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I have this rag I wipe pastel dust off my fingers with. It used to be a t-shirt I wore in my office job, before I quit. Every portrait I've ever done has left a bit of itself on it, layers of pigment so thick in places it's more like a painting than a rag. My partner keeps offering to throw it in the wash and I keep saying no, and I can't really explain why. It's not sentimental, it's not like I hold onto a shirt for the memories. It's just that the color buildup is a record. I can look at it and see the last two years of faces, all smeared together into one brownish mess that's somehow more honest than the finished pieces. Today I held it up to the light and there was a patch of that exact pink I mixed eleven times for one portrait and never got right. The rag got it in the end. Maybe I should frame the rag instead of the drawings.

I spent most of yesterday painting a single section of a white camellia petal, and I have the faintest residual dread about peeling the masking fluid off today. You never really know if it's going to come away cleanly or take a thin layer of paper with it, and there is very little in studio life quite as deflating as a torn surface at the end of three hours of careful washes. I've tried half a dozen brands over the years. Pebeo is what I keep coming back to, but I wouldn't call it loyalty so much as the least-bad option. And I am still, after decades, occasionally too impatient about letting it dry fully before painting over it. You'd think I would have learned. Does anyone have a brand they actually trust? Or do we all just hold our breath and hope.<｜end▁of▁thinking｜> <｜｜DSML｜｜parameter name="tags" string="false">["watercolor", "botanical illustration", "masking fluid", "technique"]

I've been thinking about how etching forces you to accept that you don't fully control the outcome. You can prepare the plate perfectly, time the bite, measure the acid concentration, and still something happens in the bath that you didn't plan for. A tiny pinhole you missed, a breath of air that moved the mordant differently, the temperature changing because someone opened a window. I used to fight this. I wanted the plate to be exactly what I imagined. Now I think the whole point is that it never is. The acid has its own intelligence, or maybe it's just indifferent, either way, you're in conversation with something that doesn't care about your plans. My assistant asked me yesterday why I don't just work digitally if I want clean lines. And I couldn't explain that the imperfection is the content. That a line that's been bitten by acid is different from a line that's been drawn, it's been through something. Maybe I'm just getting older and learning to let things be what they are. Or maybe I'm rationalising a plate I ruined this morning. Both can be true.

So I had a watercolor in a group show at this small gallery downtown, nice space, good foot traffic, I was genuinely excited to be in it. It sold opening night, which felt amazing for about ten minutes until I did the math on my take-home. They took 50%. Half. And I get it, they have overhead, they promoted the show, they poured the wine, whatever. But I walked away with $175 on a $350 piece and I spent差不多 two weeks on it. That's like... $12 an hour if I'm being generous to myself. And I had to frame it myself too. I texted my old professor from school and she was like "yeah 50% is standard for emerging artists in that kind of space" which made me feel both better and worse somehow?? Like oh great so this IS the deal, I'm just supposed to accept that half my labor disappears because someone else has a storefront. I don't know. I'm not trying to sound ungrateful, the sale itself was validating. But I keep thinking about how many more hours I'd have to work just to make rent off that kind of split. My partner was like "well now you have a gallery relationship" and I'm like ok cool but the relationship doesn't pay for my gouache tubes lol. Anyway. For those of you who've been doing this longer, do you just build the commission into your pricing from the start? Do you negotiate? Or is 50% just the price of entry and I need to shut up about it?

I finally replaced my steel ruler after 15 years. Same brand, same size, looked identical out of the package. And then I measured a column of paper with both and they're off by almost a millimeter over 40 cm. I kept the old one. It's bent in a way I've learned to compensate for with my eye, so it's actually more accurate in my hands than the straight one will ever be. The new one sits in the drawer, brand new, useless to me. Some tools you don't own. You just get to know them well enough to work around their flaws. That's the real relationship.

Working on a portrait from a reference photo I found in an old magazine, some woman I've never seen before. And I get to the mouth and I keep redrawing it and it's not working, and then I step back and realise, it's my mother's mouth. The upper lip thinner, the way the corner tucks in. I didn't put it there on purpose. It just came out of my hand. I don't even have a great relationship with my mother. So that's unsettling. Has your hand ever just. Drawn something from your life without asking you first? Like the muscle memory knows things you don't want it to know?

some guy at a cafe yesterday saw me working on a sketch, came over, loved it, said he runs a "curated online gallery" (instagram account with 300 followers). wanted to feature me. for free. in exchange for "exposure to his network." i asked him how many sales his featured artists usually get from it. he said "well it's more about building relationships." so i said cool, let's build one where you pay me. he did not think that was funny. he left me his card anyway. the card had a stock photo of a paintbrush on it.

A guy at a group show on Saturday looked at one of my big charcoal pieces for a while, which is already more than most people do, and then said it "needed more control." He said it kindly. That's the part that got me. If he'd been a dick I could've shrugged it off. I've been in my head about it for two days now. Half of me knows he's right in the technical sense, there's a shoulder in that drawing that's held together by hope. The other half wants to say no, the whole point is the hand going too fast to be careful. That's not a mistake, that's the drawing. I keep wondering if people who trained properly have a different relationship to that. Like do they hear "control" as a craft note or does it hit them somewhere else. Because for me it lands like, oh, you think I'm faking it. Which is my stuff, I know it's my stuff. Anyway. I'm not changing the shoulder. I might fix the arm though.

Right, I'll go first and take the slagging. Years back I was doing a small group show and the gallery owner told me, in the same breath, that she loved the work and that she'd "need to hold onto the blocks" in case she needed more prints down the line. I heard the second half and my brain just went "grand, she likes them." Handed over two carved blocks. Never saw them again. She didn't last the year and neither did the relationship, and I still think about those blocks more than I think about the money. So what's yours. The thing you clocked at the time and talked yourself out of because the show was worth it. The contract with the weird clause, the dealer who was a bit too keen, the space that was somehow always empty when you dropped by. Tell me I'm not the only eejit.

A gallery I have worked with for eleven years asked me in March for three small, easily shippable pieces for a fair booth in the autumn. "Something that sells itself," was the phrase. Which in practice means the same painting I have made fifteen times already, in a size that fits a car. I said no. Not out of pride exactly. I am 52 and I have done the years where saying yes to everything was the only way to keep the lights on. But I know how that ends: you make the easy thing, it sells, and then the easy thing is what you are known for, and every year after that you are asked for more of it in slightly different colours. What I offered instead was one large canvas, one mid-size, and one small. He was quiet on the phone for a while and then said the large one would never sell at a fair. It did not, at the fair. It sold four months later, to a private collector in Basel, at more than the booth piece would have brought. So in the ledger I am ahead. But the relationship is cooler now, and I am not naive about what that costs. The market does not reward the refusal, it just eventually forgets to punish it. The honest part is I do not know if I was right. I know I did not want to spend five months of my life on something I could have painted in my sleep. Whether that is integrity or just stubbornness at my age I could not tell you.

Okay so I'm about 8 months into doing this full time and I've sent maybe 15 cold emails to galleries and gotten exactly one reply, which was a no, but a NICE no, and honestly I printed it out?? haha. Here's my actual question: how did you get your first gallery to even open the email. Not the whole relationship, just the door cracking. Did you walk in with work under your arm? Did you know somebody? Did you go to an opening and corner the owner (respectfully)? Did you just send 60 emails until one landed? My own answer: the one no I got came from a gallery I'd actually been to in person first, stood in front of a painting for way too long, and then emailed saying I'd seen the show and here's my work and it might sit next to this one artist's stuff. That's the only one that ever answered me. So now I'm convinced showing up in person actually matters and I want to know if that's real or if I just got lucky once. Tell me yours. Especially if it was dumb or accidental, those are my favorite ones.

There's a sledgehammer that's been propped in the corner of my studio since 2004. Not mine, nobody remembers how it got there. I trip over it, I move it, it comes back. Yesterday a young guy came to help with a frame and he asked what it was for. I said I don't know, it just lives here. Then I thought about it. Twenty years of stepping around a tool I've never once lifted. That's not a studio, that's a relationship. I finally carried it out to the yard. Felt like breaking up with someone I never dated. Now the corner looks empty and I can't decide if that's better or worse. Maybe I'll buy a different hammer to take its place. Some of us just need the weight in the room.

I keep reading that you're supposed to build relationships, email first, get on their radar. But I've never once had the nerve to actually walk into a gallery with my portfolio and just ask. I've sold at local fairs for years and people keep saying I should approach the galleries in town, but the thought of it makes me want to crawl in a hole. So who here has actually done it? Walked in cold, no email, no connection, and just asked? How did it go? I need to know if it's as terrifying as I've built it up to be in my head, or if gallery owners are actually just normal people who don't mind someone asking.

Six months it took to get paid for a portrait. I had almost written the money off, the usual French bitterness about commerce, and then the woman who owed it sent me to two friends and a gallery owner who now shows my work in Geneva. Not because I chased her. Because I kept painting for her while she didn't pay. She remembered that. I think we are too quick to cut people at the first late invoice. Some of the best relationships I have started with a payment that made me grind my teeth. I am not saying let people walk over you. I am saying a bad payer is not necessarily a bad patron. And a fast payer is not necessarily a friend of your work either. The gallery that strings you along for months will sometimes be the one that sells everything. The client who is slow with the check will sometimes be the one who builds your whole next year. The correlation between promptness and generosity is weak. I wish someone had told me that at thirty.

So I've been full-time for eight months now which means I've been doing all the "okay so I guess I have to market myself" stuff that nobody prepares you for in art school lol. And the thing that actually worked, the thing that got me my first real gallery relationship, was the most humiliating process ever. I spent a weekend sending 40 cold emails. Like, proper ones, with images and links and a real bio. And I got one reply. ONE. And honestly for like two days I was so embarrassed I almost didn't open it because I assumed it was a no too. But it was a yes. A small gallery in a city I'd never been to, but they liked my work and wanted to talk. That one yes turned into a group show, which turned into two commission requests from people who saw the show, which turned into enough money to pay rent for three months without panic-ordering takeout. Anyway I'm not saying cold emailing is the secret sauce, mostly it's just brutal lol. But I think sometimes we hear about the one reply and not the 39 silences. So here's my question I guess: what's the thing you tried that felt stupid or embarrassing or like it wasn't working, and then it kind of... did?

A gallery about an hour from me offered representation last year on condition of exclusivity within a fifty-mile radius. I turned it down. It felt too limiting for a first relationship, and I wasn't convinced they could sell enough of my work to make it sensible. I still wonder whether that was the right call. Has anyone here signed an exclusive agreement with a gallery and found it worked well? Or regretted it? I would be interested to hear how you decided.

I'm not talking about the obvious ones like "we need money upfront." I mean the small thing you noticed in the meeting that made your stomach go tight. For me it was the contract. Two pages, and no line saying when it ends. I asked, and the owner said "oh, we don't really do that, it's a relationship, not a lease." He said it very nicely. I still did not sign it, and then I spent two weeks wondering if I had just thrown away my one chance 🙃 So tell me yours. The thing they said, or the thing that was missing from the paper. Partly because I want to know I was right to walk, and partly because I have another meeting in two weeks and I would like to know what to watch for 😅

i once told a gallerist my work was "kind of a vibe" and then just stood there. she nodded. that was the whole meeting. didn't get the show but honestly i respect her for not laughing. anyway, tell me the worst thing that's come out of your mouth in a gallery, cold email or in person, and did you recover from it or was it a wrap on that relationship. i'll take either. the cringe is the point.

did the math today while mixing and my burnt umber is now older than some of the apps i use. 2020, lockdown, i panic-bought the gallon jug because the small tubes kept running out and i was convinced the world was ending and i'd never get another one. the world did not end. i have used maybe a fifth of it. anyway it's the only color i've never had to think about. everything else i'm scraping the bottom of the tube like a raccoon, but the umber just sits there, enormous, smug, will outlive me. i pour it out on the palette like i'm feeding a horse. ngl there's something nice about one material being a non-issue. one whole thing in the studio with zero anxiety attached. the rest of the shelf is a graveyard of dried-out caps and regret. what's the supply you overbought in a panic and now have a weird relationship with

Admitting mine first. Years ago a dealer in Germany kept two of my pieces after the show ended. Not "storing" them. In his apartment, hung, where his friends could see. I found out from a friend of a friend. I never did anything. I did not want to be the difficult Czech. I still think about it in the shower. So. What is the thing a gallery did that was not just rude but maybe against the law, and you let it go because you wanted to be liked or keep the relationship? Late payment, work not returned, side sales, your name off the list, whatever. Tell me the story and whether you would tolerate it now.