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The frame question is the one that gets me every time. Not the haggling, not the silence after I say the number. The frame. A woman came to the studio in March for a portrait of her father, head and shoulders, 35x45, a study really, alla prima, maybe four sessions. I said nine hundred euros, canvas and my time, and she nodded and then asked, very reasonably, if that included the frame. And I had to say no, and watch her face do the thing. Here is what I should have said and didn't: nine hundred for a painted head is already cheap. My frames come from a man in the Croix-Rousse who does them by hand and charges me 180 for a simple moulding in walnut. So if I'd said eleven hundred, or twelve, and included the frame, she would have felt taken care of and I would have made the same money minus a conversation I did not enjoy. Instead I said no, frame is extra, and she looked at me like the painting had shrunk. I've been doing this twenty years and I still price the paint and forget the object. The frame, the stretcher bars, the varnish, the six weeks the canvas sits drying on a rack in my studio taking up the wall I could be working on. None of that is in the nine hundred. I know this. I say it to students. She commissioned it anyway. I'm not asking for advice, I know what the advice is. I'm mostly annoyed that I'll have this exact conversation again in six months with somebody else.

They arrived Tuesday. The box has that wooden smell and the sticks are wrapped in paper like they're something precious, and I have been walking past them for three days now. Meanwhile I am still working with the flattened stubs from my cheap set, the ones that are basically just dust held together by hope. Which is silly. I know it's silly. You buy them to use them, that is the whole point, and I am not the kind of person who saves things for a special occasion. But there is something in my head that says if I break the good ones open I have to make something worth them, and I don't know yet if I can. The portrait on the easel is a study of my own hands, which is harder than I expected, and I keep thinking maybe I'll just do a few more of those first before I open the box. A few more. Sure. Anyone else have this? Or do you all just tear the paper off immediately like normal people.

The sitting was Tuesday. Charcoal study first, then a small oil head, 25 by 33, nothing grand. I gave her 1,200 and she said yes before I finished the sentence, and I knew immediately I'd left money on the table. Not because she's rich, she isn't especially. Because she didn't blink. I've been doing this for years and I still do it. I add up the linen, the ground, the pigment, the sittings, and then at the end I take the number and quietly shave it, because I'm afraid of the silence after I say it out loud. My teacher in the atelier used to say a price is a statement about the work, not about you. Fine in theory. In practice I hear my own voice go up at the end like I'm asking permission. Two weeks ago I sold a small still life, three lemons and a knife on a grey cloth, to a man who runs a restaurant on Rue Sainte-Catherine. 900. He put it straight on the wall and it looked correct there, and I thought, that was the right number, and it surprised me how much I needed to feel that once. So the portrait head. She's coming back Thursday for the second sitting and I've decided I'm not going to reopen the price, that would be grotesque. But I've written 1,600 on a card and taped it inside the lid of my pochade box where I have to look at it every time I open it.

Two months of roses hips on my studio windowsill, and every single one split or went soft before I could finish a study. Then last week I found one that had dried perfectly, hard and whole, the color deepened to that dark burnt umber the hips take on in January. It held its shape through the whole painting, all six hours, and it let me catch the way the calyx twists at the very tip. Small victory, but I've been chasing it since October. There is something satisfying about a specimen that cooperates. The paint is hard enough without the subject fighting you. Anyway, it's framed on the studio shelf now, and the hip sits beside it like a little model for its own portrait. I almost don't want to compost it.

There's this late Byzantine panel from the Church of the Holy Apostles in Thessaloniki, Christ Pantokrator, standard stuff, and I copied it by hand for a conservation module back in 2004. Six weeks on my knees, matching every tessera, and I got it so close my professor kept it as a teaching example. The joke is that piece ruined me. I can't look at a face in mosaic anymore without measuring the eye spacing against that Pantokrator. Last week I finished a portrait commission, contemporary, abstracted, not even trying to be realistic, and I spent an hour staring at it thinking the left eye is two millimeters too far out. Client won't see it. Nobody will see it. But I know it's there because of a dead Byzantine emperor's face I memorized twenty years ago. Anyone else carry a reference piece in their head like a splinter? Something you studied so hard it rewired your eye permanently.

ok so this happened tuesday and I'm still weirdly annoyed about it. There's this watercolorist I've followed since like 2019, I have her book, I've basically studied her washes. She reposted one of my gouache pieces to her story. I sat there refreshing like a maniac. 40 new followers in two days, which is more than I usually get in a month, and I was SO sure this was it, this was the breakthrough, I'd finally have to figure out how to do a mailing list properly. Two people emailed me. One of them asked if I could paint a portrait of their dog for $60 because "it's just a small one." The other was a company asking if I'd do a free piece in exchange for exposure. Meanwhile the thing that's actually kept me fed since I quit the café is a 3-person email list (ok slight exaggeration, it's 91 people) where I send a photo of whatever's on the easel and a paragraph about how it's going, and I sell something almost every time. It's ugly and unglamorous and I keep trying to make it prettier than it needs to be. I think I've been chasing the wrong number this whole time and I don't totally know how to stop. Followers feel like a scoreboard. They're not. Anyway if you have a mailing list, what actually goes in it? Because mine is basically a group text at this point and I'm not sure if that's the secret or if I'm just getting lucky with 91 very patient people.