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3am thought i can't shake. i don't know if i actually love making art or if i love the idea of being a person who makes art. someone watching me sketch in a cafe is a completely different drug to being alone with a blank page, which honestly mostly just feels like dread. if you took away every audience forever, no posting, no shows, nobody ever seeing it again, would i still do it. im a bit scared of my own answer

Something happened last week I am still turning over in my mind. A gentleman from Patna, well off, wanted a Kohbar for his drawing room. Size was fine, budget was fine, he was ready to pay more than my usual. Then he said, the colours are very bright ji, and the fish and all, can you make it a little less traditional? More matching with the sofa. I said I will think and let him know. My son says take the order, money is money, do a small change, no harm. Maybe he is right. But I have been sitting with this for some days now. Because what is left if I remove the fish? In our Kohbar the fish is not decoration. It is fertility, it is the whole point of why the bride's family asks for this painting. I cannot make it "less traditional." I can make it smaller. I can make it on better paper. I can explain to him for one hour what he is buying. That much I can do. I did not send that order away yet. He is waiting. My wife says I am stubborn like my mother, which I take as a compliment, though I am not sure she means it so. For those of you selling traditional work, I want to ask honestly. When the buyer wants it diluted, what do you do? Do you hold the line, or you adjust and stay alive? I am not asking to be praised for refusing. I genuinely do not know which is the wiser thing.

Now I love Sister Ruth, I do. She caught me in the fellowship hall Sunday after the second service, held my arm, said my quilt on the altar rail for homecoming was the prettiest she ever saw, and then said the thing. "Can you make me one just like it? Same colors, same blocks. I'll pay you." Same colors. Baby, that quilt is my grandmother's apron and three of my daddy's work shirts and the yellow dress I wore to my sister's wedding in 1979. There is no "same." There's one. I told her I could make her one of her own and she looked at me like I'd offered her a rock. Same look my cousin gave me when I said she couldn't have her mama's dishes split four ways. I'm not mad at her. I'm just tired of being asked to make a copy of the only thing in the world that can't be copied. Twenty-nine years since my grandmother passed and I still can't walk past a certain blue madras in a fabric store without my chest going tight. Anyway. Going to go lay it back out on the floor and finish it. Lord willing and the thread holds.

deadline's friday. freelance gig for a wellness brand, which already tells you everything. they sent the brief as a 14 page pdf and a separate mood board that's just nine screenshots of the same beige instagram feed. today's note: "love it! can we make the logo bigger? like 40% bigger." the logo is a wordmark. the whole card is the wordmark. making it bigger means deleting the phone number, which, sure, honestly, fine. the thing that gets me is i did this exact conversation in 2019. and 2021. i know all the moves. i say "sure, i'll try a version" and then i send the version where it's 12% bigger and they say perfect. i'm not even mad at them. i'm mad that i'm this good at it. spent two years in art school to get fluent in the language of making a thing slightly worse on request. anyway i'm gonna go paint something flat and ugly and loud after i hit send, for me, where nobody gets to say bigger.

My granddaughter posted a picture of the blue one, the one I finished in March, and a lady messaged me direct. Said she loved it. Then she asked could I make her one "but not so busy." Said all the different prints was giving her a headache. Mm. Honey, that busy-ness is the whole quilt. I cut those strips off my mother's church dresses. Three of them. There's a piece in there from a shirt my daddy wore to my brother's wedding in 1974. It don't match because it wasn't supposed to match. Nothing in this family ever matched and we made it work anyway. I told her I'd be glad to make her one and I'd pick her out some nice fabrics, but I wasn't gone take the patterns out. She never wrote back. Then Sunday I'm sitting behind Sister Ruth and she leans over and says the blue quilt put her in mind of her own mama's curtains. And that's it. That's the whole thing. Somebody will always want it quieter. I'm not making it quieter.

I still make my own brushes from neem twigs sometimes. Not always, I have proper ones also, from the city, my son brought me. But for the very fine line work, the kind you see on the border of a Sita kalyan painting, nothing works quite like the neem twig brush. You chew the end soft, shape it with your teeth, then trim it. My grandmother could make one in two minutes without even looking. I still cannot do it like her. But I try. When I am using a store brush I feel something missing. The twig brush, it does not hold so much colour. You have to dip again and again. But the line, thin like a hair, steady. The hand remembers. Yesterday I broke one I was making. The wood split wrong. I sat there a while just looking at it. Then I went outside and found another twig.🙂

Finished a small collage on Thursday, torn book endpapers and a bit of ledger paper, mostly empty. Making it took about six hours across two evenings. Then I spent most of Friday trying to photograph it. Kitchen table, north window, the light here in November is roughly the colour of dishwater. Fourteen shots. The paper is slightly warmer than the photos make it, and the torn edge disappears into the grey background. I know the advice. Get a lightbox, get a proper setup, treat the photo as part of the work. I resent it. The piece is a physical object made of thin, fragile paper and it does not care about a screen. What I make on the table at 23:00 is not what comes out the other end. So I'm considering just posting the bad photo. Slightly grey, slightly off, and honest about it, instead of the lie of a perfectly neutral white background. Not sure if that is stubbornness or a real idea. Probably both.

For about a year I tried to do the Instagram thing properly. Reels, stories, a little carousel about my process. I was showing up, I was consistent. And it worked, in a way, more eyes, more likes, a few commissions. But I was spending the part of the day when the light is right sitting inside editing a video of the light. Last autumn I just stopped. Not deliberately, not as a strategy, I had a show to prepare for and the choice was between making the prints or making the content. So I made the prints. I'm not on TikTok. I don't have a newsletter. My website is a single page with an email address. And honestly? This year has been better than last. Not richer, but better, the people who find me find me through word of mouth, or because someone saw a print in a friend's house, or because they walked into the shop that carries my work. Every sale has a real thread attached to it. Nobody found me through an algorithm and asked for a discount. I don't think this is advice. It's not scalable and I'm not trying to make a living off prints alone, my partner works, I teach a workshop now and then. But the pressure to perform the making instead of just making is so constant that I wonder how many of us are burning our best hours on it. The sea doesn't care about your content calendar.

Okay so this is going to sound like I'm about to sell you a course and I promise I'm not. I deleted the app off my phone nine days ago. Not the account, just the app, because I was opening it while the kettle boiled and then the kettle would boil for eleven minutes and I'd be watching some guy in a loft in Berlin explain underpainting to me. My actual painting time was like 40 minutes a day and my scrolling was two hours. Do the math, it was ugly. Then three commissions came in. From the same two people who've bought before, plus a woman I met at a market in March who said "I'll think about it" and I fully wrote her off. And I keep trying to figure out if this is causation or if it's just that the work I made in those nine days was better because I wasn't painting with half my brain doing caption math the whole time. I think it's the second thing. The commissions might be coincidence. The work is definitely not. The part that bugs me is that the "post every day" advice isn't wrong exactly, it just made me a person who was making content about painting instead of making paintings, and I didn't notice the swap happening. It was slow. Also honestly the account's fine, I'm not quitting, I just check it on my laptop now like a Victorian. Anyway. Nine days, three commissions, one very smug partner who told me to do this in June. Has anyone else taken a step back from posting and had it go weirdly okay, or is this just a lucky streak I'm about to be humbled by

I am putting this here because I have no one else to say it to without sounding ungrateful. Last month I finished a painting for the cooperative, the one that takes our work to Delhi and to the fairs. Wedding scene, peacocks on both sides, natural colour. Fine line work, my eyes are not what they were, so it was slow. Three weeks nearly, with the teaching going on in the mornings. Account came: 1,850 rupees. Paper and the red I make from sindoor and gum and the yellow from turmeric and stone, that all paid from my side. So the real figure is lower than 1,850. There was a time when the buyer came to the house or to the haat and money was less but it was ours and the talking was ours. Now there is the cooperative and the gallery and the website, and I am grateful, truly, because the work goes far. But somewhere in that chain the person who makes the line is the smallest one in it. My son says I should put my own price on the paper when I send it. I am 56, I have been doing this since I was a girl of nine. And still I hesitate to write a number, because in our community the art was never sold as such, it was given for the wedding, for the puja, for the household. That thinking is inside me and I cannot remove it. Tomorrow I have to send two more to the same place. I will send. But something in the chest is sitting heavy.

Sold a run of small prints on the Instagram side in three days. Little 15cm squares, cheap enough that people don't think twice. Then a collector who bought one messaged asking why I don't do a large version of the same piece, one meter wide, because that's what she'd actually hang. Thing is, the big ones don't sell through social. They need to be seen in person, in a gallery, with the light right. I can photograph a cyanotype until the sea turns grey and it still flattens into just another blue rectangle on a feed. So I keep making the small ones because they move, and the collector sits there wanting the big one I haven't printed. There's a version of this economy I don't fully understand yet. The work people say they want and the work people actually buy, they're cousins, not the same person. Anyway I'm prepping the large one this week. I think I'll keep making the smalls too. One feeds the other, even if I can't say exactly how.

The museum down in Montgomery asked if I'd make a piece for their gift shop last fall. I was honored, genuinely. Then I sat down and counted the cloth and the hours and the thread and what I'd need to charge to make it worth my while, and the number I came to felt too big to say out loud. So I didn't say it. I said $400. Took me three weeks. By the time I'd bought good fabric and batting and the needle time, I figure I made about enough to buy a tank of gas and a nice lunch. My granddaughter about cried when I told her. She said, "Grandma, why'd you let them do you like that?" And I thought about it. And the truth is, the honor of it got me. That little piece with my name on it hanging in a museum shop, that's what I was really taking. But honor don't pay the light bill, and it set a number that's going to follow me. Now that shop thinks a Gloria Mae quilt costs $400. That's the price I gave them, so that's the price I get. I've made peace with it as a gift to the place. But I'm a little bit older and a little bit smarter now, and the next time somebody wants a piece, I'm going to say the hard number out loud and let them be the ones to flinch. It's what I tell the young ones starting out: you name your price like you mean it, or the world will name it for you, and it won't be kind.

Client commissioned a big piece for her new office. Paid fully upfront, lovely woman. Then she sent me a Pinterest board full of those mass-produced hexagonal thingies you buy in a box and sticks on the wall like stickers. And she said it, she actually said it, "can you make it more Instagrammable?" I laughed. Not a polite laugh, a real one. She looked shocked and then she laughed too, so I think we're fine. I explained that a Byzantine-style smalti panel takes me about three weeks on the floor, and that the whole point is you can't photograph it properly anyway. The glass catches the light different every hour, the tesserae sit slightly uneven so it shimmers, it's a thing you stand in front of. Anyway she walked away with a piece based on a local old map of the city instead of her Pinterest board, and I think she's happier for it. This whole "content is king, work for the algorithm" thing, I get it, I sell work too. But there's something sad about shaping what you make around a photo of it. The work outlives the post. That's the whole game.

there's this one flat brush i've had since art school. it's completely destroyed, splayed out like a broom, and every single time i pick it up it makes the painting worse. and i keep it on purpose. it's like a grounding tool. whenever i'm being too precious about a piece i grab it, make a mess, and suddenly the stakes are gone and i can actually work. i've had nicer brushes since. bought a set that cost more than my groceries last year. they're fine. but this busted thing is the one that actually fixes my head. it just lives in my cup, insulted looking, and it's done more for me than any of the expensive ones. anyone else got a tool that's objectively bad at its job but you refuse to retire it

I've done this three times now and I keep doing it. A client says they want the best, gold leaf, a hand-carved frame, the real thing, and I nod along because yes, that is what I want to make too. Then I order the frame from a specialist in Avignon who does nothing else, and I'm already €700 in before I've touched a brush to linen. The portrait itself took about six weeks, off and on, between teaching and the daughter's schedule. When I calculated my hourly rate after the frame, the stretcher, the materials, the varnish, it came to about €11.50 an hour. My daughter makes more babysitting. I know I should charge separately for the frame. I know I should quote the whole thing upfront with a deposit that covers materials. But there's something in me that wants the final price to just be the price, like the frame is part of the painting, not a line item. Stupid, probably. The client would never know the difference. Anyone else just bad at separating what you make from what you need to make it?

Took a commission I almost turned down. A cafe owner in Ano Poli wanted a mosaic wall behind the counter, but he had no budget to speak of and kept saying "you know, something Greek." Which usually means he's picturing Parthenon columns or a blue-flag beach, and I've spent twenty years trying not to make those. I went anyway because the space was good, low light, and he let me bring a couple of test panels. I brought smalti and some broken terracotta from a demo site, did a sample that used the actual colors of the street outside instead of the postcard palette. Half expected him to say no. He said yes, and then he let me do whatever I wanted. No moodboards, no "can you make the fish bigger." Three weeks on my knees but I got to make the thing I wanted to make and somebody paid me for it. It's up there now, people photograph it with their coffee. I'm still surprised when that happens. Twenty years in and it still surprises me. The good kind of surprise, the kind that keeps you doing it.

Namaste to all. Myself Ramesh, Mithila painting from Madhubani, and I am fairly new to this online talking. My question is this. In my work there is the traditional thing. Fish, peacock, the wedding of Shiva and Parvati, kohbar for the marriage chamber. This is what my mother taught me and her mother before. Then there is the simpler work. Small fish, plain border, bright, easy to carry home, and this sells faster. So the galleries and the middlemen, they say to me, make more of the simple one, this is what the customer will buy. I have done it sometimes. Money is money and the house is running. But each time I feel some heaviness inside. So I want to ask the artists here, not the gallery people. Have you ever told a gallery no when they asked you to change your work for the market? What did you say, and did they drop you or not? And if you did change, was it worth it or you regret. One more small thing. I told one gallery in Delhi I will not remove the kohbar line from the border because that line is not decoration, it is for the marriage blessing. He laughed. I still did not remove it. That is my answer, kindly give yours.

ok so against my better judgment I started filming the studio work. vertical, phone balanced on a bucket of grogged stoneware, the fancy one. seven videos in and here is what I actually learned. the timelapse of me building a vessel got 400 views. the one where I talk through what I'm doing, 90 views. the one where the piece collapsed at the end and I just said "vale, pues" and kept my hands in the clay, 6k. six thousand. on a collapse. so the thing everyone tells you, "teach, give value, be useful," is apparently worth 90 views. me failing quietly is worth 6k. I don't know what to do with this information. am I supposed to build failure into the schedule now? break things on camera for the algorithm? the part that actually bothers me is I film so much worse when I know the camera is there. my hands get self-conscious, I over-explain, I do the little laugh. and then I'm editing at 1am instead of, you know, making the thing that the account is supposed to be about. anyway I sold two pieces from the collapse video, so. maybe the answer is just keep failing where people can see it.

A woman saw a piece in a group show last spring, one of the ones built around my brother's jacket. Wanted something in the same family, same size, roughly 40x50cm, paper and wash and a bit of the lining stitched in. I said 400. Just said it, out loud, before I'd thought about it, because she was standing right there and the number came out and then it was a commitment. Materials were maybe 60. The rest was eleven weeks of evenings. And the real problem isn't the 400, it's that I can't make a second one. Not that I won't. I can't. The first one used the only piece of that jacket I had left and I knew that when I said yes. So I took the money for a thing that doesn't exist twice, and I've been sitting on the deposit since March trying to figure out how to tell her. I keep drafting the email and it comes out either cold and businesslike or way oversharing, and both of those are worse than just saying it. The part that stings is that I priced it like it was a print. Same flat number you'd give for something you can run again. I don't have a formula for the ones that can't be remade, and I suspect a formula would be a lie anyway. Anyone else quote before their brain caught up? Or taken a deposit for something that turned out to be the last one.

took a freelance logo job i was dreading because rent was due and my studio's a glorified walk-in closet. and it was... fine? client actually let me pick the palette, paid half up front, didn't ask for 47 revisions. i know that sounds like a five-star yelp review for basic decency but in this economy that's basically a miracle. the real win is i finished it in three days and still had energy to paint something for me after. first time in months i didn't feel like a vending machine that dispenses the same beige logo for "exposure points." i even sort of liked the logo by the end. not enough to say it out loud to anyone who'd make fun of me, which is why i'm telling strangers here instead lol rent's paid, i've got a canvas prepped, and the cat finally stopped sitting on my palette. good week.