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applied to a small residency back in february, the kind with a studio in an old school building and a bunch of other people around. found out at 7 this morning i didn't get it. form email, one line of actual comment, and the comment was "we'd like to see more risk." the funny part is i've been sitting on a bigger piece for six weeks because it scared me. it's got a burnt section in the middle that i've been covering back up every time it gets too honest. so yeah. fair. i'm not going to pretend i took it well at first. i ate toast standing up and stared at the wall for a while. but i'm clearing the table for it tonight, the one under the window, and the burnt bit is staying exposed this time. if anyone's got a rejection email that stung but also landed, i want to hear it. misery loves specifics.

I did a screenprint edition last month, 50 copies, three colours, hand-pulled, on nice 300gsm. Cost me about €450 in materials plus probably 30 hours in the studio. Sold 7 so far at €40 each. That's €280. Even if I sell every last one I'm barely breaking even on materials, let alone labour. And I know the advice. Raise the price. Build a mailing list before you print. Test the market with a preorder. All sensible. But there's something about making the edition first, committing to it, that's the whole point for me. The risk is part of the form. If I only printed what I'd already sold, it'd feel like a different practice entirely. I'm not complaining exactly. More trying to figure out where the line is between doing something for the work's sake and just being bad at the business side. Because I think I'm genuinely bad at the business side. But I also think the people who are good at it sometimes make work that's too safe. Any other printmakers here just accepting they'll lose money on editions because the object matters more than the margin? Or am I deluding myself.

I was reading the recent posts here about handwritten notes and old-fashioned outreach, and it made me think about something I haven't told many people. Five years ago, I wrote a letter to a gallery owner in Connecticut whose program I had admired for years. Not an email. A letter. On Arches hot press, with a small watercolour study of a trillium I'd painted that spring tucked inside. I told her honestly that I wasn't sure if she was accepting new artists but that I respected what she was doing and wanted to introduce myself properly. She wrote back. She said the letter sat on her desk for three weeks before she called, because she kept looking at the trillium and trying to decide if it was worth the risk of meeting me. She took me on. That gallery remains the steadiest source of my serious sales. Not Instagram. Not my website. A letter. I don't think the lesson is that we should all be sending letters. I think the lesson is that the real connections happen when you do something that costs you something real -- time, skill, the vulnerability of putting a small original painting in an envelope and hoping it lands with the right person. It is harder to ignore than a form submission. I still send a letter occasionally when a connection matters to me. I have never once regretted it. I have regretted the polished emails I overthought and never sent.

Ok so this is maybe the dumbest thing I've done this year. I walked into a gallery near me with a physical portfolio under my arm, no appointment, no email first, just showed up on a Tuesday because I'd convinced myself that a cold email gets deleted and a face doesn't. The woman at the desk was SO nice about it and took my card and I genuinely think I blacked out for part of the conversation. I have no idea what I said about my work. I might have said "it's mostly a window." She said "we'll be in touch" and I have been refreshing my inbox like a maniac ever since haha. My partner said I should have emailed first like a normal person. I said the whole point was NOT being a normal person. We're still arguing about it. So tell me. Do you email first and wait, or do you walk in and risk it? And if you've done the walk-in, what did you actually SAY. I need a script because I will absolutely do this again. 🙏

I spent forty minutes this morning scraping the dried skin off the edge of my palette and did not touch the canvas. Barely moved a brush. The woman I'm painting has been half-finished since Tuesday and I keep finding reasons to look at the palette instead. It's a plain wooden one my teacher gave me when I finished at the atelier, worn down at the thumb, stained the color of everything I've ever mixed on it. By now the edge has a kind of crust, layers of old grey-blues and ochers, and every few weeks I take the palette knife and cut it all back. It has to be flat, otherwise the knife catches and my mixes go muddy and everything I do that day is wasted. My daughter came in and asked if I was actually working. Fair question. I let her scrape a bit. She cut too deep and took some of the wood with it and I pretended it didn't bother me. I think the truth is I was not ready to paint her hands. Hands are the hardest thing there is and I have been putting them off. The palette is honest work with no risk in it. Anyway. Back in a minute. Hand first, and the rest can wait.

A small gallery in the 6th approached me in April about six paintings for a summer show. Consignment, 50/50, and they wanted me to cover the framing on all six. I did the arithmetic on the back of an envelope, which is where most of my bad news comes from. Six canvases, roughly 120 hours of work between them, frames at about 180 each because they wanted them uniform. If everything sold at my price, I would clear a bit less than what I make teaching two terms. If four sold, I would be paying them for the privilege of hanging my work. So I said no, politely, and I have been second-guessing it for three weeks. The gallery is good. People I respect show there. My wife thinks I was right. My daughter asked why I would turn down a gallery and I did not have a clean answer for a fifteen year old. The part I keep coming back to is the frames. 1080 euros out of my pocket before anyone walks through the door, and if the show goes badly I own six framed paintings in a size I did not choose. That is not a partnership, c'est un pari, and I am the only one with money on the table. I am not anti-gallery. I would like to be in one. I just want the risk to be shared, or at least acknowledged.

I quoted a 2m x 1.5m floor commission for €2,800 last spring. Client loved it, paid in two installments, no drama. Then I actually sat down and counted the hours after delivery. Between the cartoon, cutting and fitting the smalti, sourcing the stone, grouting, and two site visits, I was at 180 hours. That's €15.50 an hour before you subtract materials, which ran me about €400. So closer to €13 an hour for a piece that'll be walked on for decades. The killer is I couldn't have done it faster. That's the honest part nobody wants to say out loud. The work is the work. You can't rush setting a thousand tesserae and have it hold up in a floor. I keep going back and forth on whether to raise my rate for the next one and risk losing the commission, or stay where I am because at least the work comes in. My therapist friend says I should raise it. The landlord says I should raise it. My hands say they'd like to not be ruined by sixty for €13 an hour. Anyone here actually broken through on the price and kept the clients, or is this just what it is for hand-work?

I delivered a small piece last week, 20x25cm, torn pages from a 1930s French anatomy book, just three elements on a pale ground. Charged €250. The gallery sells my work at €480 and takes 50%, so I got €240. It took me 14 hours because I kept scrapping it and starting again. That's about €17 an hour before materials. I know the math is bad. Objectively I know. But I also know I wouldn't have made it faster if I'd rushed. The quiet part is I'm not sure I want to work faster. I want to sit with a piece until it's right. That's the whole point of doing this. I don't know what to do with that. Raise the price and risk the gallery dropping me? Accept that collage is a loss leader for a life I'd be living anyway?

Spent three weeks on a head, hand built, eyes done with a copper wash that finally came out the way I wanted, glaze pooled just under the cheekbone, all of it. And it looks dead. Not subtle dead, museum diorama dead. Like something that should be behind glass with a little card saying what it ate. The problem is I fixed everything. Every time a fire came out with a chip on the lip or the neck leaned wrong I rebuilt that part until it behaved, and now the whole thing is very correct and has no air in it. My early stuff was a mess but you could feel the hand still moving in it. This one you can't. I'm not going to smash it, my grandmother would genuinely be upset, she likes this one. But I'm thinking of going back with a low fire stain and putting a hard line through the jaw, something that breaks the symmetry and gives it a direction, like it just got interrupted. Risk is I ruin a piece that took three weeks and is technically the best surface I've ever got out of the kiln. Anyone else get stuck here? Where the thing is finally good and that's exactly the problem.

There is a rack behind the door in my studio, the cheap metal one that came out of a hardware shop on Zschochersche Strasse in maybe 2009, and it holds about a dozen canvases that did not work. Not unfinished. Failed. One of them is 180 by 140, four months of work two winters ago, and it is a dead grey thing now. I scraped it back to the ground and then scraped that too, and what is left is basically the ghost of the underpainting with a lot of wax residue sitting on top like something spilled. When the light comes in from the north window in the afternoon it looks almost like something. Almost. Most people I know would have painted over it. I know a painter in Dresden who reuses everything, nothing gets wasted, and I have some respect for that. But I cannot do it. Once a surface has failed, painting on it feels like lying to myself, and the layers underneath keep talking through. So the rack fills up. My wife has asked twice whether they are for the skip. She is patient about it, more than I would be. The thing is I look at them. Not often, maybe once every few months when I am looking for something else back there, and I am always surprised by how much of the actual problem I can see in them six months later and could not see while I was inside it. That is not a lesson, I am not going to go and rescue one. It is more like a record. Proof that the hours happened and did not become anything. Naja. There is a piece of me that thinks a studio without a few corpses in it is a studio where someone is not risking enough. And another piece that thinks I am just sentimental about my own labour. I have not decided which one is right.

My easel is a cheap H-stretcher I bought second-hand in 1998. One of the crank handles broke off years ago, so I keep a pair of pliers on the floor next to it to adjust the height. People who visit the studio always offer to fix it. I tell them no. Fifteen years of my paintings came off that thing, I'm not going to risk it now. I know it's superstition. I know a new easel would be sturdier, that the pliers are ridiculous at my age. But there's something about the fact that this exact wooden frame has absorbed twenty-six years of turpentine drips and bad days and good ones. The crank is worn smooth where my thumb sits. The tilt is slightly off because I dropped it once moving studios, and I've learned to compensate without noticing I'm doing it. My daughter asked me last week why I don't just buy the good one I've been looking at online for three years. I didn't have an answer that made sense out loud. The truth is that the pliers are part of the painting now. Every time I bend down for them, it's a little ceremony before I change the height. Keeps me honest about what I'm doing. Anyway. If the bent screw gives out mid-canvas someday, I'll take it as a sign from the universe that I should finally retire the thing. Until then we're in it together.

Ok confession: I've been painting on scraps and old cardboard for weeks because I was too scared to touch the good linen. Told myself it was "economic" but really I was just terrified of wasting a $40 surface on a bad idea. So today I went and bought 12 mid-range canvases, stacked them by the easel, and just started throwing charcoal at the first one with zero plan. The first one's already a mess. I love it. That's the thing, when the surface is cheap enough to ruin you actually take risks and then you make the weirdest stuff. I keep having to learn this lesson over and over. 😭 Anyone else hoard their good supplies like it's the last loaf of bread? Because I need to know I'm not alone. I've got entire drawers of nice brushes I'm "saving" for something.

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?