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First gallery I was with, I was young and glad to be there. Signed everything they put in front of me. Two years in I found out they'd been holding back 20% of the framing, shipping and insurance costs I was supposed to be paying direct. Nothing criminal, just buried in a contract I never fully read. My fault as much as theirs. I was too eager to look like I knew what I was doing. These days I put everything in writing before anything hangs. Who pays for the opening, who covers shipping, what happens if a piece sells in the first week versus the last. Even then they'll try things on. What's the clause or agreement you wish you'd nailed down before your first show? I'd be curious what bites people most.

I don't know that I'm doing any of this right, so I'll just tell it plain. My granddaughter set me up a shop back in the fall. Said folks would buy my work online. So I put up four pieces, took the pictures on my kitchen table with a dish towel behind them for a background, and then I sat there and waited like a hen on a nest. March I sold one potholder. Five dollars. But here's the thing that's got me thinking. The quilts I post on here, the big ones, the ones I spent a year on? People look but they don't buy, and I understand it, you don't buy a quilt off a phone from a stranger in Alabama. What sold was the little thing. Something small enough to hold in your hand and cheap enough not to think too hard about. Then last month a lady in Seattle bought a quilt. Said she saw it on here and went and found the shop herself. I never once mentioned the shop on my page. Not one time. So I don't know what to make of that. I put the sign out front and nobody came in. I hung the quilt on the line and somebody knocked on the door. Maybe that's just how it works and nobody told me. Or maybe I'm still fooling with it wrong. I'm 63 years old and I've been sewing since I was seven. I know cloth. I do not know this. 🙂

So I finally did the thing everyone says you should do and put the price right in the caption, not "DM for price," just there, 450 zł for the A3 pastel portrait, framed, shipping in Poland included. I sat on that edit for two days before posting it, which is embarrassing to type out. Anyway. Four people asked about it before I did that. After I put the number up, three people asked and then two of them went quiet the moment I answered. Not rude, just gone. And weirdly I felt better? Because I stopped having to perform the little dance where someone says "so beautiful" and I say "thank you so much" and we both pretend nobody is thinking about money. One woman did buy. Paid full price, no haggling, and then told me she'd assumed I'd charge more. I don't know what to do with that information, honestly. I've been undercharging for two years partly because I was afraid, and now I'm scared I've taught everyone the wrong price. Is it normal that the silence after the number is worse than a no? I can handle a no. The quiet is what gets me.

for years I had "DM for pricing" at the bottom like everyone told me to. the reasoning was always that talking to people gets you further than a number on a page. then a friend who sells furniture online said something that stuck. she said the only people who ask about price are the ones who already want it, and you're making them jump through a hoop to find out they can't afford it. so in march I put actual numbers up. the torn paper pieces at 240, the big charcoal ones at 900, a couple of small ones at 85. lost nothing. no angry messages. what I did lose was about an hour a week of the same conversation, the one where someone says "and what would something like this run" and then goes quiet. and I got three sales off people who told me later they'd been watching for months and only bought once they saw I wasn't going to ask them to negotiate over DMs like it's a rug in a market. the thing nobody warns you about with hiding prices is that it makes you look like you're deciding how much each person is worth. I wasn't doing that. I just didn't want to be told my numbers were too high. which is its own problem, and putting them on the page mostly cured it, because the number stops being a thing I have to defend in a chat window and starts being a fact on a page.

So I had this conversation with a gallery owner last week. Small place, mostly sells to people who want "art that goes with the sofa" kind of thing. She was genuinely interested in my work, wanted to take a few pieces on consignment. But she kept pushing me to price them higher than I wanted, not in a greedy way, more like she thought I was undervaluing myself. And I couldn't explain it properly to her. It's not that I think my work is worthless. It's that I paint these old Bangalore houses that are being torn down, and I know the people who used to live in them. Some of them still come and watch me draw. So when I put a price on it, it feels like I'm putting a price on someone's childhood, you know? She said "then don't sell them, just show them." But I do need to sell. I just don't want to pretend it's the same as selling a print of a nice landscape. Anyway, I priced them lower than she wanted and she took three. Two sold in a week. Which I don't know if that proves anything or nothing.

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.

They said no, of course. You cannot put a photograph of rotten floorboards on the front of a poster, people will think the building is falling down. Which it is, a little. That is the piece. So the poster has a nice wide shot of the whole room, everything lit evenly, you can see the arc of it, very impressive, and nobody walks in ready for the smell. The smell is half the work. Wet plaster and old wool and something I have never identified, from a mattress I took out of a skip in Žižkov in 2019. Visitors come in, they get the smell, and then they stand there for a while doing the arithmetic of what they are standing in. My point is not that marketing people are philistines. Half of them are better at reading a room than the curators. My point is that the thing that actually pulls someone off the street is almost never the thing that fits on the poster. It is the detail that sounds like a mistake. I have started keeping a folder. Every time someone photographs something small in one of my rooms and ignores the big obvious sculpture, I keep that photo. The rotted floor gets more phone time than the commissioned bronze. I do not know what to do with this information yet. I suspect it means the poster should be a close-up of something broken and the room should be discovered. The gallery will fight me. We will compromise, and the compromise will be worse than either idea, as usual.

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.

Went to a gallery years back, they loved the steel pieces, wanted to take three on consignment. Then wouldn't commit to a dollar amount. Said they'd "see what the market said." I told them my market said fifteen hundred and walked. Never regretted it. I know galleries need room to negotiate but if they won't even put a number down, that's not a partnership, that's them hedging with your work as the collateral. What's the strangest ask you've gotten from a gallery? The one that made you thank them and leave?

Set up at a local fair this past Saturday and made a dumb mistake. I hung my favorite little still life right at the front of the booth, eye level, where everyone turns the corner. It sold before 10am. Great, right? Except the next 31 paintings just sat there for the rest of the day. The piece that would have pulled people deeper into the booth was gone before the crowd even showed up. I did the math on the way home. Sold one $65 piece and maybe 4 greetings cards. Meanwhile the booth next to me, a jewelry maker, had her whole display set up so there was no single focal point, and she was busy all afternoon. I think I keep treating this like a gallery wall when it's really a storefront. People browse the front, something catches them, they step in, they stay. Next fair I'm putting the good stuff in the middle and keeping the doorway bits simple. Anyone else hit this? Or am I overthinking crowds that mostly want a free mint?

Myself Ramesh, Mithila painter from Madhubani. All my life I sold through the cooperative or when someone came to the house. Tourists sometimes, or people from the city who heard about the village where the painting women are. My son, he is in Patna for his job, he took photos of maybe eight of my pieces, a fish with the lotus, a Durga, two peacocks, some others. He put them on WhatsApp status and also in some groups he is in. I did not think much of it. Now in the last month I have sent six paintings by courier. To Delhi. To Bangalore. To one address in Dubai even, a man whose mother is from Darbhanga originally and he wanted something for his wall. These people never touched the paper, never saw the pigment. They saw a phone photo and they trusted it. This is strange to me. In my market, the buyer wants to see the line work up close, wants to know the colour is natural, wants to hold it. But my son says this is how it works now. I am grateful, truly, but also I am thinking, what if the photo does not show the real thing? I use geru and rice paste and lamp black, the photo cannot show that. But the buyers are happy when the parcel arrives. I do not understand this new way but I cannot argue with the orders. Anyone else selling traditional craft online and feeling this same confusion?🙂

found this landscape at goodwill for $4. someone painted it carefully, every tree has individual leaves, the sky is blended smooth. i bought it because i wanted to collage over it, use the sky as a ground for something else. but now i can't bring myself to touch it. it's not good, technically, but you can feel the time in it. someone sat with this for hours. maybe it was a gift. maybe it hung in someone's kitchen for thirty years. i keep pulling it out of the stack and putting it back. i've had it for three months. i know the rational thing is to just work on something else. but this is the one i keep circling. anyone else get stuck on a piece of source material like it's a person you owe something to?

Had a gallery years back that wanted first look at everything I made. Said no showing anywhere else, no selling direct, no side commissions. Shook on it. Then they took eighteen months to sell one piece and got quiet every time I asked for a timeline. Never again without a contract. If they won't put it on paper, they don't mean it. Anyone else get burned on a handshake deal with a gallery? Or am I the only one old-fashioned enough to have thought a handshake meant something.

Something happened last night that I did not expect at 44. I stopped early. Voluntarily. On a painting. It is a small interior, a corner of the kitchen with the morning light coming across the zinc, and I had been fighting one passage near the copper pot for three sessions. I knew exactly what I wanted to do to it. I could feel my wrist already making the stroke. And then I put the brush in the turpentine and walked away. Ten years ago I would have stayed there until two in the morning and ruined it. I have done that many times. The painting looks wonderful at 1am and dead in daylight, and you cannot save it because you have closed everything underneath. My teacher at the atelier used to say the hardest thing to learn is not the drawing. It is knowing the moment your eye stops seeing and starts inventing. Took me twenty years to actually hear that. So, voilà. The pot is not finished. It is also not ruined. I am calling that a win this week, which feels strange to type, but there it is.

Made a little quilt for my grandbaby's own baby, back when she was expecting. Finished it three years ago come spring. This morning I was clearing out the closet shelf and pulled it out just to fold it proper, and I stood there holding it a good long while. Ran my fingers over them stitches and I could tell you exactly which evening each one was sewn. Which prayer was running through my head at that particular seam. People ask why we hold onto these things. Why not just buy a blanket from the store, it's warmer, it's softer, it's machine washable a thousand times. And I never know how to say it. That cloth got my hands on it and my time in it and my hope for that child poured into every corner. A store blanket can't hold that. I put it back on the shelf. But I tell you what, I think I'm gonna sit with it tonight and maybe patch the one corner that's wearing thin. Not because it needs it. Because I got more prayers left in me for that baby.

so I'm shipping a painting to a buyer, right, my first sale in like two months that's actually a decent chunk of change, and I've spent 45 minutes bubble-wrapping this thing like it's a hostage situation. I get to the UPS store and the guy behind the counter watches me put it on the scale and goes "you know, you really should be using a rigid mailer, not a box, the box is gonna shift around in transit." and I'm like oh okay thanks but it's already packed pretty tight, I've got foam corners, it's fine. and he just WOULD NOT let it go. he's like "I ship art all the time, you're gonna get a claim" and starts telling me about the proper way to do it while I'm standing there with my debit card out. like sir I did not ask. I did not come here for a consultation. I came here to pay you $18 to put a sticker on my box. I know he was probably trying to be helpful but I was this close to being like "okay and how many watercolor paintings have YOU shipped that were still wet this morning and you stayed up too late stressing about the corners", I didn't say it because I'm a coward but I wanted to. anyway it arrived fine. no claim. I'm gonna frame that delivery confirmation and put it on my wall.

First gallery that ever showed me, I walked in with a portfolio of photographs. Nice prints. The owner looked at six of them, put them down, and asked if I had anything in the back of the truck. I didn't. I had driven four hours with nothing but paper. She gave me a show anyway, two years later. But I've never forgotten that she wanted to put her hands on something. Stone doesn't photograph for shit and I should have known it. So what did you actually take in. The piece itself, maquettes, photos, a tablet. And did it matter or did they just want to talk. Asking because I'm putting together a list for a younger guy I know and I don't want to hand him my grudge as advice.

My daughter, she studies in Patna now, came home for Diwali and saw me sitting with the brush and she said, Baba why are you not putting this on the phone. I told her I don't understand all this. So she took the phone, and she made one of those short videos, just my hand and the brush and the fish I was drawing, not even twenty seconds. She put some music on top which I found too loud, but I said nothing. In one week people came to my stall asking for the fish painting. A lady from Delhi bought two. A girl came and said she saw me on Instagram and wanted to learn. All this after I spent so many years doing exhibitions and cooperative meetings the proper way. I felt like such a fool ji, that the thing I ignored was the thing that worked. Now I am learning. My niece is teaching me to hold the phone steady while I paint. But I am also worried. The video showed the fish and the peacock, but nobody saw the ten years behind that line, the discipline, the ritual, the grandmother who taught my mother who taught me. I want the buyers but I also want them to know this is not decoration, this is our history. How do I put the history in a twenty second video without losing the people.

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.

A lady from Montgomery commissioned a queen-sized quilt, wanted it in her mother's old dresses and a Sunday shirt her daddy used to wear. I charged her $450 and felt a little bad about it at the time, like I was asking a lot. Well I counted it up honest. Sorting those dresses, taking them apart at the seams so the cloth laid right, the piecing, the quilting, binding. Sixty-one hours across three weeks. That come out to about $7.38 an hour and I supplied the batting and thread out of my own pocket. And I still felt bad asking for the $450. I told my granddaughter and she just looked at me like I'd lost my mind. She said grandma, you spent a whole week and a half of your life down there at that machine. And she wasn't wrong. But it's a funny thing, this work, you grow up where the women never charged for a quilt, you gave one for a wedding or a baby or to somebody whose house burned. Money on it still feels a little bit like shame to me sometimes. I know better in my head. Getting there in my chest is another matter. That $450 quilt is on her bed right now with her mama's plaid and her daddy's Sunday shirt all in it. And I'd do it again for the same money, if I'm honest. That's the part that really ought to bother me. 🙂