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just got an email from a gallery i was excited about, they want me to ship insured, but when i asked what value they want me to declare, they said "whatever you think is appropriate." like that's not how insurance works?? i'm pretty sure i already know the answer here but i'd love to be wrong, is this normal? did i just dodge a bullet or am i being paranoid? for context my last gallery experience was the one that strung me along for six months and then ghosted, so my radar could be off.

Got approached by a gallery last year that wanted me to cover shipping there and back, plus insurance, before they'd even put my piece in a group show. No guarantee of sale. Just my cost to get it in the door. I told them no. They acted like I was the unreasonable one. I've heard worse since. What's the most ridiculous thing a gallery has asked you to swallow the cost on?

so I'm shipping a painting to a buyer, right, my first sale in like two months that's actually a decent chunk of change, and I've spent 45 minutes bubble-wrapping this thing like it's a hostage situation. I get to the UPS store and the guy behind the counter watches me put it on the scale and goes "you know, you really should be using a rigid mailer, not a box, the box is gonna shift around in transit." and I'm like oh okay thanks but it's already packed pretty tight, I've got foam corners, it's fine. and he just WOULD NOT let it go. he's like "I ship art all the time, you're gonna get a claim" and starts telling me about the proper way to do it while I'm standing there with my debit card out. like sir I did not ask. I did not come here for a consultation. I came here to pay you $18 to put a sticker on my box. I know he was probably trying to be helpful but I was this close to being like "okay and how many watercolor paintings have YOU shipped that were still wet this morning and you stayed up too late stressing about the corners", I didn't say it because I'm a coward but I wanted to. anyway it arrived fine. no claim. I'm gonna frame that delivery confirmation and put it on my wall.

Long story short, someone messaged about a piece, wanted to see it in their space, asked if I could hold it for two weeks while they "decided." I said sure. Then I did the math on what that actually costs me, three weeks of a piece sitting in my front room while I answer follow-ups about whether it's "warm or cool in person." So now I say: $40 to reserve it for a week, comes off the price if you buy. Half of people vanish. The other half pay the $40 instantly and two of those bought. Which is roughly double my close rate from when holding was free. The part nobody tells you is the $40 isn't about the money, it's that it forces them to say yes or no. Free holding lets people stay in maybe forever. Maybe is where all my work goes to die. I had 6 pieces in maybe last spring, I sold 1. Also I finally started saying "I can't hold it, someone else is looking at it this weekend" even when nobody was. Felt like a lie the first three times. It stopped feeling like one when it turned out to be true twice. I'm not saying do this. I'm saying I was giving away the one thing I have that's actually scarce, which is time on a piece before the decision.

got the email this morning. we love the work, we'd like to include it, one small thing: could it be, and I'm quoting, "scaled down slightly to fit the wall." it's a physical object. it's paper glued to board. it's 30 by 40. there is no smaller version of it, that's just a different piece. I spent twenty minutes drafting a polite reply that said no in six different ways and then sent "let me check the wall dimensions" like a coward. anyway the wall is 34 inches. so now I'm sitting here measuring my own painting like it's a couch.

First gallery I was with, I was young and glad to be there. Signed everything they put in front of me. Two years in I found out they'd been holding back 20% of the framing, shipping and insurance costs I was supposed to be paying direct. Nothing criminal, just buried in a contract I never fully read. My fault as much as theirs. I was too eager to look like I knew what I was doing. These days I put everything in writing before anything hangs. Who pays for the opening, who covers shipping, what happens if a piece sells in the first week versus the last. Even then they'll try things on. What's the clause or agreement you wish you'd nailed down before your first show? I'd be curious what bites people most.

Three weeks ago a small gallery that's been circling me finally asked for a social content plan before they'd put me in a show. Not the work. The plan. I sat on it for a day and then sent back a photo of the crack running from my workbench to the door, the one I've been stepping over for two years, plus two lines about how I'm building a series off it. No grid, no posting schedule, no "pillars." They said yes. Show opens in October. meanwhile I spent most of last year making little video edits of my process with a trending audio and got 40 views and one comment from a man asking if I ship to Brazil. I don't ship to Brazil. I'm not saying the crack was strategy. It wasn't, I just couldn't make myself write the plan. But there's something in the fact that the most honest thing I had was also the only thing anybody responded to. Maybe the whole "content" thing only works when it's an accident. or maybe the gallery just wanted a show and the plan was paper they needed to file. still taking the win.

I shipped a small gouache piece to a buyer in Portland nine days ago, tracked, packaged like it was going to the moon, and the tracking has said "in transit" since Tuesday of last week. Which is apparently a real status that can just sit there forever like a cat on a fence. The thing is, it wasn't even an expensive one. It was a 6x8, a corner of my window in the morning when the light comes in orange and hits the radiator. I did it fast in one sitting and it's the only piece I've made in months that I didn't pick apart afterward. Sold it for basically nothing because I wanted it to go somewhere. Now some box is somewhere between here and Oregon and the buyer keeps messaging me "any update?" every two days which is fair and also making me want to put my phone in a drawer. I spent $14 on extra padding at the UPS store. $14! For a box that is now a ghost. Anyway I'm going to go repaint the radiator out of spite. If anyone has ever successfully gotten a package unstuck from "in transit" I would love to hear how, or just tell me your worst shipping story so I feel less insane

So a woman from a little gallery in Ghent messages me about a show, wants three of the leaning vessels, and then writes the sentence I've now read about forty times: "we can offer you exposure and a small participation fee." I read it twice. Small participation fee. Meaning I pay her. I said no thanks, and she got a bit cold after that, like I was the unreasonable one. And maybe I am? Because everyone around me keeps saying you have to do these things when you're starting, that the shows build the CV, that the CV sells the work later. My father said almost exactly this over lunch Sunday, in between asking when I'm going to "get serious." But the last time I said yes to a thing like this, I shipped four pieces to a space I'd never seen, paid 60 euros in crates and shipping, and sold one. One. The other three came back with a chip on the foot of the biggest one. I've still got it here, I use it for brushes. I don't know. Maybe I'm being stubborn and there's some version of the math where this pays off in three years. But I keep thinking about my grandmother, who ran a stall in the market in Ruzafa for thirty years, and her rule was simple: the work costs what it costs. She never once paid anyone for the privilege of selling her own oranges. Not asking anyone to agree with me here. Just tired of being made to feel greedy for wanting to be paid.

Had someone message me about a commission back in February. Wanted a small piece, maybe 40x40cm, in mostly smalti. We went back and forth for two weeks, she wanted a discount, wanted free shipping, wanted me to throw in a smaller piece "as a gesture." I held my ground, said the price is the price, and eventually she went quiet. I figured she'd moved on. Three weeks later the full amount shows up in my bank account with a one-line email: "Same dimensions as discussed, please proceed." No apology, no explanation. Just the money. I made the piece, shipped it, never heard from her again. Not even a photo of it on a wall. I still don't know what to make of that interaction. Part of me thinks she tested me and I passed. Part of me thinks she just got tired of negotiating and decided to pay. Either way, the lesson I keep landing on is: if you're confident the work is worth what you're asking, the haggling either resolves itself or it doesn't, and either outcome is fine. You don't have to win every conversation. Just don't be the one who folds first.

So a gallery I was talking to, small, not huge, but seemed legit, wanted me to ship them a bunch of pieces on consignment, cover the shipping myself, no guarantee anything would sell. I asked about the split and they sent me their "artist agreement." 70/30 their way. For a solo show. And I'd be paying for the opening night drinks out of my 30%. I laughed and said no obviously. But I'm still thinking about it, what IS normal these days? Like what's an actual fair split for a small gallery that's actually doing the work? I've heard 50/50, I've heard 60/40 artist-favoring, I've heard some places do 70/30 the artist's way if the artist is bringing the collectors. What are y'all actually seeing out there? What's walking-around real vs what's them trying it?

Okay so I've been doing the full-time artist thing for 8 months now and today I shipped my first actual commission. Not a print, not a little piece at a market, an actual person who messaged me asking me to paint their grandmother's garden. Their GRANDMOTHER'S garden. There were reference photos of this old rose bush and a rusty bench and I spent three weeks obsessing over getting the green right because greens are the devil honestly. Anyway I sent it off this morning and then I just sat in my car outside the post office and cried a little. Not sad crying. Just like. Oh, this is real now. Someone trusted me with their memory and I didn't mess it up. My dad died when I was 19 and I painted my way through that whole year, and I kept thinking today about how painting someone's garden feels like the exact opposite of that. Like here's a thing that's still alive and growing and someone wanted me to hold onto it for them. And the grandma apparently cried when she saw the photos I sent before shipping, which made me cry again. My partner just handed me a towel and said "this is your whole personality now huh" and he's not wrong. Not really asking anything, just wanted to tell people who'd get it. What's the last thing that made you cry in a good way?

I'll start. First real gallery interest I ever got, the guy wouldn't put anything in writing. Kept saying "we work on a handshake here." Then he asked if I'd cover the framing and shipping on my own pieces for a show. Signed nothing, walked. Cost me a year of wondering if I was being too picky. What's the thing that made you back out, or the one you ignored and wish you hadn't?

The piece was 30x40, acrylic wash and torn paper over a photo of somebody's grandmother's kitchen. Client found me through a friend of a friend. 900 felt generous when I said it out loud. Then I actually sat down with the receipts. Panel 62. Mediums, call it 140 because I wasted a whole tube of a grey I ended up hating. The photograph was a scan and a print, 34. Frame, because it needed one and I didn't trust them to pick it, 210. Shipping 55. That's 501 gone before I touched it. What was left was 399 and maybe 60 hours. I don't work fast. I re-tore the same paper corner four times. So roughly 6 an hour, and that's before the gallery takes a cut if it ever shows. The part that actually bothers me isn't the number. It's that I knew it was low when I said it. I said 900 because I could hear myself about to say 1400 and it scared me. Fear has a price and mine is 500. Quoting a new one next week. Same size, same materials. I'm going to say the higher number and just sit there.

i did the thing where you make an edition because a friend said "prints are passive income." 40 giclee prints of a piece i actually like, cost me $180 plus shipping tubes, and i've sold three. two of those were to people i know. here's the part that bugs me. the original sold fast, $450, to a woman who wanted it for a hallway she's repainting. the print, same image, $45, sat. i think it's because a print is honest about being a copy and nobody wants to hang a copy of a painting, even a good one. or maybe my print is just bad, that's also possible. anyway there's a stack of 37 in my closet and one of them is under the lamp with the cracked base to stop it wobbling. i'm not mad about it exactly. it's more that i can't tell if i failed at marketing or failed at having the right product. those feel like different failures and i don't know which one i'm looking at. curious if anyone here has made an edition that actually moved, and what was different about it.

ok so I need to say this somewhere because my partner is tired of hearing it and honestly they're right. I did a little gouache commission last month, 11x14, a house portrait for a coworker of my mom's (mom's coworker, not even mine, which is its own whole thing). Quoted $260. Felt generous at the time, felt like a real artist number. It took me four sessions. Four. Because the roof had all this dappled light on it and I kept redoing the same three shingles like a maniac. Plus materials, plus the scan and a print of it as a thank you, plus driving it over to her house because "oh don't worry about shipping." By the end it was like $40-something an hour if I don't count the prep drawing I threw away. If I DO count it, it's less. And then she tipped me $20 and I almost cried, which, in fairness, might have been the sleep. The thing that's actually bugging me isn't the $260. It's that I quoted it off the top of my head in a two-second text. Didn't look at anything. Didn't think about size or complexity or the part where a house has like nine hundred windows. Just said a number because saying a bigger number felt rude. Meanwhile I've got a 5x7 in the same style I've been charging $85 for since art school, and those take me maybe two and a half hours now, so per hour they're actually not awful. It's the mid-size ones that are quietly eating me alive. Which I only figured out because I wrote every job down in a notebook this month like a responsible adult, and the notebook is mean. Anyway I think my 11x14 needs to be $400 and I've been sitting on that number for a week like it's a live grenade. Saying it out loud here so it stops being just mine. Nobody warned me that the hard part of full time isn't the painting.

what's the one thing in a gallery contract you read and immediately knew you weren't signing? for me it was exclusivity within the city. i get it, they don't want me selling out of my studio down the street, but i'm not locking myself to one space when rent is due and the other gallery two blocks over actually sells my stuff. ngl i asked them to strike it and they did, which told me more about them than the whole rest of the contract honestly. what's yours? the commission split that gave you pause, the "artist covers shipping" fine print, something weirder? tell me i'm the only one who's crossed stuff out like a toddler with a crayon.

Spent three days welding a knee joint for a figure and only noticed when I went to grind the seam that I'd built it mirror-image. Left leg where the right belonged. Two hundred pounds of steel and I stood there looking at it like it was someone else's work, because it was. Shaped wrong by a man who's done this for thirty years. Cut it apart this morning. Salvaged maybe sixty percent. The rest is scrap. What bothers me isn't the wasted steel, it's that I looked at that thing off and on for three days and my eye told me it was fine. You trust the eye or you don't, and mine lied to me until my hands finally caught it. Makes me wonder what else I've shipped out that I never caught.

Gallery show five years back. They wanted exclusive rights to sell my work for the run of the show. I was younger and dumber so I said fine. They took the pieces at 60% of what they were going to price them at. So if they sold a piece for $10,000 I got $6,000 before expenses. That part I understood. What I didn't realize until later was they were pricing my work at 2.5x what I'd ever sold anything for before. So I'm thinking I'm getting 60% of a fair price. They were pricing it at whatever they thought they could get and I got 60% of that. One piece sold. A welded steel figure I spent three months on. They priced it at $14,000. I got $8,400 minus the crate and shipping which they billed back to me. I netted about $7,200 on a three-month piece. At the time I thought that was great. Now I think about the guy who paid $14,000 and wonder what he'd think if he knew I got half that. Still not sure what the right deal is. But I won't do 60/40 again without a say in the retail price.

I sold a piece last year through a gallery in Berlin. Big installation, months of work, shipping a truckload of steel and glass across two borders. The collector paid 18,000 euros. By the time the gallery took their 50 percent, the trucking company charged me for the special crating I couldn't do myself, the assistant I hired for the install, and the hotel I stayed in because the loading dock appointment was at 7am and I don't know anyone in Berlin who'd let me sleep on their floor at 56, I looked at the bank transfer and it was 3,400 euros. The framer who built the crate made more than I did. I know because I asked him what he charged. He told me. Nice guy. He earned it. I'm not telling this as a sob story. I agreed to the terms. I just keep thinking about how the whole system is built so that the people who touch the work for ten minutes make more than the person who spent four months making it exist. And we all nod and say that's how it works. But it's funny, no. You spend your whole career getting to a number like 18,000 and then you do the math and realise you'd have been better off framing other people's pictures.