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Saturday, open studios, and I'm not paying attention because I'm talking to a man about his dead father's shed for twenty minutes. Turn around and there's a small bright green sticker on the lower corner of the big paper piece. Some kind of dinosaur. I left it. It's still on there. Two days now. Partly I'm annoyed. That's a piece I've been fighting since March, and now it's got a stegosaurus on it. Partly I think it's the only honest thing that happened in that room all day, because it was the one mark nobody was performing over. The kid saw a thing and stuck a thing to it and walked off. No statement, no price list, no explanation about tension and memory. The friend who helped me hang says take it off before the next thing. She's right, obviously. I just keep not doing it. Anyone else had their work improved by someone under the age of six

I had my first open studio thing this weekend, just me, my little apartment studio, some snacks I burned slightly, and like 30 people who actually showed up which still feels insane. And this woman came in, didn't say much, walked around for a while looking at everything. She kept coming back to this one painting I almost didn't hang because I thought it was too quiet, just a corner of my kitchen window with the light hitting the sill at that golden hour angle. I'd painted it like six times trying to catch it right. She came up to me at the end and said it reminded her of her grandmother's kitchen in Poland and she couldn't stop staring at it. And then she bought it. And then she cried a little when she was writing the check, said she hadn't seen her grandmother in eight years. I didn't know what to do with that honestly. I just stood there holding the cash like a complete idiot. My partner had to nudge me to say thank you properly haha. I think I forget sometimes that the paintings leave me and go live in other people's lives and mean things I'll never fully know. That's kind of terrifying and lovely at the same time. Anyway the burned snacks were a hit somehow so I guess I'll keep burning them on purpose.

I had an open studio thing last weekend. Small, local. A woman stood in front of a piece I'd spent two weeks on, maybe forty torn paper fragments on a long white sheet, spaced out carefully, and she said, "it's nice but it needs more layers. You know, more depth." She said it kindly. Like she was helping. I just nodded and said I'd think about that. But what I wanted to say was: why does everything have to be maximal? I put seventeen layers in that piece and then took twelve of them out again. The space between things is part of the thing. I walked home irritated and then irritated at myself for being irritated. But it's still sitting with me.

open studio was saturday. sold three things which, for a saturday in a converted warehouse with bad lighting and worse parking, is basically a miracle. but the thing i keep thinking about is this woman who came in around two, bought a small one, came back at four and bought another, then asked if i'd take a deposit and three payments for one of the big ones. i said yes immediately and then felt weird about it after. like did i just undercut myself? is this a bad precedent? am i a bank now? the whole drive home i argued with myself. and then i remembered being 24 and putting a $200 print on a credit card i couldn't pay off for a year. so. idk. i think i did the right thing and i also think i'm going to be chasing an email for six weeks. anyway the real win is that i stopped saying "no pressure" every time someone looked at a painting. that reflex is a disease

I do open studio stuff now, which is a nice way of saying I leave the door to my studio open and hope someone wanders in. Last month a guy came in because he thought it was a garage and stayed 40 minutes. Bought a small oil head study for €180, cash, and told me it was because it looked "unfinished in a way that felt honest." Then he posted it on his own account. Not mine. His. In his hallway with a lamp I would have told him to move. That post did more for me than the last six months of my own grid. I have no idea what to do with that information. I've been trying to build this tidy little funnel of print sales and reels and it turns out what actually moves the needle is standing next to a wet canvas smelling like turpentine while someone talks themselves into it. Which is not scalable and I can't put it in a caption and honestly it makes me want to delete everything and just paint with the door open and stop pretending I understand the internet. Do any of you sell in person and just... not bother with the rest? Or am I about to talk myself out of something that's quietly working

Opened the studio this weekend for the open studios thing. Nothing special, just a chance for people to wander through. Middle of the afternoon a woman maybe my age comes in with her daughter, maybe twenty. Walks straight to a piece I made three years ago from an old boiler door and some broken factory gearing. Stands there. Then she says to her daughter, very quietly, I wasn't meant to hear, "Look. Someone saved this." That's it. Thats the win. Someone saved it. Not someone made art from it. Someone saved it. I've been thinking about that sentence for three days. She understood the whole thing in four words better than any critic ever has.

ok so this happened saturday and i've been sitting on it. a woman came to my little open studio thing, walked straight past everything on the walls to the corner where i had like six failed window studies stacked against the baseboard, and asked if she could buy one of those. not the finished ones. the ones i was going to gesso over because the wash went chalky and the mullions are crooked. she said it was the one that looked like her mother's kitchen. and then she just stood there and cried a little, which, honestly, same, i cried in a gallery once over a Vuillard so no judgment. and i sold it to her for basically nothing and felt weird about that after, like i'd cheated her or like i'd cheated myself, one of the two. my partner says both can be true and i hate that they're usually right. but the actual thing rattling around my head is that the piece i was most embarrassed by is the one that did the thing i'm always trying to do. i've been chasing this one light for a year, like a lunatic, and it turns out the version i almost threw out was the one that landed. don't know what to do with that information. i just know i'm not gessoing over anything for a while.

My first real gallery found me through a collector, of all things. A woman bought a small still life at an open studio and passed my name to her dealer without telling me. Six months later I got an email out of nowhere. So my answer to "how do you get in" was: I didn't. Someone else did it for me. Which makes me wonder how the rest of you got that first yes. Did you walk in with a portfolio, email a hundred places, get introduced, send slides (dated myself there)? And did it feel earned or accidental at the time?

alright here's one that's been rattling round my head. I did a group show maybe three years back, decent gallery, nice space, did the whole song and dance. Sold three prints. Got my cut six months later after chasing it twice. Grand, that's the game, I know. but the same summer I did a one-night thing in a mate's pub in Salthill. Hung stuff on the wall with picture wire and blu-tack. Sold five prints off a stack on the bar and took cash in a jar. Made four times what the gallery paid me and had a feed of pints out of it. I'm not knocking galleries, I've had great ones. But I'm wondering, have ye ever done something scrappy and unpolished that outsold the proper exhibition? Like a studio open day, a market stall, a pop-up in someone's living room. What worked? What felt mad but actually paid?

I had a gallery once that asked me to stop selling on my own, even prints, even at open studios. "It dilutes the brand," they said. I agreed because I thought that's how it works, right? They'll do the selling for you. Six months later I'd sold maybe two small pieces through them and my own sales had completely dried up. Anyone else had a gallery want exclusivity and then just... nothing? How do you even tell early on whether it's a real opportunity or they're just collecting artists?

had this piece sitting in my studio for months. a collage i made out of my brother's old road maps and a bunch of receipts from that year everything fell apart. i kept thinking it was a mess, too personal, no composition, just stuff glued down with no distance. almost threw it out twice. took it to a small open studio thing last weekend more to get it out of my sight than anything. put a low price on it so if nobody bought it i wouldn't care. a woman bought it and then emailed me later saying she'd lost her sister two years ago and the piece made her feel less alone in it. she said the receipts looked like proof that someone had actually lived a life, not just a name on a stone. i sat on my kitchen floor and cried for like ten minutes. not sad crying. just. something broke open that i didn't know was still sealed.

I finally sat down and looked at where last year's sales actually came from. Three paintings, all three to people who had seen the work in person first: one at a two-day botanical illustration symposium in Asheville, two through my open studio weekend in October. Not one sale came from anything I posted. Not one. Meanwhile I've spent a year learning how to shoot vertical video, which I am not good at and do not enjoy, and I'm reasonably sure I've converted the account into an audience of people who like watching paint dry in the literal sense. They came for the process and they are not buyers. That's not a complaint about them. It's a complaint about me not noticing for twelve months. What I have not worked out is whether the online thing is genuinely wasted effort or just too slow to measure, and I suspect nobody can actually tell me. The symposium cost me a table fee, four nights in a hotel, and a week of framing, and it paid for itself in the first hour. I'm keeping the account. I've stopped pretending it's a shop.

Someone at a studio open day asked what I work with. Collage, paper, I said. And he launched into a long thing about texture and grain and how he could really help me with my sanding technique. Sanding. I don't even own a sander. I tear pages with my hands. I didn't correct him. Just said "that's not really the material, but thank you" and went back to my corner. Two minutes later he was telling someone else about the artist he'd given advice to. I keep thinking about the word "help." Nobody ever offers to help me with the thing I actually do, which is sitting very still and deciding what to leave out. That part has no equipment, so it doesn't register as work.

Someone at an open studio yesterday looked at a big interior I've been working on for two months and said, with real admiration, "wow, it looks just like a photograph." I smiled and thanked her because what else do you do. But inside I was thinking, I spent two months fighting the light in that room, scraping back a passage three times because the edge was too hard, because a photograph would never have that softness in the shadow side. I am not trying to make a photograph. If I wanted a photograph I would take one in three seconds. The funny thing is people think it's the highest praise. It tells me they don't see anything I'm actually doing. The paint, the color temperature shifting across a form, the decisions. It reduces it to likeness, which is the least interesting thing about a painting. I know I should be grateful people look at all. Some days I am. Yesterday I was not.

Still fuming about this from Saturday. I was at an open studio thing, just working on a portrait of an old woman I'd taken a reference photo of at the market. Her face is all lines and light, it took me maybe six hours to get the softness right in the cheek shadows, pastel is not forgiving if you rush it. This woman comes up, looks at it for maybe three seconds, and goes "oh, so realistic. It looks just like a photo. So where's the art in that then?" I just said "well, the photo is right there" and pointed at my phone. She didn't even look. Just walked off. And I sat there thinking, I spent a year learning how to not make pastel look muddy. I know exactly where every highlight on that face came from. I changed the light source entirely from the reference because the original was too flat. But sure. No art. Just copying, right? I didn't say any of that to her. I just smiled and went back to work. But I keep replaying it. Why do people think realism is just... cheating? Like there's no decision-making involved? Anyway. Just needed to put it somewhere. 😅

A collector bought one of my prints at the studio open day, then emailed asking if I'd sign it "individually" because "an edition of 50 feels a bit mass produced." I had to explain that the edition IS the work. The number is not a compromise, it is the point. Fifty prints that are one image, one decision, repeated until they stop being copies and become something else. He wrote back, "Oh, so it's like a limited edition." Yes. That is exactly what it is. That was always the whole thing. I spent ten minutes afterward staring at my own screenprint like I had to defend it from its own buyer. Maybe I should start answering the question with "would you say that to a writer about their print run?" I don't know why the edition makes people so uncomfortable. As if the multiple is somehow less honest than a unique object. As if there is a true original hiding somewhere and the rest of us are just photocopying. Anyway. He bought it. I think he still believes he got a discount version of a real artwork. Let him.

I've never actually gotten into a gallery (local fairs are my whole scene), but I've had a few conversations at open studio weekends and one owner told me my work was "nice, like something you'd see in a dentist's office." I just laughed and moved on because what else do you do. But it stuck with me for a week. 😅 What's the least professional thing you've let slide in a gallery conversation? Looking back, would you have handled it differently or was smiling and moving along the right call?

Young guy at the open studio last weekend. Watched me work a piece of limestone for maybe thirty seconds. Then he tells me he could program a CNC router to cut the same shape in twenty minutes and walk away while it ran. I asked him when was the last time he chipped a tooth on a tool grit he didn't see. When he had to look at a piece of stone for three hours before he knew what was in it. When he ruined a week of work because he hit a fissure nobody could see. He said he didn't need to do any of that because the machine did it for him. I'm not against the machines. I've used them for roughing out when it makes sense. But the way he said it, like the whole point was to not be there. Like the work was an inconvenience between him and having something to sell. Twenty minutes. I wanted to hand him the chisel and a block of granite and see how that twenty minutes felt on hour three.

There was this gallerist in Leipzig, maybe seven years ago, who saw my student work at an open studio and invited me to bring things by. I was terrified. I had nothing ready, loose proofs, some plates, a notebook full of ideas I hadn't made yet. She looked at it all and said "you're thinking about the right things, come back when you have something to say." Not a rejection exactly, more like a deadline I set for myself. I came back two years later with a real body of work. She took it. And I still think about that, how she saw something before I'd proven it, and said so. Did anyone else have that one early believer? The person who took you seriously before you had any reason to be taken seriously?

open studio night at the community space downtown. juror's supposed to be walking around, talking to people, whatever. i watched her glide past my piece, two minutes tops, maybe, and then plant herself in front of some guy's photorealistic campbell's soup can. twelve minutes. i clocked it because i was that bitter. and look, i'm not saying my work is for everyone. it's messy. there's a lot going on. but 45 seconds versus 12 minutes on a can of beans? i wanted to walk over and ask her if she was waiting for the soup to heat up.