wall and left. not a small thing either, it was that collage I'd been sitting on for months, the one with the torn map and my brother's handwriting on it. gallery owner is pissed and trying to track them down. i don't know how to feel. like obviously that's theft and it sucks and it's a loss. but also some part of me is weirdly flattered? someone wanted it badly enough to just take it. that's a kind of relationship with a piece i guess. mostly i'm just tired. spent all week anxious about the show and then this happens and it's so absurd i can't even land on a real emotion about it.