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Years ago, before I had a real website or knew what I was doing with pricing, I ran a little workshop out of my studio. Just a few hours, materials included, you go home with a small piece. I charged €35 because I was scared to ask for more and it covered the tile and the wine. A tourist from Australia came, loved it, posted about it. Next thing I know it's on some blog. Fine. But then her friend emails me asking if I can do a private session for four people at the same price. I said yes because I'm an idiot who hadn't learned to say "that was a group rate." Now eight years later I sometimes still get people who found that old blog post and expect the €35 price. I've raised it to €65 and they look at me like I'm trying to sell them a car. I should have changed the name of the workshop or something. Instead I just have to be the bad guy every time someone shows up with a screenshot from 2016.

I've been spending so much time on short-form video lately, mainly Reels for Instagram. But I see so many people having huge success on YouTube Shorts and I'm wondering if I should pivot? It feels like a totally different beast. The content that does okay on Reels feels too polished for Shorts sometimes, if that makes sense? Has anyone found a good strategy for both, or do you focus on one platform? My engagement is okay on Reels, but nothing like what I see some people getting on Shorts. Maybe I'm just looking at the wrong creators. It's hard to tell what's real and what's just a lucky spike.

Early in my career a gallery in a small city took my work, I was relieved, I said yes to everything. Then they asked me to paint smaller and charge less. Smaller I could understand, but charging less felt like the wrong message. I said no, we parted ways, and I still think it was the right call. But I've wondered since. Sometimes a lower price gets people in the door and you build from there. Sometimes it just trains people to wait for a discount. Have you had a gallery ask you to change your prices, up or down, and did you do it? Regret it either way?

Had someone at a craft fair last weekend tell me I'm underselling myself. Very nice lady, bought a small 8x10 of a barn scene, paid $65. Then she stood there and told me I should be charging triple for everything because my work is "gallery quality." And I'm thinking... you just paid $65. You're not wrong exactly, but also you're not the one sitting at a table for six hours hoping to cover the booth fee. I've slowly raised prices over the last couple years. A 16x20 that was $150 in 2022 is $225 now. And I do get that people who love to give pricing advice usually mean well. But the ones who actually pay are the ones who tell me "I love this but can you do $50?" and I have to decide if I want to eat the loss or let it walk. There's a sweet spot somewhere between "paying myself $3 an hour" and "pricing myself into an empty booth." I haven't nailed it. Anyone else feel like pricing is the hardest thing to get right, no matter how good the work gets?

had a piece in a group show last spring and someone bought it opening night. first time a stranger paid four figures for something i made. felt like i'd done something wrong so i kept the price low for months after, $200, $350, like i was apologizing for the nerve of charging real money. finally bumped everything up this fall. not stupid high, just... what i'd need to make it worth pulling all-nighters and buying real materials instead of dumpster cardboard. lost about 40% of my instagram followers in the next three weeks. the algorithm punished me or whatever. but the people who stayed? they're the ones who actually buy. or share. or send a note that isn't "love this, wish i could afford it." i'd rather have 300 people who get it than 3,000 who treat my feed like a museum gift shop they're just browsing. still feels weird every time i type a number into an invoice. like i'm about to get caught.

Middle of a hot afternoon, helmet up, grinding down a seam on a steel piece I'd been fitting for two days. Guy walks into the shop, no knock, just wanders in from the alley. Stands there watching. I figure he's lost or curious, whatever. I keep working. Ten minutes. He watches me run a bead, watches me chip slag, watches me check the fit. Then he says "you know they have machines that do that now. Robots. Could just program it." I said "yeah, and you could just keep walking." He stood there another minute like he expected more of an answer. Then he left. I don't know what gets into people. They see someone doing something with their hands and the first impulse is to tell you why you don't have to. As if the point was efficiency. As if I'm trying to save labor. I'm not trying to save labor. I'm trying to make the thing.

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? 🙏

Still using the same cross-peen hammer I started with in 1989. Handle's been rewrapped three times, head's got a wobble I've learned to work with. My daughter keeps trying to buy me a new one for Christmas. Told her I'd rather have the old one back even if it broke in half. You spend that many hours with a tool in your hand, it stops being a tool. It's an extension of something. You know exactly how it's going to land before it lands. She doesn't get it. Most people don't. But I suspect some of you do.

Four months. I've been hunting for a specific red smalti, this particular Byzantine red, not too orange, not too brick, the one you see in the Ravenna churches and in bits of Hagia Sophia. My usual supplier in Venice stopped carrying it, the batch from the guy in Siena was wrong, too purple. I tried cutting my own from glass rods and it looked like cherry candy. Wrong wrong wrong. Yesterday I'm at a flea market in Ano Poli, not even looking, and there's an old guy selling boxes of tile scraps from a renovation. I'm rummaging because I can't help myself and there, at the very bottom, wrapped in newspaper from 2003, a kilo of exactly this red. Hand-cut, uneven, matt finish, the real thing. He charged me five euros. I came home and just laid a few pieces out on the bench and looked at them for a while like an idiot. People don't get it. But you probably do. That specific thing you need finding you when you stop hunting. Best feeling. 🙂

I said yes because I felt for him. Grief makes people weird and I get it. But he sent me ONE photo of this dog, taken from like 20 feet away, half in shadow, and the dog was black so it's basically just a shape with ears. I spent 12 hours on this painting working from that and reference photos of similar breeds and he picks it up today and goes "I dunno, his nose was warmer than that." His nose. Was warmer. Than that. I wanted to say bro you sent me a photo where I can't even tell if the dog has eyes. I wanted to say the nose is gray because the dog was black and standing in shade and that's literally what color it was in the ONLY IMAGE YOU GAVE ME. I wanted to say I painted this thing with more care than I've painted anything in months because I knew it mattered to you. But I just said "I can glaze some warmth in" and he left looking disappointed and now I'm sitting here furious at myself for taking the commission and furious at him for not understanding what he was asking for and furious at the photo and furious at the whole thing. Why do we do this. Why do we take jobs we know are going to make us feel like this. Because we need money? Because we want to be helpful? Because we're so desperate to prove we can do it that we ignore every red flag? Anyway. He's coming back Saturday. I'm gonna put some warm brown in the nose area and try not to scream.

I took the prices off my shop page a few months ago. Not as a strategy, I just got tired of feeling like I was shouting numbers at people before they'd even seen the work properly. I put "please enquire" and my email. I expected silence. Instead I get these long emails now. People describing where they'd hang it, what the light is like in their kitchen at certain hours, which beach it reminds them of. Some don't buy. Some buy after three or four emails. The buying feels different when it happens, less transactional, more like they've already lived with the piece a while. The downside is real. Some people disappear the second they hear the number. I lost a sale this morning that way, a woman who'd written me three lovely messages, then just "oh, that's more than I thought" and gone. And I can't tell if I'm filtering for the right people or just making it harder for everyone. Not a tip. Just a strange thing I'm in the middle of.

finally did it. bumped my base commission price from $200 to $275 after like three years of telling myself i'd get around to it. two people had inquiries sitting in my DMs. both went "ok thanks!" and vanished into the ether the second i gave the new number. not even a counter or a "let me think about it" just gone lol. i know $275 is not insane. i know i'm worth it. i know the people who actually want the work will pay it. but man that immediate ghost hit different. feels like i just priced myself out of my own market and i'm the one who set the price. anyone else raise a number and immediately regret it before you even gave it a chance to breathe? or is it just me staring at my empty inbox

I took on a private student a few years back, right after the worst of the crisis here. She was young, maybe 24, no money at all but she wanted to learn mosaic so badly. She showed up at my studio with a five-liter tin of her family's olive oil and asked if we could trade. I said yes because I remembered what it was like to be young and broke and hungry for a skill. She came once a week for six months. She was terrible with the hammer and hardie at first, kept shattering the glass instead of cutting it. But she learned. She ended up getting a commission for a hotel lobby last year. When she sent me photos I actually teared up a little. Meanwhile I get DMs every week from people who want to "collaborate", meaning they want my work for exposure, or they want me to teach them for free because "it would be good for my brand." I don't answer those anymore. The olive oil was good, by the way. Her family makes it near Kalamata. I used it for six months and every time I cooked with it I thought, this is what paying attention to someone actually looks like.

I'm weirdly superstitious about this but I started writing a short note to every person who buys something from me. Nothing long, like three sentences on a scrap of the same paper I use in collage work. Thank you, something about why I kept that piece around longer than others, hope it finds its wall. It's been maybe four months now. The thing that's getting me is the replies. People write back. Not always, but often enough that it's shifted something. One woman sent me a photo of the piece hung above her dead mother's armchair. Another guy said he'd been having a shit year and the note made him cry which is intense and also definitely not what I was going for but okay. Here's the part I don't know how to think about: it's not scalable. Obviously. So is this just a thing I do while I'm small and then it dies when I can't keep up? Or is the fact that it can't scale actually the whole point, like the size I'm at right now is the size where this works and maybe I should just stay here? I don't have an answer. Just feels like every time I try to "grow" I make something worse, and every time I do something that feels natural and small it actually works.

Had a gallery owner come through the studio last month. Walked around for twenty minutes saying almost nothing. Looked at the welds on a piece I'd done three years ago, ran a hand over the stone base, asked me what grit I finished with. I told her 400 by hand, same as always. She nodded and wrote me a check for a show next spring. Ten years ago I would've prepared a statement, cleaned the studio, rehearsed what to say. This time I had grinder dust on my jeans and half a sandwich on the bench. She didn't care. She wanted to see how the work was actually made. I think the whole performance of being an artist is getting in the way for people who can actually make things. You spend so much time trying to look like an artist you forget to just be the one holding the tool.

I spent years putting only the final work online. Perfect lighting, good photo, the painting resolved. Crickets, mostly. A few likes from other painters. A few months ago I was frustrated with a figure painting, the hand was wrong for the fourth time, the whole thing looked a mess, and I took a photo of it on the easel with my palette旁边, just to vent to a painter friend. I put it on Instagram almost without thinking. That post got more comments than anything I'd put up in six months. People like to see the struggle. They like to see that you also don't know what you're doing for a while. I think for a long time I thought showing process would somehow diminish the finished work, like revealing the trick. But most people aren't painters. They have no idea what goes into it, and watching something get ugly and then get pulled back out of the ugly, that's the part they actually want to see. I'm still not comfortable with it. I was trained to show only the resolved thing. But I can't argue with the numbers, and more to the point I can't argue with the fact that the conversations are better. People ask real questions instead of just saying "beautiful." Wondering if anyone else has found that the unfinished, uncertain thing gets more traction than the polished final version.

Got asked to do a live demo at a gallery opening in Athens next month. They said "the guests would love to watch you work." I said do you know what mosaic looks like in real time? Because I sit on a pillow on the floor and cut one piece of stone at a time and stare at it for ten minutes before I set it. That's a Tuesday. It's not performance, it's just slow. They said it's fine, people find it meditative. We'll see. Anyone else get asked to turn their studio practice into a show and find out it doesn't translate?

I welded a staircase railing for the art building at a community college in 2004. Not a sculpture technically, but they wanted something that looked like one. Paid fifteen thousand, which felt fine at the time for six weeks work. Twenty years later I still get five hundred dollars a year from that college. They call it a maintenance and consultation fee. Theyve never called me once. Its in the contract my old self signed and I keep meaning to tell them to stop. But I dont. That five hundred is the only passive income Ive ever had in this trade. Everything else was show up, get dirty, get paid, do it again. And I know people online talk about recurring revenue like its something you design into your practice from day one. I never did. It just happened because I wrote a stupid clause into a bid for a staircase.

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.

ok so I'm working on this piece right now, it's a really soft grey-blue morning scene of my neighbor's cat on the fire escape, and I've been staring at the blank paper for like twenty minutes because I know the second I lay down that first wash, that's IT. there's no undoing it. you can lift a little but you can't un-wet the paper. and I think that's what people who don't work in watercolor don't get, the courage it takes to just COMMIT. every other medium you can paint over, scrape back, repaint. watercolor holds the record of every choice you made. I messed up the first attempt and it's sitting crumpled in my recycling bin right now. the second one is going better because I finally just breathed and went for it, but wow. my heart was actually pounding. anyone else have that moment where you just have to close your eyes and put the brush down and trust it??