20 results for “making work”
The gallery owner took me aside after looking at my cyanotypes and said, very kindly, that the work was beautiful but maybe "a bit too quiet" for their clients. Could I try something with more obvious subject matter? A wave, a boat, something people recognise. I said I'd think about it. I didn't. What's the nicest way someone has tried to change what you make? The most polite "could you be less yourself?"
First gallery that took me seriously wanted me to scale everything down. Said my pieces were too big to sell. I told them no. We parted ways. I still think it was the right call. What's the thing a gallery asked you to change that you actually should have listened to? Or the one you're glad you walked away from.
A gallery once told me they'd take my interiors "if I brightened them up", wanted to hang them next to some very cheerful abstract stuff. I said no, politely, and never heard back. Zero regrets, but I still wonder if that was stupid. So, the question: has a gallery ever asked you to change your work to fit their space, and did you do it? Where's the line between adjusting and selling out? I know some people say a gallery knows its buyers, that a little shift is just business. But I've also seen painters sand the edges off everything they did trying to please one room and end up with nothing. Give me your story. Especially the ones where you said no and it went fine, or where you said yes and it paid off.
My gallery, after fifteen years, asked if I could start working on a smaller scale. The new collectors, they said, want something that fits above the sofa. I pointed out that I already have a small format, it's called a sketch. That didn't land. I know the market has gone that way, everything compressed into a domestic object, something you can rehang when you repaint the wall. But there is a size where a painting stops being a painting and becomes a furnishing. When I have to ask myself if the piece will clear the hallway of whoever buys it, I have stopped thinking about colour and started thinking about logistics. I didn't say no. I said let me think about it. And now I'm sitting with the fact that I said that, and what it costs me to keep the door open. Forty years ago I made work on paper you could fold and put in a drawer. Nobody asked me to then. Genau, times change.
I've been painting a long time and I still can't explain it, the moment that sharp mineral smell hits my nose my brain just switches into work mode. It's like a Pavlovian trigger. I had a period where I was using odorless mineral spirits because my daughter was small and I was worried about fumes, and I felt like I was working through fog the whole time. Soon as I went back to real turpentine it was like someone turned the lights on. The headaches are real though. I keep my windows open even in January, the neighbours probably think I'm running a laboratory. Does anyone else have this with a material smell? Or am I just a romantic who romanticises his own solvents.
A gallery in Barcelona wants to do a small solo show in October, my work, but also some documentation of process, which is fair, the whole thing is basically tidepool alchemy. They asked for my notes on the seawater development, dilution ratios, exposure times, how I account for different salinity levels. And I sat down to write it and realised I have none. I just know. I've been doing this so long I can feel it, the weight of the paper, the way the light sits, the smell of the water. I never standardised any of it because every print is a different day, different sun, different batch of Atlantic. I told them I'd put something together and now I'm staring at a blank page trying to remember how to explain something I only understand with my hands. I think this is the gap between making work and showing it. The making is private and intuitive and full of failure and small victories nobody sees. The showing asks you to translate all of that into something legible. I don't know how to do that without flattening it.
I used to do this thing where I'd tell people "pay what you can afford" because I genuinely believed in making art accessible and also I hate conflict LOL. But here's what kept happening: Someone who clearly had money would pay me $20 for a charcoal portrait that took me 6 hours. And I'd smile and say thank you because I SAID they could name the price and I didn't want to be a hypocrite. Meanwhile I had a single mom pay me $150 for a small drawing because she said "I know what labor costs and I want you to keep making work." The sliding scale only works if people are honest. And I realized I was letting the people who COULD pay more off the hook because I was scared to just... state my price like a real businessperson. Now I just say what it costs. If someone genuinely can't afford it I'll trade or work something out one on one. But I stopped making my pricing a charity auction where the rich get the discount. Anyone else do the "honor system" thing and regret it?
I did a screenprint edition last month, 50 copies, three colours, hand-pulled, on nice 300gsm. Cost me about €450 in materials plus probably 30 hours in the studio. Sold 7 so far at €40 each. That's €280. Even if I sell every last one I'm barely breaking even on materials, let alone labour. And I know the advice. Raise the price. Build a mailing list before you print. Test the market with a preorder. All sensible. But there's something about making the edition first, committing to it, that's the whole point for me. The risk is part of the form. If I only printed what I'd already sold, it'd feel like a different practice entirely. I'm not complaining exactly. More trying to figure out where the line is between doing something for the work's sake and just being bad at the business side. Because I think I'm genuinely bad at the business side. But I also think the people who are good at it sometimes make work that's too safe. Any other printmakers here just accepting they'll lose money on editions because the object matters more than the margin? Or am I deluding myself.
I had this portrait I did last summer, a woman with her hair caught in wind, all warm ochres and pale blue. I was so proud of it at first, then after a few months I started seeing everything wrong with it. The jaw was off. The pastel dust had settled into the paper grain in a way I didn't like. I kept it in my studio, didn't even photograph it properly for Instagram. I mentioned it in passing to someone at a small market stall I was sharing last month, just complained actually, that I had this piece taking up space and nobody wanted it and maybe it was just a failed experiment. She asked to see it. I pulled it out reluctantly. She bought it on the spot. Not because I pitched it well. Because I stopped trying to make it sound like something it wasn't. I've been thinking about that a lot. How much energy I spend polishing the story around my work, making it sound impressive, desirable, worth someone's time. And the one time I just said "this thing exists and I'm not sure it's even good" it worked better than any of my careful descriptions ever did. Maybe the selling is in the honesty, not the framing. I don't know. I'm still figuring it out.
Found a box in the back of the closet today. Ex's stuff, the stuff I couldn't give to Goodwill after we split. Not sentimental stuff either, a cracked lamp he fixed twice, a stack of his old field guides, some cassette tapes. Four years and I still can't bring myself to open it, let alone get rid of it. Weird part is I don't miss him. The marriage was done long before the divorce was. But that box is the one thing I won't touch. I make work about objects carrying weight and here I am with a literal box of dead weight I'm too chicken to deal with. Maybe it becomes a piece someday. Maybe that's the only way I let myself look at it.
There's a bucket of seawater on my studio floor that's been there since Tuesday. I keep meaning to dump it and I keep not doing it, and now it's become this small fixed point I walk around, like a pet I've forgotten to feed. Probably has something living in it by now. I don't even remember what I was going to use it for. Some experiments I had in mind about development time in colder water, and then the day got away from me like they do. It's not the first time. There's a shelf of dried prints I've never mounted because I liked them better loose, and they're starting to curl. I think half of making work is just this. Holding things long enough to decide they matter, and letting the rest quietly go bad in a bucket.
found a roll of undeveloped film at the bottom of a drawer my mom gave me. finally got it developed. 24 frames, all trips to the same relatives' house, xmas 1987. nobody in a single photo is smiling. not one. my dad took them all and he isn't in any of them. i keep going back to the one of my mom holding a casserole dish and she looks like she's about to drop it on someone's head. i don't know what i expected. some part of me hoped for something warm in there. instead it's just these people in a dim living room all waiting for it to be over. i've been staring at one frame for two days trying to decide if i can use it. the light is actually good, which makes it worse somehow. anyone else ever dig up old photos and find out the past was exactly as grim as you remembered? sometimes i think i make work just to argue with it.
i've been going back and forth on this. i've had some luck emailing but they usually take months to answer if they do. then last year i dropped by a small space on a whim just to look, mentioned i make work, and the owner actually asked to see my portfolio right there. nothing came of it but the fact that she even looked. i feel like walking in is such an old-fashioned move now but it's the only time i've gotten a real response. am i missing something? do you all just email and wait, or are people showing up in person still?
I got so sick of the game I just stopped. No stories, no posts, nothing. Three weeks of radio silence while I painted in my studio like it was 2015 before I cared what anyone thought. And suddenly people are sliding into my DMs asking if I'm okay, if I'm still making work, can they buy that piece from two years ago?? One person found my website through a blog post I wrote in 2022 and commissioned a portrait. A PORTRAIT. Off a blog I forgot existed. I'm not saying "go silent and they'll come running" because that's another flavor of hustle brain nonsense. But damn. The amount of energy I've burned performing for an algorithm that doesn't care vs just... existing and letting people find me when they need to. I don't know what to do with that information honestly.
I did the math on my last edition of 12. Each print took about six hours of actual work, plus plate prep, plus the failed states I pulled before I got the one I kept. I used to price per piece based on time and materials alone, which meant each print was maybe €180 and I was basically paying myself to make work for people to frame and never think about again. Then I flipped it. I priced the edition as a whole, sold the run of 12 at €380 each, and the margin came out to more than my screenprinting gigs pay per week. Same hours, same copper, same ink. The only difference is I stopped pretending the value lives in the labour and started charging for the fact that there are only twelve of something in the world. Feels almost dishonest. Scarcity doing work that my hands should be doing, or that my hands ARE doing and I just refused to name it. Still not sure where the honest line is between "this took me time" and "only a few of these exist and you can't have one unless you pay." But I'm not going back to per-hour pricing either.
My daughter told me yesterday that the studio smells like "old chip shop and sadness." I had to laugh. To me it's the smell of work, of a day beginning properly. But she's not entirely wrong, that linseed, that turpentine, it does hang heavy. I don't even notice it until I leave and come back. Then it hits me. There's a painter I know who switched entirely to water-mixable oils a few years ago. Says his wife couldn't take the fumes. I understand. But I can't do it. Something about the smell is part of the process for me, like the feel of the oil in the brush. It's a sensory anchor. Without it I think I'd paint differently, more timidly maybe. Curious if anyone else has that one sensory thing, smell, sound, a particular light, that they can't separate from making work.
Working on this collage for about three weeks now, layered paper and acrylic on board. It's about the house I grew up in, which I've been avoiding making work about for years because it felt too obvious. But I'm stuck at that stage where I can't tell if it's actually done or if I've just stared at it so long I've gone blind to it. The thing is, there's this one torn scrap of a photograph I embedded near the bottom right, my brother's hand, actually, from an old birthday photo, and every time I look at it I think it's either the whole reason the piece works or it's a sentimental crutch I should've painted over two weeks ago. I don't trust my own eyes on it anymore. Anyone else get to that point where you can't tell the difference between "it's finished" and "I'm just tired of this conversation"?
Had a gallery reach out to me recently, or rather, someone claiming to scout for one. Seemed excited, asked for my portfolio, then came back with a list of things I should change before they could "consider" showing the work. Make the palette warmer. Fewer buildings, more people. Can I add more "local flavour", their words. I didn't know whether to laugh or be offended. You haven't even seen the work in person and you already want me to be someone else? Anyway I politely declined. But it got me thinking, has anyone else had a gallery approach you and then immediately start asking for changes before they've even taken the work? Where do you draw the line between feedback and them wanting you to fit a mould?
For ten years I kept a paper notebook of every piece I sold. Who bought it, how they found out about me. Back when that was mostly gallery openings and word of mouth. Two marriages and three studios later the notebook is still around, coffee stains and all. Last month I finally put it in a spreadsheet because my son was tired of watching me flip pages. And there it was, plain as day. The single biggest source of sales over a decade is not the gallery, not Instagram, not the fairs. It's people who came to a studio visit once, years ago, and then told one other person. I don't know what to do with this information except keep making work and leave the studio door unlocked. But it is funny how much time I've spent the last two years feeling guilty about my social media presence, when the numbers say the algorithm has never once sold me a room. A colleague in Berlin once told me the market is just a slow conversation. I think about that more than I should.
Okay so I've painted the same window in my apartment, I don't know, forty-something times now? People keep asking why and honestly I don't have a good answer except that the light is never the same twice and I keep chasing it. But here's the thing. I framed one today. Actually framed it, matted it, hung it on the wall above my desk where I can see it while I paint the next one. I've never done that before. Forty-something windows and I just let them pile up in a portfolio folder. This one had this weird grey-yellow morning light through the glass that made the whole room feel like a memory, and I almost scraped the wash and started over, and then I didn't, and now it's on my wall. It's not a sale. It's not a commission. Nobody's going to buy it. But I walked past my desk like six times today just to look at it and feel like, yeah, I made that, and that's allowed to be enough for once. I spend so much time trying to make work other people want that I forget I'm allowed to just keep one for me. Anyway that's my win today. Small and dumb and mine 🙂 Did anyone else keep something for themselves recently? Because I think we should all be doing that more.