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I had this piece sitting in my studio forever. A birdhouse made from an old fuse box, wired with a single warm bulb inside. I thought $450 was fair, maybe even a little high. Three years. Nobody. Then this woman comes by, loves it, pays asking price no haggling. I was just relieved to have it gone. Then a friend texts me a screenshot from some HBO show. There's my fuse box birdhouse in the background of a scene. She looked it up, the set dresser rented it from a prop house for two grand. For a week. I charged $450 for something that took me years to make and someone else made almost 5x that in a week just for having it on a shelf in a fictional living room. And honestly I don't even know who to be mad at. The system? Myself for not knowing what things are worth? Both? Still trying to figure out what the actual lesson is here. Not sure it's just "charge more."

A gallery reached out last year about a piece I had in a group show. Wanted to know my price for a commission in that range. I said $400. They said great, we'll list it at $1800. That's when it hit me. I wasn't pricing my work, I was pricing my materials and time like I was still doing fabrication for other people. I'd welded it myself, designed it, sandblasted it, patinated it, figured out the base so it wouldn't tip in wind. Three weeks start to finish. $400. I told my daughter about it and she just stared at me. She said dad you're not a contractor. She was right. I raised my studio rate after that but I still catch myself lowballing. There's a voice in my head that says who's going to pay that for something you made. Thirty years in and it's still there.

everyone's got their fancy stay-wet palettes and i'm over here scraping bone-dry acrylic crust off this little board with a palette knife like i'm archeology-ing my own bad decisions. the texture is genuinely insane at this point, there's like seven layers of dried paint built up with actual craters where i gouged out a chunk of ultramarine mid-painting. i know i should just sand it down or toss it but honestly i'm attached. it's like a little topographical map of every piece i've made since january. you can see the exact week i went through a burnt umber phase. tell me you also have a cursed palette you refuse to retire

ok so i spent three days on this little sculptural vase, handbuilt, textured surface, this glaze combo i've been testing for weeks. really proud of it. posted a reel of the process, lighting nice, good music, the whole thing. got maybe 300 views. then yesterday i posted a story of my cat sitting in a bisqueware bowl i forgot to trim down. phone footage, bad lighting, my thumb in the corner for half of it. 4.2k views. 14 dms asking if the bowl is for sale. i don't know what the game is anymore. i'm not even mad, just... confused. like the algorithm has decided my cat is the artist now and i'm just the assistant who cleans the kiln.

She told me I need to "document the process." So I've been taking photos of the same chunk of limestone every few days. It's a bust. Half the face is still buried in the stone. I don't know who wants to watch that. But here's what happened. I posted a photo of my chisels laid out on the bench. Just the tools. Nothing fancy, dirty handles, worn down. That one got more likes than any finished piece I've ever put up. So I'm trying to figure out what the point is. If the work itself doesn't draw people, but the mess and the tools do, what am I actually selling? Because I'm not interested in selling the romance of being a sculptor. I'm interested in selling the sculpture. Hasn't made me any money yet. Just more people asking if they can come watch me work. Which I don't allow.

I welded a staircase railing for the art building at a community college in 2004. Not a sculpture technically, but they wanted something that looked like one. Paid fifteen thousand, which felt fine at the time for six weeks work. Twenty years later I still get five hundred dollars a year from that college. They call it a maintenance and consultation fee. Theyve never called me once. Its in the contract my old self signed and I keep meaning to tell them to stop. But I dont. That five hundred is the only passive income Ive ever had in this trade. Everything else was show up, get dirty, get paid, do it again. And I know people online talk about recurring revenue like its something you design into your practice from day one. I never did. It just happened because I wrote a stupid clause into a bid for a staircase.

Just finished the fabrication on a welded steel base for a bronze sculpture that's over seven feet tall. It's about 1500 pounds of mild steel, mostly 4-inch square tube. Had to build a custom jig to get the angles right. The welding is all done, now it's just grinding and prepping for patina. Feels good to get this beast off the floor. It fought me the whole way.

Not sculpture exactly, but close enough. Neighbor's property line needed a wall after a bad washout. I told him I'd do it for the cost of materials if he left me alone to work. Took all summer between other jobs. Dry-stack is a different kind of patience. No mortar to hide behind. Every stone has to lock in on its own weight. You spend half the time flipping rocks trying to find the face that wants to sit where you need it. Then you tap it in with a hammer and it either rings solid or you pull it back out. Laid the capstone this afternoon. It's four feet high, thirty feet long, and it'll be there after I'm gone. That's the part that still gets me after all these years.

finally worked up the nerve to push my prices up in february. small jump, nothing crazy, a handbuilt mug went from €28 to €34, a medium sculptural piece from €80 to €96. i made a whole spreadsheet about it. felt very professional. then march and april happened and i sold literally nothing through my online shop. not one piece. i started checking my own site like an idiot, refreshing, "is the add to cart button broken??" no, just nobody wanted it at the new number. i almost caved and dropped them back down last week but my friend who's been doing this longer told me to wait. she said the first silence after a raise is just the market recalibrating, or something. sounded like bullshit at the time. may i've sold three pieces. not a landslide. but the weird thing is the people buying now don't haggle. nobody. before, every single sale came with a "any discount for buying two?" or a "could you do €25?" and i'd fold immediately. now they just... pay it. and i'm making more on three sales than i used to make on six. still feels fragile. like the second i relax the silence comes back. but i think she might have been right.

Got a piece sitting on my bench right now that I've been avoiding for two weeks. Knew what was wrong the first time I looked at it but kept thinking I could finesse my way around it. Can't. Gotta cut the joint out and start over. That's the thing with steel that I think applies to everything, you can't fix a bad foundation by piling more on top. I see students do it all the time. Keep adding, keep adjusting, hoping the original mistake gets buried. It doesn't. It just gets more expensive to undo. Had a guy in my studio years ago spend six weeks building a sculpture on a bad armature. Six weeks. Knew the armature was wrong on day three. By the end he couldn't save any of it because the whole thing was built on something crooked. Sometimes the only real move is to scrap it and go back to square one. Hardest thing to learn and I still fight it.