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?"
so i killed my instagram in february. 11k followers, three years of posting almost daily. the reach had gone to shit anyway, i was getting maybe 200 views on a reel that took me an afternoon, and i kept catching myself making work that would photograph well instead of work i wanted to make. that's the part that got me. i made a piece in january specifically because i knew the process video would do numbers. it did. i hated the piece. anyway i deleted it. no announcement, nothing, just gone. what i did instead: went back to emailing. actual emails to about 40 people, buyers from the last two years plus a few gallerists and one curator who'd been nice to me once. no newsletter platform, no funnel, just me at the kitchen table with the names in a spreadsheet. one email every four or five weeks with a photo of whatever's on the wall and one line about what i'm doing. sold four pieces since february. which is more than i sold in the previous eight months of posting. i don't fully understand it. maybe it's that email feels like a person and the feed feels like a shop. maybe i just got better at asking. either way i'm not going back and i feel slightly stupid for the three years i spent chasing views that never turned into anything. the thing i can't decide is whether this only works because i already had the followers to begin with. like if i were starting from zero tomorrow would i have to do the whole dance again. i think probably yes and i don't like that answer
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've been fighting this piece since March. Charcoal on paper, 40x60, my mother at 29, which is two years younger than I am now. I used a photo I hadn't looked at in probably a decade, one where she's laughing with her whole face and you can't tell anything was wrong yet. Drew it four times. Burned the second one, actually put it in the fire pit out back, which felt dramatic and then felt correct. The thing that finally did it was stopping trying to make her look like the photo and just drawing the mouth from memory. Her real mouth, the one she got when she was tired. Not the smile. I cried a little, which is embarrassing to type but there it is. It's hanging now. Cheap black frame from the craft store, nothing fancy. And every night I get up around 3 to pee and walk right past her face in the dark and I still don't know if it's good. But it's UP. It's on a wall, in my house, where people will see it. Some work you make to show people and some work you make to put something down. This one was the second kind and I'm only now figuring out that counts as a win too.
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?
Ok so I want to hear the actual stories, not the polished "I just kept making work and eventually..." version. Mine: there's a café near me with really good light and I basically went in every week and eventually the owner let me hang six pieces. Sold two. One to the barista. I have never felt more famous than that week haha. It was NOT a gallery, it was a café, and it counted. So how did your first one actually happen? Cold email? Walked in with a portfolio? Friend of a friend? Messaged a curator at 1am (no judgement, I have almost done this)? Tell me yours, I want the real version. Also if you've never landed one yet, what's the thing you're most scared to try? I'll tell you if I'd do 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.
back leg snapped clean off, someone had tried to fix it with a wood screw and made it worse. i gave the woman two dollars and she looked at me like i'd done her a favor which, i guess, i had. it's sitting on my work table under a lamp right now. i keep not drawing it. that's the whole problem lately, everything i start comes out too neat, too resolved, like i'm illustrating the thing instead of looking at it. the chair doesn't resolve. it just sits there being broken and specific, the splintered end of the leg still pale where it snapped, the screw hole gone black at the edges. i've been photographing it from underneath for a week, which is a weird angle nobody would choose, which is probably why it's working. three of them are pinned up over the sink. my friend said they look like a crime scene. she's not wrong. anyway. making work about damage is easy to say and hard to actually do without turning the damage into a prop. this chair is teaching me the difference.
The courier handed it to me and it was warm. Who knows why. The box had a dent the shape of a person sitting on it, and I thought fine, the ream inside is wrapped. It was not wrapped. Cotton paper absorbs everything it touches and apparently it had been touching a box that spent two days in a warehouse that smells like diesel and damp cardboard. So the top thirty sheets now smell like a truck. Not visibly ruined, just smelling, which is worse, because you can't photograph the problem and you can't prove anything. I have a show in March. I need 40 good prints and I've been working toward them since October. So now I'm doing the thing where I hold each sheet up to the window like a doctor looking at an x-ray, deciding which ones I'm going to pretend are fine. The funny part is I make work about the multiple, about the copy, about how a print is never really the original. So the universe has a sense of humor about me being precious with paper. But there's a difference between the idea of the reproducible and the smell of my studio right now, which is a rented Mazda. I've started leaving them out with a bowl of bicarbonate next to them like it's a sick animal. Tell me if you know a better trick, or tell me I'm being dramatic. Both fine.
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.