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so a friend that owns a coffee place here asked if i'd hang a couple small pieces on the wall by the till. not a show, no hanging fee, no commission beyond whatever i bought in flat whites. i said sure, mostly to get them out of my apartment. one 20x20cm acrylic, one slightly bigger. little handwritten tag next to each, price and my IG handle. that's it. sold three in nine days. not the two on the wall, three, because people asked if i had more in the back and my friend texted me and i drove over with two more. here's the part that bugs me. last year i did an actual group show, framed stuff, printed cards, the whole thing, sold one. this is a wall by a pastry case next to a sign about oat milk. i don't fully know what it means and i'm trying not to build a whole theory about it. maybe framed art in a white room reads as expensive and scary and a small unframed panel next to your coffee reads as a thing a person could own. maybe it's just that people are already in a buying mood when they're buying a croissant. maybe i got lucky. ngl though i'm now walking around town looking at every counter and shelf like a weirdo thinking about where else i could leave a painting. the guy at the hardware store is going to think i'm unwell. anyone else done the non-gallery thing and had it go weirdly better than the gallery thing

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 have done both and I still cannot decide which is worse. My first real show came from walking in. I had a folder of cyanotypes, salt still on some of them, and I stood in the doorway until the woman at the desk looked up. We talked for maybe ten minutes, mostly about the sea. She gave me a slot in a group show two months later. I am sure I was lucky. The emails, I have sent many. Most go nowhere, which is fine, but a few have turned into something. Harder to read a room that way. So which is it for you. Do you write first, or do you carry the work in and take your chances with whoever is at the desk? And has the one you chose ever actually worked.

ok story time because I need to know if this is just a me thing. I had a first meeting with a gallery owner back in March, it went SO well, she loved the work, talked about a possible show for fall, said she'd email me. And then... nothing. I followed up twice, got one "so sorry, crazy month!" and then radio silence again. It's been like four months. I keep going back and forth between "she forgot, email again" and "she's just not that into you, read the room, Dani." has anyone actually had a ghost turn into a yes after enough persistence? or is silence always the answer? and be honest, how many times did you email before you gave up?

I spent three hours today on one nostril. Not the nose, the nostril. The highlight that runs along the side of it. I kept smudging it out and bringing it back and it still isn't right, and I know if I step back and look at the whole portrait from across the room it reads fine, maybe even good. But I can't stop. People keep saying pastel is forgiving, which tells me they've never tried to do a highlight on Unison that stays where you put it and doesn't just become a gray smear. I'm on my last stick of the pale peach I like for skin light and I already know I'm going to order three more tonight out of pure superstition, like the piece will fail if the supply runs out. My partner walked in and said "it's really coming along" the way he does when he knows I'm stuck and doesn't want to say the wrong thing. I said thanks and went right back to the nostril. I wonder if there's a version of me that could just leave it alone and call the day done instead of chasing it. She seems nice. I've never met her.

I walked into a gallery once for a portfolio review and the space told me more in thirty seconds than the gallerist did in an hour. White walls, sure, but the lighting was wrong, the work on the walls was all the same size, nothing was challenging anything. I already knew it wasn't for me before we sat down. I think we spend so much time worrying about what to say in these meetings and not enough time reading the room itself. The way they hang other artists, the kind of work they show, whether they take risks or play it safe, it's all there. What's the fastest a gallery has told you it wasn't the right fit, just by being itself?

There is a half-finished interior on the easel since Tuesday, a corner of my kitchen with the window in it, and I have reached the stage where I talk to it. Not in a mystical way. Just out loud, small things, mostly complaints. Ah, non, that shadow is too cold. Come on. The window is the problem. I have mixed the glass four times. The first three were dead, flat, a hole in the wall instead of a light source. The fourth is closer and now the whole thing reads wrong, the room looks lit for a different hour than the one I meant, and I cannot decide if that is bad or if it is just not what I had planned. My teacher at the atelier would have said nothing. He would come, stand behind me, and after a while put one finger on the canvas somewhere I was not looking. That was the entire lesson. I miss it more than I expected to. Having someone whose eye you trust stand in your studio for forty seconds. So, out of curiosity. When you are stuck like this, do you repaint the thing that is wrong, or do you repaint around it until it stops mattering? I am asking because I have done both and only one of them was honest.

For years I shot everything the same way: tripod, two softboxes, neutral grey, fill in every corner so nothing was lost in shadow. Correct, and completely dead. Then in November I delivered a small interior to a client in Villeurbanne and she had already hung it before I got my coat off. Afternoon light coming sideways across the room, one half of the canvas frankly too dark to read. She was delighted. That is what the painting does in a real room, and I had spent a decade photographing it as if it were a passport photo. So now I photograph the new work where it lives. Same corner of my studio, north window, no lights, one shot at three in the afternoon when the light rakes across and the impasto shows, and I let the darks go dark. Enquiries went from almost nothing to about one a week, and the people who write are the ones who noticed the light, which tells me they will notice it on their wall too. The obvious objection: a client cannot judge the whole canvas. True. I send the full flat documentation to anyone who asks, privately, and nobody has ever been unhappy to receive it. The public image is not the record. It is the invitation. Bof, and the flat grey shots are still on my site, in the archive, where they belong.

The studio has one wall where I can stand back far enough to really look at a thing, and I've had this small interior on it for three days, tilted maybe four degrees off level. Just enough that you'd feel it before you'd name it. Every time I walked past I noticed, then forgot, then noticed again. I wanted to see how long it took for the tilt to become the subject instead of the painting. It took about a day. Then I straightened it and the whole piece read differently, better, the way a room settles when someone opens a window. I don't know what that says about me or about the painting, but there's something in it about how we see. The eye forgives a lot and then very suddenly doesn't. Probably no point to this. I just thought other people here might do the same stupid experiment and tell me what happened.

I've been setting a small panel for three weeks now, roughly 22 by 30, a figure half turned away. Not saying more than that. The problem is one section of red smalti in the drapery. I cut it, laid it, and the transitions are exactly what I planned. Every tesserae sits where I wanted it. It is the best-executed passage of red I have made in years and it is completely dead. I have been looking at it from across the room for four days. From there it reads like a photograph of drapery, which is the worst thing I can say about mosaic. The hand is gone. No gaps, no small errors, no slight wrongness that tells you a person sat on the floor placing these. I smoothed it out of existence. I know what I have to do. Rip out about forty pieces from the middle of it and set them badly on purpose. Deliberately. Wrong sizes, a couple of them turned a few degrees off the flow, one piece of a different red that is almost but not quite the same, so the eye catches on it and moves. Not chaos. A few honest mistakes that I am going to have to manufacture. The strange part is I spent years training out those mistakes. Conservation teaches you to blend, to match, to disappear. Then you go make your own work and you spend the rest of your life trying to be visible again. Tomorrow I take the chisel to a section that took me two days. Anyone else set something too well and had to wreck it back to life?

Painted a still life tonight at the kitchen table after the kids went down. Same table we ate spaghetti at two hours earlier. I wiped it down, laid out the drop cloth, and there's still a smear of tomato sauce on the corner of my reference photo that I just decided to live with. I used to feel bad about not having a real studio space. Read all these posts about people's dedicated rooms with north light and proper easels and I'd get all wistful. But honestly the kitchen table works. The light is awful. The cat walks across my palette at least twice a session. My 8 year old stuck a drawing of a dinosaur to the easel I can't even use because there's no room for it. But it's the only uninterrupted hour I get and I'll take it. Finished a decent little pear study tonight, better than my last one. That's the whole win. Packed it up and now I'm eating leftover spaghetti over the sink like a civilized person. Who else is painting on a dining room table or a folding tray or wherever they can grab space?

My mother is 79 and has almost no vanity about art. She hung the same two bad prints in her hallway for thirty years and never once thought to change them. So when she came for lunch Sunday and I had the big interior on the easel, I nearly turned it to the wall before she came in. Old reflex. She taught music for forty years and she has a way of looking at a thing that makes you want to be finished already. She didn't say anything for maybe a full minute. Then she put her finger on the window in the back of the room, the one where the light comes in, and said "that is the corner where you used to read." I had not told her that was what it was. She just knew it, from the light. I have painted that room four times now. This is the first one where the light is actually right, and I only found it because I stopped trying to make the window pretty and painted what it did to the plaster instead, all that grey going warm at the edge. Two years of glazing to get one small truth. Voilà. That is the trade. The funny part is I don't care anymore whether it sells. It is the first time in maybe fifteen years I have thought that and meant it. She is coming back Thursday to see it dry.

Right so, small confession. Years ago I stopped trying to carve cold lino. You'd be fighting the stuff, the tool skidding, the surface like a frozen jaffa, and you'd blame your hands when really the block was just stone cold. So now the kettle goes on the minute I get in. Not for tea, not at first anyway. I sit the block on an old tea towel beside it, let it take the warmth for ten minutes while I have the actual tea and stare at the drawing and convince myself I know what I'm doing. Means the studio smells faintly of burnt dust and hot rubber now. Which is a smell I've come to love and absolutely nobody else would. The wife came in last week to call me for dinner, saw the block propped up on the towel like a patient in a hospital bed, and just looked at me. "It's not even a real setting, Niall." It is though. It's the setting between boil and off. That's a setting. Anyway I'm midway through a big heron piece, 40cm by 60cm, three blocks for it, and the grey block is the one giving me trouble. Grey always takes the warmth worse than the brown. I'm aware how mental that sentence would sound to anyone outside this room. What's the mad ritual you'd have to explain with a straight face? I'll read them all tonight before I go back to the heron.

i raised my prices. i know it's what you're supposed to do, and honestly i believed it. the 850 painting sold in nine days, so i figured i'd been leaving money on the table and bumped everything about 40%. that was two months ago. sold one small one since, to a friend, at a discount she didn't ask for and i offered out of panic. the annoying part is the work didn't get worse. it got better. i finally figured out how to get that flat saturated orange to sit on top of a purple underpainting without turning into mud, which took me like four separate failed canvases to learn, and nobody cares because nobody's looking. so now i have nine finished pieces stacked against the wall in the studio, which is also my kitchen, and a pricing spreadsheet that i keep opening like it's going to say something different this time. it does not. not asking what to do about pricing, i've read all the threads. more like, is this just the shape of it now. you do the thing, you price it like a professional, and then you wait in a room with your own work.

I need to say this out loud to people who will understand. There is a shoulder in the interior I am working on, a woman seated at a table with a window behind her, and I have repainted that shoulder four times since Monday. The problem is not the shape. The shape has been right since the second pass. The problem is that in getting it right I kept softening the edge against the wall behind it, wet into wet, because every time it looked a half millimetre too hard I reached for the brush instead of leaving the room. Now the paint there is about a centimetre thick in places and the edge has gone to mud. It reads as fuzzy, which is worse than hard. Hard is at least a decision. Classical training gives you a lot of beautiful words for edges and none of them help when your hand is nervous. So tonight I am scraping that shoulder back to the ground with a palette knife, which will take two days to dry properly, and then I will paint it once. One pass. Then I put the brushes down and go and eat something. Anyone else have a place on a canvas where the number of attempts has become the actual subject?

Spent the morning writing the artist statement for the March group thing and it came out as nine hundred words of nothing. Deleted it. Wrote six lines. Deleted those too. What I actually wanted to send: this piece is made from a photo of my brother's kitchen that I tore into about forty pieces and glued back together wrong, on purpose, because that's how I remember the room. There's a coffee ring near the corner. I left it. Instead I have a document that says "explores the tension between preservation and loss." My friend Jen read it and said it sounded like a grant application for a hospital. She's right. Anyway, my real question, and I'm genuinely asking: does anyone actually read these things, or do they just get filed and nobody looks until after the show. Mine's going in the frame on the wall and I keep thinking I should just print the six honest lines and let it be uncomfortable.

My first proper gallery meeting here, the man was perfectly nice on email, and then I reached the place and he walked me through his own kitchen to get to the "gallery space." Which was one room at the back of the house. I still showed him my sketchbook, still said yes when he offered a wall. Lasted one show and I spent six weeks chasing him for the two paintings that sold. I've got better at reading it now, but I want to know what yours was. The sign you saw and ignored because you wanted it too much. Mine was the kitchen. Tell me something worse so I feel better about it, na? 🙂

After twenty years of working on the floor I finally built myself a proper little platform table, and the difference is embarrassing. Used to think kneeling was part of the craft, some kind of badge. Now I stand up after three hours and my hip doesn't make that noise. Should've done this in my thirties. Won't lie though, there's something lost. You read the work differently from above. Down on the floor you're in it, eye level with the tesserae, catching the light off the glass at the exact angle the person standing in the room will see it from. Up here I keep having to get down to check. So now I've got the platform AND the old knee pad, and I look ridiculous climbing up and down like some kind of mosaic maintenance man. The work's better though. And at this age that matters more than the ritual. My hands still know what to do, it's just the knees that needed a promotion.

there's a clock radio in the studio, the kind with the red numbers, and the antenna broke off years ago so it gets exactly one station and half of it is static. I keep meaning to fix it. I never fix it. so the day has a shape now. some point in the afternoon the same furniture ad comes on and I know I'm about two hours from losing the light. I've started pacing myself to it without deciding to. heard that ad read so many times I can say it along with the guy. he sounds tired. I respect it. tried a playlist last week, lasted twenty minutes, everything about it felt like someone else in the room telling me how to feel. the static doesn't have opinions. anyway the paper I've been layering for the last three days is still buckling at the edges and I can't decide if I'm going to fight it or let it do that. leaning toward letting it.

They were polite about it. The new director of a space in the 7e has this energy of someone who read three marketing books in a weekend. She wanted clips. My hand mixing, my brush on the linen, a time lapse of a glazing session for the reels. I said no, and I could feel the room cool about two degrees. Here is my problem with it. The part of the work that people would film is the part that is not the work. Watching me lay a glaze takes forty minutes and looks like nothing. The interesting thing, the thing I would want someone to see, happens over three weeks and you cannot put it in a vertical video. Voilà. Maybe I am wrong. I have watched the chisel clip thing, I know what it does. But I am not a process account. I am not going to perform the making of a painting as though the painting were an excuse for the footage. She asked if I understood how the market works now. I do understand it. I just don't agree that understanding something obliges you to do it. We will see if the show happens.