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Last year in Madhubani, marriage season was coming and a family from Darbhanga came to me. They wanted a large Mithila piece for the wedding wall, traditional, with the sun and moon, the fish, the bridal procession. I told them ₹8,000 for the whole thing, handmade paper, natural colours from my own stock, ten days' work minimum. They said they would think about it. Next week I heard they went to a younger fellow in the next lane. He does the work too, learned from his aunt, but he charges ₹4,000. He uses poster colour, not geru and rice paste. And the paper is machine-made. But it is half my price, so they went to him. I am not angry at the boy. He is feeding his family. But this is the thing, when your own neighbour will do it for half, the customer does not see the difference between handmade pigment and a tube from the market. They see two paintings that look somewhat same, and they pick the cheap one. My son tells me I should raise my prices even more, because the people who understand the difference will pay. But the people who understand the difference are fewer every year. The ones coming to buy are often new money, wanting a "Mithila painting" to hang on the wall like a thing, not knowing what they are looking at. So I am stuck. ₹8,000 is already not much when you count the grinding of the colours, the preparation of the paper, the days of sitting. But I cannot compete with ₹4,000 and poster colour. And I don't want to compete that way either. How do you hold a price for the real thing when the market does not know what real means anymore?

Did the accounts for the last market season over a cup of tea this morning, the way you do, and I nearly spat it out. Sold 240 prints over eight Saturdays, which sounds great till you add up the fine: about €4,600 in, and then the stall fee, the petrol, the framing offcuts, the lino and ink and paper and the new gouges I had to buy because the old ones went blunt halfway through July. Net came out around €900 for the season. That's not a business, that's a very slow hobby with a stronger opinion of itself. But here's the thing I keep coming back to. I met a woman at the October market who bought one print of the heron and then came back the next Saturday with her daughter and bought another one the same, "one for each of them" she said. That's not in the accounts. And I sold one to an American lad who sent me a photo of it framed above his fireplace in Chicago, which is mad when you think the lino block it came from has a coffee ring on it from the Tuesday before. I know the whole thing should be priced better and I know the answer is I'm a coward with my own numbers. But I also know I'd still do the eight Saturdays for less than minimum wage, and I'm not sure whether to be proud of that or embarrassed by it. Maybe both. Anyone else ever run the numbers and then decided not to learn anything from them? 🙂

Every time I sit down to a fresh sheet, handmade paper, the one I like from the Srikrishna batch we got last year, I tell myself I will do something new this time. A different composition. Maybe the wedding scene I have been thinking about since my niece's marriage last month. But my hand, it goes to the dhaan. The paddy stalks. That old motif curving from the corner, the grains full and heavy, dropping toward the bottom edge. My mother used to say it is not decoration, it is a prayer, for the land, for the stomach, for the season coming right. I put it in even when the painting is about Durga or the fish or the tree of life. Sometimes I hide it small behind a border so only the person who looks carefully will see it. My grandmother told me once: if you paint the dhaan enough times, the goddess will recognise your hand and bless your harvest. I was a boy then, I thought she meant the rice harvest. Now I understand she meant the harvest of your life itself, what you have grown, what you will feed others with. So today again, starting a new piece for an exhibition in Patna next month. And there it is. The paddy stalks already. I did not even decide. They just came. 🙏

Had a gallery tell me they were "so excited" about my work, invited me to come in, talked through framing and placement like it was happening... then went silent for eight months. I emailed four times, got one "let's circle back" and then nothing. Finally got a one-line reply saying they'd filled their calendar for the season. I know this is basically the gallery origin story at this point but I'm genuinely wondering how common it is. Did you ever chase one that turned out to be a total waste of your time? Or did you have one where the silence actually meant something and it worked out?

i emailed a gallery back in february. they replied in march saying they were "reviewing my work with the curatorial committee." i followed up in may, still reviewing. july came, i followed up again, got "we'll circle back after summer programming." then in september i get a polite no. like, just say no in march? don't drag me through all the seasons? tell me your longest string-along. not the rejection that stung, the one that wasted your time.

Raised my prices two months ago. Not by much, from 350 to 450 for a portrait. I had this whole spreadsheet argument with myself about it. The logic was fine. Someone actually bought one at the new price last week and I still felt guilty about it, like I'd overcharged a friend. But here's the thing nobody warns you about. The silence. Before, I'd post a finished portrait and get the usual little hum of interest. Now I post the same quality work and it's just... quiet. I know it's partly the season and partly the algorithm being moody. But I can't shake the feeling that the quiet is people deciding 450 is too much. The other part of me, the part I'm trying to trust more, says it's just that higher prices filter out the people who were never going to pay anyway. One buyer who treats it as a real purchase beats ten people who say "oh I love your work" and mean it as a compliment to themselves. I don't know. I keep going back and forth. Any of you who've raised prices and sat through that quiet stretch before it paid off, tell me it got better. Or tell me you dropped back down and it was the right call. I need someone else's spreadsheet.

I got to thinking about my grandmother's feed sack quilts the other day. She had one she kept folded under her bed, not on a bed, and I never understood why as a girl. Now I know she was keeping it for the hard days. Feed sacks from the flour and the chicken feed, that's what we had, and she'd piece them so careful you'd think it was silk. The colors weren't picked, they were what the mill happened to dye that season. But she made them sing anyway. I hold onto a little piece of one of hers. Just a square, faded almost white now. I touch it when I'm sitting down to sew and feeling like what I've got to say in cloth aint enough. And then I remember she said it with chicken feed sacks and made it beautiful, and I get to work. My granddaughter says the museum people call it improvisational piecing now. I call it making do and making it pretty. Same thing, honey. Same thing.

Fifteen by twenty-two centimeters. A corner of a room, morning light on a folded tablecloth, a copper pot, half a chair. Two days under the paint, maybe three with the varnish drying. I quoted 1 900 euros in September and I've been sitting on the price list since, not sending the new one. The number I want is 2 700. Same painting, same size, forty percent more. Nothing changed except that I finally did the arithmetic properly: materials, the linen, the ground, the week I lose afterward not painting because my head is still in that room. And a gallery in the sixth wants four of these for spring. Four at 1 900 is 7 600 for a season of work, before they take their cut. I know what the answer is. I know a woman in Villeurbanne who charges 3 200 for this size and sleeps fine. But I've written the email four times and deleted it four times, and there is a version of me that would rather paint it at 1 900 and complain than send it. My wife says the price is not the problem, the asking is. She is usually right and it is very annoying. I'll send it Monday. Writing it here so I have to.

Had a piece out in the weather since 2019, a tall steel form on a corporate plaza downtown. I welded it with a guy half my age helping me, and I argued with myself the whole way about one joint near the base. Wind load, thermal movement, all of it. I knew better. Did it anyway because the schedule said so. Went by there today to check on something else and stood under it for a while. That joint is clean. No cracking, no rust bleeding through the seam where I was sure it would go. Thirteen years on steel and I still don't trust a good weld until the weather has had a few seasons at it. Checked every connection while I was there. All of them fine. Thought about telling the young guy who helped me but I dont know if hes even still fabricating. Some people move on from this work. Just nice to be wrong about a thing once in a while.

What's the most unprofessional thing a gallery has done to you, after they already took your work? I'll go first. A gallery in another city confirmed a solo show, dates locked, contract signed. Two months before, I emailed to check in about shipping logistics. Nothing. A week later, nothing. I finally got someone on the phone and they said, I swear, "oh, we decided to push you to next season." No call, no email, nothing. I found out because I called them. The show never happened. They just... stopped answering. I know we all have one. What's yours?

okay so I know this is such a specific complaint but I have been fighting for my life with my gouache the last few weeks because it's finally warm here and the drying time is just… different?? Like I'll lay down a wash and it's practically dry before I can even blend into it, and then other times it stays tacky forever and picks up the layer underneath. I feel like I'm relearning my own medium every June. I've been working on this little street scene from a photo I took on my phone last fall, just a corner bodega with that orange awning you see everywhere in Brooklyn, and the sky went from a smooth gradient to a streaky mess in about 90 seconds because I hesitated. Had to let it fully dry and go back in with a damp brush to finesse it and honestly it's fine now but I was so mad in the moment lol. Do you guys adjust anything when the seasons shift or do you just suffer? I keep telling myself I'll figure it out by August and then August comes and I'm equally confused.

I almost ruined a figure study yesterday because I couldn't leave the studio. The light was going, I knew it was going, and I kept poking at the edges anyway. Ten more minutes of that and I'd have repainted a perfectly fine passage into mud. It took me years to learn this and I still do it. There's a moment where the painting tells you it's done for the day and if you don't get up then, you pay for it the next morning with a wet rag and regret. Right now I have a rule of sorts: when I start adjusting things just to have something to do, when my hand makes a mark and I think hm, before I make it, that's the signal. Put the brush down. Walk out. Of course I had to ruin the shoulder of that figure to remember my own rule. Three hours yesterday, then an hour today scraping and restating what the light had already given me for free. Bof. Some lessons you re-learn every season.

had a gallery "really excited" about my work for almost eight months. kept saying we're putting together a show for next season, hang tight. never happened. i finally just stopped emailing them and walked away. still not sure if i gave up too early or way too late. what's the longest a gallery ever kept you dangling? and at what point did you cut it loose?

A visitor from Germany came to our village last month through a cooperative tie-up. She saw the fish and the peacock panel I had done for the wedding season, and she asked the price. I told her twelve thousand rupees. She did not bargain, ji. She simply took out the money and paid me twenty-two thousand because she said my work was worth more than I was asking. That very night I could not sleep properly. Not because I was happy. Because I kept thinking, for thirty-five years my mother sold the same size of painting through the local haat for eight hundred rupees, and it was good money then. I have never once named a price that came to me naturally. I always think of the market here, where the families cannot pay. So we all keep the art cheap to keep it in the hands of our own people, and the foreign buyers walk away with it for whatever they feel. I am not blaming anybody. But I have started asking myself, am I doing a disservice to my mother's art by pricing it for the ones who cannot pay and not for the ones who clearly can. I have not got an answer yet.

There's a window in my studio, north light, looks out onto the courtyard wall. I've painted it twelve times over the years and I'll paint it again this winter. Same window, same wall. People think this is a lack of imagination. It isn't. It's the opposite. The light behind the courtyard wall changes with the hour and the season and the weather in a way you can't fully hold in your head until you've tried to put it down on canvas and failed. I've failed eleven times. The twelfth was close, so now I'm irritated. My old atelier master used to say a subject isn't finished when you've painted it, it's finished when you've stopped learning from it. I thought that was sentimental at twenty. Now I hang my whole practice on it. Anyway, the light today is doing something particular with the damp on the wall, that grey-green you only get in Lyon in November. I should be at the easel instead of typing this.

It's not even a good corner. There's a radiator, an old chair my daughter doesn't want anymore, a window that faces a wall of the building next door so the light is always indirect and grey. I've done maybe thirty small studies of it, different seasons, different times of day. Nobody would ever hang them. They're not for anything. I think I just need a subject I don't have to perform for. Something that asks nothing of me. When you spend all day trying to make something worthy of being looked at, you start to crave the opposite, a corner of the world you can paint badly and it doesn't matter. My husband thinks I'm avoiding the commission I'm supposed to start. Maybe. But I also think there's something real in these little failures. A kind of intimacy.

Today I ground the neem leaves with the stone. My grandmother used to say the paste must rest two nights before you strain it, otherwise the green comes out thin and quarrelsome. Three days this time. The colour that came out is deep, almost black-green, and it sits on the handmade paper different from any tube colour. It has a weight in it. People ask why we do the slow way when the market has everything ready. I tell them the old colours have the season inside them. This neem, it came from the tree behind my sister's house in Darbhanga. The paper is from Saurath, the same mill since my mother's time. Nothing about this painting is in a hurry. The fish and the lotus are done. Now the peacock's tail is waiting and I am letting the colour settle. Some days the work is not about the hand, it is about the patience. I am learning this again every time.

found my old brush rinse cup under a pile of rags today. the water had fully evaporated and left this perfect layered sediment thing going on, like a little geological core sample of every color i've used since like june. honestly prettier than half the stuff i actually finished last quarter. i almost scraped it out but now it's sitting on my shelf like an art piece. my studio smells like vinegar and regret either way so it fits right in. the thing is i remember being so annoyed when that cup disappeared. turns out it was just doing its own thing the whole time. maybe that's a metaphor for something. or maybe it's just a dried paint cup and i should clean my space more than once a season lol

In summer I can start at six and have good north light until almost noon. Now in November I have maybe two hours in the morning if I'm lucky, and then everything goes flat and grey. I keep trying to paint anyway and just end up fighting the canvas, overmixing, losing the thing I was following. I know the solution is to adapt, move to artificial, shift to smaller work, whatever. But I've never found a lamp that does what daylight does. The colour is never right, the way it falls on the form is dead. So I just stand there and watch the light go and feel sorry for myself. Do you switch to something else when the season changes or do you stubbornly keep trying to make the same work? I haven't figured out the dignified answer yet.