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ok so i took my little travel kit down to the park today, first time painting outdoors in years, i've been such a coward about it honestly. and i forgot, i mean i FULLY forgot how brutal plein air is?? like you're fighting the light changing every ten minutes, wind keeps flipping your paper, bugs land in your wet paint, and some kid's mom is standing behind you going "oh how nice" while you're internally screaming because your shadows are already wrong. BUT. i got something. one little study where the light actually worked and i caught the way the jacaranda was dropping purple all over the bench. and i felt like myself again? the version of me that used to sit on the sidewalk outside the studio building and paint whatever. it's messy and the proportions are off but i don't even care. anyway if you've been scared to paint outside just go do it it's terrible and wonderful 👍

I bought one of those expensive daylight easel lamps last winter because everyone swears by them, and yes, the colour is consistent, you can work at midnight, fine. But I took a painting outside yesterday afternoon for the first time in months, proper northern light, overcast, the real thing, and I wanted to cry. Everything I'd done under that lamp looked colder and harder than I thought, all these blue-grey shadows I'd been trusting. The warmth was gone. So now I'm back to working only during daylight hours like some kind of farmer, and the lamp is gathering dust. Maybe they're fine for people who paint digitally or whatever, but for oil, for actually mixing what you see? It's not the same and it cannot be the same. I don't know why I thought it would be.

My parents put their house on the market last week. The one in Malleswaram where I spent 26 years. My room, the jasmine creeper over the gate, the terrace where Amma used to dry mango pickle in summer. Someone's going to tear it down and put up an apartment block, I'm sure of it. I've been putting off painting it for months. Too close, too much pressure, too many feelings. But yesterday I just sat on the floor of my old room with my sketchbook and did it. Watercolour and ink, the way it looked in the late afternoon when the light slants through the neem tree outside. Cried a little while painting. Then laughed at myself for crying. My husband found me like that and just handed me a cup of chai and walked away, the man knows when not to say anything. It's not my best work technically. But it's the most honest thing I've done in a while. I don't know if I'll frame it or stash it away. Just needed to put it down somewhere before it's gone.

For me it was no gallery, nothing like that. It was a visitor from Delhi who came to our village for a wedding. He saw me painting a fish on the wall for the ceremony and he stood there and watched for a long time. Then he asked my father if he could buy it. We had never sold a painting in our lives, we only made them for the house and the festivals. That one small exchange changed everything, because for the first time I understood someone outside our home valued this work. I still remember his name. I think we all have one person like that, the first one who made us believe it was not just decoration but something people wanted. Who was it for you? A teacher, a stranger, a gallery? And did it change what you made after that, or how you thought of your work?

Let me tell you about my first proper gallery. Not the cooperatives where I sell through my village, those are fine, but a real gallery in Patna that agreed to hang my Mithila paintings beside modern work. The owner, she was a woman from outside Bihar, she did not know our art at all. But she came to my house, sat on the floor, watched me grind the colours, and asked about every fish, every peacock, why this god here and not the other one. She did not talk about selling that day. She just listened. That is when I felt our work was being seen properly. Where was the place that first took your work seriously? Which gallery, and what did they do that made you feel it?

My son helped me put some of my paintings on Amazon last year. Small things, mostly, fish motifs, a few Lakshmi pieces for Diwali time. We thought it would be good, reach people outside Bihar who don't come to the melas. Six months now. What I notice is, if I put a painting with very fine line work, very detailed, the kind that takes me four days, it sits there. No sales. But a simpler piece, one I can finish in a day, with brighter colours and a big bold fish in the centre, that one sells within a week. Same size, same paper, same story behind it. I don't understand this. The detailed one has more of me in it. More tradition. But the simple one is what people want to buy. I am grateful for the sales, do not mistake me. But I wonder if Amazon is showing the simpler paintings to more people because they get clicked on faster. Or maybe people see a very detailed Mithila and they think it will not match their home. I am not complaining ji. Just trying to understand. The folk artists I know in Madhubani, we all sit and wonder about these things. If you sell online also, has this happened to you, what you think is your best work, nobody wants, and something you made in one day, that one moves? 🙏

Myself Ramesh, from Madhubani. For me it was a small cooperative in Patna, this was maybe twenty years ago. The lady running it, she saw my work at a village mela and asked me to bring some pieces. I was so nervous I wrapped them in old newspaper. She took four paintings on the spot and sold two within the week. That small thing changed everything for me, someone outside the family seeing value in it. What about you ji? How did your first gallery happen? Was it a cold walk-in, someone saw you somewhere, or a connection? I want to hear the stories.🙏

Okay so I've been doing the full-time artist thing for 8 months now and today I shipped my first actual commission. Not a print, not a little piece at a market, an actual person who messaged me asking me to paint their grandmother's garden. Their GRANDMOTHER'S garden. There were reference photos of this old rose bush and a rusty bench and I spent three weeks obsessing over getting the green right because greens are the devil honestly. Anyway I sent it off this morning and then I just sat in my car outside the post office and cried a little. Not sad crying. Just like. Oh, this is real now. Someone trusted me with their memory and I didn't mess it up. My dad died when I was 19 and I painted my way through that whole year, and I kept thinking today about how painting someone's garden feels like the exact opposite of that. Like here's a thing that's still alive and growing and someone wanted me to hold onto it for them. And the grandma apparently cried when she saw the photos I sent before shipping, which made me cry again. My partner just handed me a towel and said "this is your whole personality now huh" and he's not wrong. Not really asking anything, just wanted to tell people who'd get it. What's the last thing that made you cry in a good way?

A woman from Tokyo found my work through the Mithila Art Institute page, wrote to me on WhatsApp. She wanted a wedding scene, the full thing, the groom's procession, elephants, the bride under her covering, all the detail. I told her 15,000 rupees for that size, which is already low but she was a foreign buyer and I thought maybe she won't pay more. She said yes very quickly. Then she said she will send in US dollars through her friend's account. 250 dollars. I thought okay, 250 dollars, that sounds like a good amount, more than 15,000 I assumed. You know what I did? I did not check. My son usually handles the online payment things but he was out. The money came. I felt happy. Later my son came home and said, Papa, do you know 250 dollars is almost 21,000 rupees? I sat quiet for a long time. She paid me what the work was worth. I undervalued it myself, not even knowing the rate of my own currency. The embarrassment is still with me. Not at her. At myself. I told her 15,000 for a painting that takes three weeks of daily work and she paid me 21,000 anyway because she decided that's what it costs. A stranger in Tokyo had more respect for my labour than I did. Since then I always check the rate before I quote to anyone outside India. But that feeling sits. How many more times have I done this to myself without knowing? 🙏

Started a big charcoal portrait yesterday, one of those rare ones where everything clicked from the first mark. The kind where you stop thinking and your hand just knows where to go. Stayed up way too late working on it, couldn't sleep, was buzzing. Showed it to my partner this morning and he was like "this is incredible." And I looked at it again and suddenly HATED it. Every line felt wrong. The energy was gone. It was dead on the paper. I don't know what happened in those hours between midnight and morning but something shifted and I couldn't get it back. So I took it outside and burned it in the backyard. I know that sounds dramatic or whatever. But there's something about watching it go that clears my head. Like I'm not holding onto the version I thought I made. I can start fresh without the ghost of it staring at me from the easel. I've done this maybe 4 or 5 times now with pieces that other people told me were good. I don't know if that's healthy or just how I process. Probably both. Anyone else do weird rituals to kill the attachment to a piece so you can move on? Or am I just insane lol

i have a perfectly good easel. i have a drafting table i found on facebook marketplace for $40. and yet for the last three months i've been doing all my small studies on a clipboard i grabbed from the checkout aisle at stop & shop while buying trash bags. it's just... the right amount of friction. i can prop it on my lap, lean it against a stack of books, take it outside, set it down anywhere. there's something about the lack of ceremony that makes starting easier. no adjusting, no standing up, no "ok now i am in the studio doing Art." just grab the clipboard and go. i think i've made more paintings this quarter than the last two combined and i hate admitting it's because of a $6 piece of bent metal and a spring clip. but here we are. what's the dumbest thing in your setup that you're secretly loyal to

I still make my own brushes from neem twigs sometimes. Not always, I have proper ones also, from the city, my son brought me. But for the very fine line work, the kind you see on the border of a Sita kalyan painting, nothing works quite like the neem twig brush. You chew the end soft, shape it with your teeth, then trim it. My grandmother could make one in two minutes without even looking. I still cannot do it like her. But I try. When I am using a store brush I feel something missing. The twig brush, it does not hold so much colour. You have to dip again and again. But the line, thin like a hair, steady. The hand remembers. Yesterday I broke one I was making. The wood split wrong. I sat there a while just looking at it. Then I went outside and found another twig.🙂

Yesterday a visitor to the cooperative bought one of my smaller fish-and-lotus pieces for ₹1200. Three days of fine line work with the brush, the natural pigment, the handmade paper that I prepare myself. When I counted it out, it came to less than what a plumber charges for a single visit in Patna. I did not bargain. The price was fixed because the cooperative fixed it, and the cooperative fixes it low so that the foreign buyers and the art galleries keep coming back. My mother sold her best work for a sari and a sack of rice when I was a boy. So I should feel fortunate, no? But ji, here is the thing I cannot set aside. The same size piece, once a Delhi dealer resells it, goes for twenty times that and it hangs in a drawing room beside imported furniture. Nobody argues with that price. Only my hand is supposed to be cheap. I am not writing this to shame the young woman who bought it. She was kind and she chose my work. I am writing it because we do not speak of this enough. I have painted since I was eight years old. My fingers know these lines the way my mother's did. And some days I ask myself what my daughter's fingers will find worth doing, if this is the value of three days. I have been thinking of raising my own price for the pieces I sell directly, outside the cooperative. For a larger piece I want to ask ₹6000 and it frightens me to say it aloud. Have any of you fixed your own price after years of accepting what was given?

Mine walked in on me. I was 26, painting in a borrowed studio above a butcher's shop, and a woman who ran a little gallery on the rue des Capucins bought a small still life off the wall and asked to see more. I thought it was a fluke, honestly, so I said yes to everything she offered without asking a single question. Took me years to learn to negotiate. I wonder how much of it is luck versus push. Did anyone here actually go out and knock on doors, walk in with a portfolio, and have it work? I never had the nerve for that, and I've always assumed it doesn't happen outside of movies. Tell me I'm wrong.