Search

What's the red flag you ignored in a gallery before you signed anything? Mine: the director talked about my work for ten minutes and never once said the word "paint." Only talked about "the story," "the themes," the market for it. I told myself fine, not everyone needs to love the craft, they sell the work. Six months later they still hadn't hung a single painting. Should have known. What did you see and ignore anyway?

Had a market stall at the weekend and the crowd-pleaser wasn't the big linen-backed heron print I was proud of. It was the small rough one of the drowned village, the one I carved off an old photo of my granda's aunt's house that's under the water now in Connemara. Three people bought it and every single one of them stood there while I told them the story. The fella who actually pulled cash out forked over for the smaller, rougher one once he heard the house had a name and a wake in it before the flood. So I've started putting a four-line story under every print on the site instead of "giclee print, acid free, signed." Not the poem, not the essay, just the bones of it. The hare one is now "she sat in the field behind the house the winter I stopped drinking and I thought we were the same animal." Early days but the page views are up and somebody actually messaged asking about the woman in the story. It's not a strategy, it's just me finally telling people why I carved the bloody thing instead of acting like the image should do all the work. Reckon the marketing crowd would call it storytelling. I call it being arsed to talk to people, which is the one thing I'm actually good at. Anyone else ever sold the story and not the picture? Or am I just talking to myself here.

Small printmaker, so this is not some big studio story. I sell at two markets a month and take the odd commission, prints from €35 up to about €280 for the big framed ones. In January I put everything up by a third. Not because I'd found religion about my worth, mostly because framing costs went through the roof and I was sick of eating it. Didn't announce it, didn't write a post about it, just changed the numbers on the board. The thing nobody warns you about: the actual sales barely moved. Maybe a few less of the cheap ones. But the messages changed completely. The crowd that wants a €40 framed original signed to their mother in law on a Tuesday for a wedding on Friday? Thinned out. The people who do get in touch now ask real questions, sizes, editions, can they collect it Saturday. One lad last month paid a deposit before he'd even seen the block proof. I spent years thinking I had a pricing problem when what I had was a sorting problem. The low price wasn't making me sales, it was making me correspondence. The bit I got wrong though: I still price the small unframed ones too low and I know it. There's a stack of hares on the shelf downstairs telling me so. Curious if anyone else found the same after a rise, or if it was the opposite and the whole thing fell off a cliff.

ok so I want to hear the real stories, not the polished ones. mine: I got my first "gallery" because I was doing a market in Ruzafa, a woman bought two small vessels, and three weeks later she messaged me saying she ran a space and wanted to show my stuff. I said yes before I even googled her. Turned out it was a bar with one wall and a very good wine list. Sold nothing. But I learned how to hang a show in one afternoon and I still say "my first exhibition" about it, so. how did yours actually happen? cold email, walk in with a box of work, someone's cousin, a group show you almost didn't apply to? and was it a real gallery or a bar with a wall? honest answers only

Sold a small piece at the flea market on saturday. Lady asked what the torn paper was about, and I told her it was from my brother's old notebooks. She bought it before I even finished the sentence. No reel, no hashtag, no "link in bio." Just me standing there with cold coffee and my actual story. Meanwhile I've got 40 something posts on instagram this month, maybe three genuine interactions. Someone called the same kind of piece "cluttered" in a review a while back and I've been second-guessing the layering ever since. The lady at the market didn't care about composition rules. She wanted to know whose stuff it was. I keep thinking the market is the hobby and the feed is the real thing. It's backwards. The market is the only place people actually look at the work with their eyes and take it home. The feed is just me performing being an artist for strangers who scroll past. Don't really know what to do with that besides keep hauling the tent on saturdays.

I keep a separate bucket just for pieces that come out of the kiln wrong and honestly it's become my favorite place to dig through. Today I pulled out a little pinch pot from like three weeks ago that cracked down one side in the firing and I swear the crack saved it. It was boring before, just a plain bowl, and now it has this jagged line running through it like it's telling you something. I glazed over the edge of the break and it looks intentional. It might have been the best piece I made all month and it was a failure. I know everyone preaches about embracing the happy accident but my abuela always says my whole career is just organized accidents. She's not wrong. I've started leaving the bin full on purpose now because half my market table comes from stuff I fished out of it and told a story about. The kiln does what it wants. You just have to be paying attention when it happens.

I am teaching Mithila painting to a small group in my village, mostly girls, on Sunday mornings in the room where my mother used to sit with her colours. One of them, Sunita, she is fourteen, she has been coming since two years. Very quiet girl, hardly speaking, but her line work is steady, better than some who have been doing longer. Today a lady from Patna who buys from our cooperative took one of her paintings. A small one, two fish and a lotus, on handmade paper, done with the black from lamp soot and the red from kusum flower. Two hundred and fifty rupees. Sunita's mother came to my house in the evening to tell me. She was holding the money folded in her blouse. She did not say much. I also did not say much. The thing is, when I was that age nobody gave us money for this. We painted on the mud walls before the wedding, we painted for the ritual, and that was all. The wall got whitewashed every year and the work went away with it. For long I thought that was the whole of it, that our painting was for the wall and for God and not for selling. I don't know what to feel sometimes. Half of me is happy that the girl has earned something of her own at fourteen. Other half is thinking, will she now paint only the small ones that sell fast, the fish and the peacock, and never learn the whole story of the Kohbar or the wedding of Shiva and Parvati which takes many days. It is a real worry for me. The market wants the easy ones. Anyway. I have told her next month we start the Kohbar, slowly, small portion everyday before she does any selling work. Let us see.

I had a piece in a group show last spring. Small gallery, decent neighborhood foot traffic. They took 40% commission. That's fine, I know the deal, rent's real. But I also had to pay for my own framing. Print the postcards myself. Supply the wine for the opening. They asked if I could "activate my network" on social and tag them in stories every day leading up to it. So I'm paying to make the work, paying to present it, doing their marketing for them, and they take 40% of whatever sells. And I walked away thinking I was lucky to be there. I don't have a tidy conclusion. I'm still trying to figure out which part of this is normal and which part is getting played. Because I keep hearing about how the model is broken for artists but I don't see a lot of alternatives that aren't just "go viral on tiktok" which is its own kind of nonsense.

mine was a disaster at first: I cold-emailed a small gallery in Ruzafa with photos so bad you could barely see the glaze, and they ghosted me for four months. then a friend dragged me to an opening, I brought one piece in a tote bag like an idiot, and the owner actually liked it. still not sure if it was the work or just that I showed up in person. so tell me the real story: how did your first gallery say yes? cold email, walk-in, a friend's intro, a market where someone spotted you? and did it feel like luck or like you actually did something?

There's a Saturday market in Galway I've been doing on and off for maybe twelve years. Rain, hail, the odd glorious day where everyone's in great form. And I used to think the point of it was to shift prints, which it is, but the real thing it taught me is how to talk to people about what you make without sounding like you're selling. You get all sorts at a stall. The tourist who wants something that says Ireland without being a leprechaun on a toilet. The local who stops because they recognise the pier or the mountain. The person who clearly loves the work but hasn't got thirty quid and stands there turning a card over in their hands. And you learn, quick, that the ones who buy aren't the ones you try to convince. They're the ones you just talk to, normally, about the carving or the ink or the hare that lives in the field behind your house and won't let you get near it. The thing that stuck with me is this: I've never sold a print by telling someone how good it is. I've sold plenty by telling them the story of the night I carved it and nearly took the tip of my finger off, or how the block got dropped in a puddle and the crack became part of the print. People want the thing behind the thing. They don't want a pitch. Anyway. The market's grand for that. But online, I still catch myself trying to sound like a proper business instead of just a fella in a jumper with ink under his nails. And the minute I do that, engagement drops off a cliff. The posts that work are always the ones where I forget I'm supposed to be marketing and just talk about what happened today. Sure I don't know where I'm going with this except that the best marketing advice I ever got was from a woman buying a print of a heron who said "just tell me why you made it" and walked away with two.

So I got my first (small, tiny, one wall) gallery show in the dumbest way. I was carrying a box of three of my wonky vessels across town for a market, they were rattling and I was sure two were cracked, and I stopped for a coffee on the way. Owner of a little space next door sees me, asks what's in the box. Next thing I'm showing him one on the floor of his cafe. He put them on a wall for a month and sold one. No email, no portfolio, no nothing. I keep wondering if that's normal or if I just got lucky with a man who likes coffee and ugly ceramics. So tell me, how did you actually land your first gallery? Cold email, walk in with the work under your arm, a friend hooked you up, an open call you almost missed? And did it go anywhere after or was it a one-time thing? I want the real story, not the polite version.

Every gallery in Lyon that takes me seriously found me through an email, not a grid. Every commission this year came from someone who walked into the studio or stood in front of a painting at a group show and stood there too long. Meanwhile the thing I kept hearing, from people whose advice I paid attention to, was that if I stopped posting the algorithm would forget me. It did not forget me. There was nothing to forget. I had four thousand followers and about nine of them ever wrote to me, and two of those nine are my cousins. So I stopped for a year and put the two hours a day back into the work. That is the whole story. I am not going to tell you it doubled my sales, it did not. It just gave me back an afternoon and a morning every week, and I made a lot of paintings in that time, and some of them are good. What I notice now, going back into it lightly, is how much of the language around marketing is borrowed from physical trades. Building an audience. Growing a platform. Nurturing a funnel. It all sounds like hard, visible labor. But I have never once seen it behave like labor. You cannot put in the hours and be sure of the output. That was the thing I could not get used to, after years of learning to paint from life where effort and result are at least in the same room together. Je ne sais pas. Maybe it works for the people who enjoy it. I never did.

got a cold email from a PR agency yesterday. they found my work through a show I did last spring and wanted to "help me tell my story." i was almost flattered until i read the whole thing. they specifically called out the piece i made from my brother's old work shirts and said i should "lean into the grief aesthetic" because it's "very on trend right now." also suggested i do a tiktok series about "what losing someone taught me about creativity." i stared at my screen for like five minutes. then i deleted it. i know they're just doing their job and this is how marketing works now but something about having your actual life turned into a content strategy made my skin crawl. i'm not a brand. i'm not a grief influencer. i'm just someone who makes things because i don't know what else to do with the weight. anyone else getting these? the ones that make you feel like a product instead of a person?

My mother used the same small bamboo brush for forty years before she gave it to me. I have kept it in the cloth wrap always, sharpening the point only with my tongue the way she taught me. Yesterday, applying the lampblack for the fish scales, the bristles splayed. Just gave up, like that. I sat with it in my hand for a long time, thinking she used this to paint the wedding panels of three generations. Now the point is gone and no amount of sharpening brings it back. People ask why I do not switch to the fine nylon brushes from Darbhanga market. They are cheaper, they last, the line is even. But this brush carried my mother's fingers. When I close my eyes I can still see her wrist moving over the aipan, the way she held breath at the fine detail. A new brush will have to learn me. I will have to teach it my grandmother's stroke. It feels like losing a person a second time. Today I opened the new brush and made one honest line with it. Not good yet. But the fish have to be painted, ji. The story does not wait.🙏

There's a gallery in town that turned me down flat about six years back. Nice enough about it, but a firm no. I kept at the prints, did the markets, built up a little name for meself, and sure enough two years later they came back asking would I be interested in a group show. And would you believe I said yes, because I'm a bold eejit and I loved the look on their faces. Anyone else ever had a gallery that passed on you first time and then came sniffing back around later? Or did you tell them where to go? I've often wondered was I too soft about the whole thing, but the show sold well and we're grand now. What's your story?

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.

Right, so I've been going through my own gallery list lately and it's a mess of odd stories, and the one that still makes me laugh is this. Years back I had a handful of lino prints hanging in a chipper in Spiddal. Not a gallery, not a cafe with notions, a chipper. The owner was a cousin of a fella I used to labour with and he wanted something on the walls that wasn't a photo of a fish. So up went three hares. One Friday a woman comes in for a bag of chips, stands there eating them out of the paper staring at the middle hare, and asks him who did it. Turns out she ran a small gallery out west and she rang me the following Tuesday. That one show kept me going for about two years, I'm not exaggerating. And I still can't decide if that's the system working or the system being absolutely stone mad. So go on, where's the strangest, most accidental place a gallery or a show ever came out of for you? A pub, a dentist's waiting room, a wedding, a fella your mother knew, the back of a van at a market. The less likely the better. I want to feel less ridiculous about the chipper.

Did the Christmas market circuit again this year, first time since before the lockdowns, and I forgot how much you learn from standing behind a table for eight hours. Two years of posting online, chasing the algorithm, reels and carousels and all of it. And then one Saturday in Galway an aul wan picks up a print, holds it at arm's length, squints, and says "that's nice, is it from a photograph?" and I'm explaining linocut to her and she buys it and tells me her mother had a hare in the kitchen. That's the whole job. That exchange. Can't get it from a screen. The thing I'd forgotten is how much the actual conversation sells. People don't buy prints standing in a cold hall, they buy the story you tell them about the block and the carving and the bad weather that put the heron in it. I sold more from the table in one day than a month of good posts. Not because the posts are wrong, but because there's no substitute for a body in front of the work. Still, the online crowd is what finds you the gallery people and the commissions. So it's not either/or. But sure, there's a reason I keep the stall. It's the only place the work gets a real reaction instead of a like.