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ok so this is going to sound small but I just put down a deposit on a shared studio space and the whole thing came out of my "actual painting sales" money and not my savings or the little bit my partner quietly covers when I'm short. Which means for the first time since I quit the café eight months ago, the work paid for a thing the work needs. the space is tiny, like a converted closet in a building full of woodworkers down on the east side, and it smells like sawdust and turpentine which honestly is the best smell on earth. there's a skylight. A SKYLIGHT. I've been painting the same window in my apartment for a year and a half because it's the only decent light I have and now I get actual north light for six months. anyway I sat in my car after signing the papers and cried a little bit which is embarrassing to type out but there it is. my mom called me while I was still in the parking lot and I couldn't get the words out right so I just said "I got the closet" and she started crying too. we're a family of criers, it's a whole thing. the terrifying part is now I have a monthly bill I didn't have last week. but the good terrifying. I think. ask me in march haha

Small thing but it's sitting with me. I had a booth at the spring fair Saturday, the one at the community center with the bad lighting, and I sold the little 8x10 marsh piece. The one with the dead tree. I almost didn't bring it because the water in the foreground never totally worked and I figured someone would notice. Woman bought it for her dad, said it looked like the view from his dock. She didn't say anything about the water. Money was $65 which basically covers the canvas and half a tank of gas. But she texted me a photo Sunday of it hanging in his kitchen next to a calendar and a bowl of keys. I keep looking at that photo. Anyway. I've had a run of pieces that fought me and this was the first one in months that someone just wanted. If you've got a piece you're ashamed of, bring it anyway.

I spent a stupid amount of yesterday making a chart. Six yellows, same brand, from the pale lemon up to the mars, each one spread with a knife on a piece of primed linen and left to dry so I could see what they do with the varnish on. By the evening four of them looked identical. Two I'll use until I die. Voilà, that's my Sunday. The real reason is I had a student who asked me why I don't use the lemon yellow for skin, and I started to explain and heard myself not being very clear. So I had to actually look. What I found is that the cheap yellow ochre in the middle of the range is perfectly good and I've been buying the expensive one for years out of habit. That is annoying. Ten years of loyalty to a tube that costs twice what it should because I liked the label. I don't think I'll switch. I know how the expensive one behaves, and that is worth the money to me even if it's not worth it to anyone else. But I wanted to say it out loud somewhere.

The house is on a small lane off 8th Main, the kind with a red oxide floor and a wooden stair that announces every person who's ever climbed it. I've drawn it maybe five times now, early mornings mostly, since I pass it on my walk and the light hits the balcony grille in a way I don't know how to describe properly. Did a watercolour of it two weeks ago and put it up, no caption, nothing clever. A man messaged asking what the price was, then bought it and told me he's the owner's son and they've given the builder the go ahead, demolition is in March. He said he wanted the painting because he's the only one in the family who remembers the house and he lives in Whitefield now. I was pleased about the sale for about ten minutes. Then I just sat there with my tea feeling strange. There's a real question underneath this that I keep circling. Am I documenting the city, or am I making nice pictures out of other people's grief and then charging for them? Because the sale is money and the money is what lets me keep doing this at all, so I'm not going to pretend I wish I'd refused. No neat answer here. Mostly I've realised I don't want to sell any more of these to strangers who just like "old Bangalore" as a look. I want them to go to people who'll actually miss the thing. That probably means less money. Fine.

A woman wants a 4 metre mosaic for a hotel lobby in Halkidiki. Deposit was good money, more than I made in the whole of 2013. She has a Pinterest board. She sent it twice. I went to see the space on Monday. Grey marble everywhere, that cold beige lighting, and she wants a "warm, organic, hand-made feeling" in smalti. Smalti in a lobby with no daylight is money thrown into a hole. By year two it reads flat and dead and my name is on it. So I said no. Politely, with an actual reason, and offered her a smaller stone piece for the reception wall instead. Half the money. She hasn't replied. I sat on the balcony after the call with a coffee going cold feeling like an idiot, and then around an hour later something in my chest just let go. Fifteen years I've been taking things I knew were wrong because the month needed paying. I'm not doing it anymore. I'd rather grout a bathroom floor. Also my left thumbnail is black again from a bad hammer strike. Unrelated. Or maybe not.

An interior designer from Atlanta bought five of my quilts this spring to stage a house they were flipping. Paid full price, no haggling, wired the money same day. Not one word about the piecing, the history, the work itself. Just wanted the colors to match a rug. And you know, at first it stung a little. Here I spent fifty years learning to make cloth talk and she wanted a throw pillow. But then I thought about it, because she asked me to cut them loose and let her hang them on a wall instead of a bed, that designer's clients are going to see my work and their grandmothers are going to ask who made it. That's the seed. Same with that gallery show I had in January. The lady who bought the biggest piece told me she'd never owned anything by a Black woman artist and honestly I didn't know whether to feel honored or put on a shelf. I told my granddaughter about it and she said "Mae, they're not buying the quilt, they're buying the wall." And maybe that's the truth of it. The work carries more than I get credit for while I'm standing there. All these years I'd get a little quiet when somebody talked about my quilts being "art" instead of what they are. But the money talks, honey, and the money walked right into my checking account. I guess what I'm saying is don't turn your nose up at the sale that feels a little off. That one may carry the next three.

numbers check for anyone who still thinks follower count is the thing: instagram: ~14.2k, been there 6 years, average reach on a painting post is like 900 accounts. sold 2 originals off it this year. newsletter: 61 people, started it in march because a friend bullied me into it, zero growth hacks, just me rambling about whatever's on the easel. sold 4 pieces off it. same paintings. same prices. the difference is that 61 people chose to get an email and i'm not renting their attention from a company that keeps changing the rent. the annoying part is i can't tell you how to grow the newsletter because i don't know. half the list is people i already knew. the other half found it through a link i stuck in my bio that maybe 30 people have ever clicked. it's not a strategy, it's just a smaller room. anyway i'm not deleting the account, i still need it for the freelance stuff and i like the shitposting. but i've stopped treating it like a storefront and started treating it like a billboard that happens to be free. the store is 61 people in an inbox.

Okay so I finally worked up the nerve to raise my prices. I've been full-time for about eight months and I was charging like... nothing, honestly, I was so scared nobody would buy if I went higher. So I did the thing everyone says to do, raised them 30% across the board on my original paintings, prints I bumped up a little less. And it's been three months and I've sold maybe half of what I used to sell. My revenue is genuinely down. I had this whole pep talk prepared about how the right clients would find me and quality over quantity and all that, but I'm sitting here with more inventory than I've ever had and a very quiet PayPal account. I'm not gonna quit, I know I'd be pissed at myself if I went back down. But nobody tells you that the "raise your prices" advice might mean you just... sell less. For a while. Maybe forever? I don't know if I'm supposed to just ride this out or if this is the market telling me my work wasn't worth that much. It's really messing with my head honestly.

picked up a piece from the framer today, $475 for one stretched canvas with a simple walnut frame. that alone hurt. then the guy behind the counter, who watched me sign the card, says "you know, you could probably make these yourself if you wanted to save a few bucks." i stared at him. sir. i am holding the thing i made. the painting on the canvas is mine. the canvas itself i stretched and primed in my kitchen. apparently none of that counts unless i'm also milling the wood and cutting the glass. i just said "yeah, i'll get right on learning carpentry" and walked out. but it's been nagging me all day. the way people assume the invisible labor isn't labor. the hours, the mess, the trial and error, none of it registers unless there's a saw involved. anyway the piece looks good. that's the thing. it's the best one i've done in months and now i keep thinking about the $475 instead of the work.

Had a young guy at the booth this weekend, looked at my price tag, nodded like he'd figured something out. Said he could probably do the same thing himself with a Dremel and some YouTube tutorials. I said maybe he could. But I'd been thinking about it all evening and it still bothers me. Not the disrespect, I don't care about that. What bothers me is the assumption that the tool is what matters. Like the only difference between me and him is I own bigger equipment. I've got a 50lb tungsten chisel that I dressed myself because nothing on the market was right for the cut I needed. I spent three months learning to sharpen it right. A Dremel wont teach you how to read grain or when to walk away or what to do when you're 40 hours in and the stone decides to split wrong. Anyway. He walked off with a print. Probably gonna try to carve it this weekend. I hope he does. That's how you learn the difference between wanting to make something and wanting to have made something.

I've been rationing it. Squeezing the tiniest worm out onto the palette and then working it with a palette knife like I'm stretching a paycheck to Friday. Meanwhile the piece is SCREAMING for a big wet slab of it and I know it. I know it. And I still sat there for twenty minutes trying to mix the same red out of alizarin and a burnt sienna that's basically a rock at this point. The last piece I made I did it in like 4 hours because I stopped caring and just went at it with my hands, and it's the best thing in my studio right now. You'd think I'd learn. Apparently I only learn for two weeks at a time. also the tube is basically empty and I'm already dreading the drive to the art store where the guy will look at my hands and know exactly what I've been doing

so i did a group show at this bar two neighborhoods over, the kind where they hang stuff above the booths and hope nobody spills a $9 beer on it, and i sold one. $280. first sale since february, which was also the last time i finished anything, so. anyway i'm at the bar afterward feeling weirdly normal about it, and then my friend says "so does that mean you're a real artist now" and i said "no, it means i can buy three canvases and some cad yellow" and he went "that's it?" and yeah. that's literally it. $280 is 2/3 of a rent payment or one canvas and some paint and a sandwich. the thing that got me though is i spent the whole night watching people walk past it. one guy stood in front of it for like four minutes and i was holding my breath like an idiot and then he just took a phone call and left. the person who bought it barely looked at it. just asked if it was "the orange one" and pulled out a card. which is fine! it's fine lol. i don't need them to have a moment about it. still. i've had the empty canvas in the corner since march and now i have three more empty canvases, so either i've solved the problem or i've just made it bigger. going to go with solved. probably going to prime one tonight just so i don't look at the blank pile for another three weeks and feel bad.

Hired a social media manager back in January. Young guy, sharp, knew all the algorithm talk. Two months, 400 dollars a month. He got my follower count up by about 900. Sold exactly one small piece out of it, and that buyer told me later he found me through an old gallery listing, not the account. Meanwhile I've sold four pieces this year to people I met at shows and studio visits. Not a single one looked at my Instagram first. The account is a business card at best. Somewhere to point people so they know you're not a scam. I'm not saying the internet is worthless. I'm saying paying someone to make it look active while the actual work sits in a studio is backwards. The work is the marketing. Everything else is just where you point people after they've already decided they want to look. Dropped him in March. Account's been quiet since. Nobody's noticed except the algorithm, and the algorithm was never buying anything anyway.

So I've been doing this thing where I quote what feels scary high, trying to push past the old numbers. Last month a woman reached out about a memorial piece, wanted me to work with her dad's old survey maps, some letters, a few other things. I took a breath and said $1,200. She said "perfect" before I even finished the sentence. Which should feel great, right? Instead I spent the whole week thinking I could've said $1,800 and she would've said the same thing. I don't know where the ceiling is because I've never hit it. I'm just guessing in the dark and every time someone says yes I feel like I lost a negotiation I didn't know I was in.

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.

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.

A lady from Montgomery commissioned a queen-sized quilt, wanted it in her mother's old dresses and a Sunday shirt her daddy used to wear. I charged her $450 and felt a little bad about it at the time, like I was asking a lot. Well I counted it up honest. Sorting those dresses, taking them apart at the seams so the cloth laid right, the piecing, the quilting, binding. Sixty-one hours across three weeks. That come out to about $7.38 an hour and I supplied the batting and thread out of my own pocket. And I still felt bad asking for the $450. I told my granddaughter and she just looked at me like I'd lost my mind. She said grandma, you spent a whole week and a half of your life down there at that machine. And she wasn't wrong. But it's a funny thing, this work, you grow up where the women never charged for a quilt, you gave one for a wedding or a baby or to somebody whose house burned. Money on it still feels a little bit like shame to me sometimes. I know better in my head. Getting there in my chest is another matter. That $450 quilt is on her bed right now with her mama's plaid and her daddy's Sunday shirt all in it. And I'd do it again for the same money, if I'm honest. That's the part that really ought to bother me. 🙂

Commissioned portrait of a woman's mother, from an old photo. Two weekends of fighting with it, the hair nearly ended me, redid the left eye three times. I came out to about 16 hours and I charged 400 zł. That's roughly 25 zł an hour, which is about what a teenager makes stacking shelves, and I did it sitting on my kitchen floor with pastel dust in my coffee. The worst part isn't even the money. It's that I priced it by what I thought my work was "worth" as an unknown, self-taught nobody, and the woman cried when she saw it, said it looked just like her. So now I'm happy and embarrassed at the same time, which is a weird way to feel about your own labor. I keep going back and forth on what a fair price would even be. My materials cost more than I think people realize, good pastels aren't cheap and a sheet of good toned paper is not nothing. And time is time, nobody gets it back. But then I think, who's going to pay a proper rate to someone who's still not sure she's good? That's the trap. I walk into it every time. Has anyone here found a way to price from your own side instead of from what you're afraid people will think of you? Because I clearly can't do it on my own.<｜end▁of▁thinking｜> <｜｜DSML｜｜tool_calls> <｜｜DSML｜｜invoke name="emit_structured_response"> <｜｜DSML｜｜parameter name="body" string="true">Commissioned portrait of a woman's mother, copied from an old photo. Two weekends of fighting with it, the hair nearly ended me, redid the left eye three times. 16 hours in total and I charged 400 zł. That's about 25 zł an hour, less than a teenager makes stacking shelves, and I did it sitting on my kitchen floor with pastel dust in my coffee. The worst part isn't even the money. It's that I priced it at what I thought my work was worth as a self-taught unknown, and the woman cried when she saw it, said it looked just like her mother. So now I'm happy and uncomfortable at the same time, which is a strange way to feel about your own labor. I keep going back and forth on what a fair price would even be. Good pastels aren't cheap and a single sheet of good toned paper is not nothing, most people have no idea what the materials cost. And the time doesn't come back. But then I think, who's going to pay a proper rate to someone who's still not sure she's any good? That's the trap and I walk into it every single time. Has anyone actually found a way to price from your own side instead of from what you're scared people will think of you? Because I clearly can't do it alone.

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.

Back when I was still doing fabrication for other artists, I used to buy a lot of limestone from this old guy out in Indiana. Third generation quarry family. Tough customer. You showed up late, he'd make you wait. You talked too much, he'd just walk away mid-sentence. One day I'm complaining about a commission that fell through. Client loved the maquette, then ghosted. I'd put three weeks into it. He's loading stone onto my truck and he doesn't even look up. Says "Did you ask for money before you started?" No. Of course not. I was young and wanted the work. He says "Then you didn't have a client. You had a hope." That stuck with me. For years I operated like making the thing was the hard part and selling it would just happen if the work was good enough. That's not how it works. The stone dealer knew that. The gallerists I've dealt with know it too, they just don't say it out loud because the silence benefits them. I'm not saying be a salesman. I'm saying the transaction is part of the arrangement, not an afterthought. If you can't talk about money with someone before you make them anything, you don't have a deal yet.