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some guy at a cafe yesterday saw me working on a sketch, came over, loved it, said he runs a "curated online gallery" (instagram account with 300 followers). wanted to feature me. for free. in exchange for "exposure to his network." i asked him how many sales his featured artists usually get from it. he said "well it's more about building relationships." so i said cool, let's build one where you pay me. he did not think that was funny. he left me his card anyway. the card had a stock photo of a paintbrush on it.

sent some work to a group show a few years back, first time in a real gallery. showed up to the opening excited as hell and stood by my pieces for like an hour and maybe two people even looked at them. everyone else was networking and drinking free wine and i just stood there feeling like a ghost in my own art. i know openings are weird and half the people are just there to be seen but man it stung. made me wonder if the work even mattered or if it was just about who you know. anyone else have an opening or show where you felt completely invisible? how'd you handle it? i just left early and sulked lol

Been posting these photos of abandoned silos for months, mostly because I can't stop driving past them on the way to the studio. No hashtag strategy, just whatever time of day I happened to pull over. A feed is basically dust and rust. Anyway a land trust emailed me yesterday. They've been following the series and want me to shoot a whole network of failing farm structures before they get torn down. They're paying. Real money, not exposure. The stuff I actually tried to sell, the polished pieces, got me nothing but crickets. The thing I did just because I couldn't look away is the one with value. I keep relearning this and it keeps being embarrassing.

Took me forty-five years and a divorce to say it out loud but here we are: if someone hands me a theme and a deadline, my brain turns off like a switch. I stare at the wall. I cut and reset the same piece of stone six times. I produce something technically fine that I don't care about. Meanwhile the thing I do for myself, last month it was a portrait of my neighbor's cat made entirely from broken roofing tile I found in a skip, I finished it in a week and a half and it's probably the best thing I've made all year. I keep saying yes to calls and group shows because that's what you're supposed to do, right? Get your work out there. Network. But I think I'm done pretending I function that way. I'll take the solo slow route even if nobody sees it for a while.

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.