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So a gallery in my city reached out. They saw my work online. Want me in a group show this spring. This is literally the thing I've been wanting for years and instead of being excited I've spent the last week spiraling. I keep thinking about how I've never been in a studio program, never had a crit, never had anyone teach me how to hang a show or talk to a collector. I don't have a CV. I don't have an artist statement that doesn't sound like a journal entry. And now I'm supposed to show up next to people who did all that the right way. I painted through the anxiety last night and honestly the piece that came out might be the best thing I've made all year. So maybe the fraud feeling is the point? Like if you're not scared you're not pushing it far enough? Anyone else get the thing they wanted and immediately want to run from it? Or maybe I'm just overthinking this.

Back in 2009 I had a show in a small gallery in Brno that no longer exists. The gallery put up a basic website with installation shots. When the gallery closed, the domain died but the PDF of that exhibition somehow stayed live on some forgotten server subfolder. Last year a curator from Oslo emailed me. Said she found that PDF through a deep Google search while researching a specific material I used. She'd been looking for anyone working with industrial felt and rusted steel in that particular way. The PDF was the only document online that showed it. She booked a studio visit. I got two museum shows out of it. Norway, of all places. Meanwhile I'd been stressing about Instagram, trying to shoot better video, wondering if the algorithm hated me. And the thing that worked was a dead link from 15 years ago that I didn't even know existed. I don't know what the lesson is. Leave things online and don't delete them, I suppose. The internet forgets slower than we think. Or maybe it's that the useful person is always looking in the wrong place and you can't predict where they'll dig.

Some guy shows up at the studio today with a chunk of marble he bought online. Says he's been "sculpting" for six months. Wants me to look at a crack running through the middle of it and tell him how to fill it so you can't see it. I told him you can't hide a crack in stone. You work with it or you start over. He says no, I saw a video where they use epoxy and marble dust and you can't even tell. I asked him what he's making. He says he hasn't decided yet, he just liked the stone. Six months. Doesn't know what he's making. But he's worried about covering a crack with epoxy. I told him to use the epoxy. What do I care. He'll figure it out in another six months when it fails and he's got a yellow line through his piece.

Spent a month on a welded steel piece. Ground every weld down until the seams disappeared. Sanded and sealed it. Put it in the yard to check the shadow line and my neighbor's dog knocked it over, bent one of the legs out of square. Straightened it the next morning. You'd never know it happened. But I caught myself thinking about it differently now. That little accident is part of the thing now, whether anyone can see it or not. Point is, I spent 30 hours on a seam nobody's going to inspect and a dog changed the piece in two seconds. I keep thinking about that ratio and I don't know what to do with it. It's not a complaint. It's just the truth of making things, and the online version of it is a circus. Probably won't even post the piece. The photo won't show what the work was. It never does.

I've been with the same gallery since 2009. They sold my work. They took their cut. We didn't talk about it much. It worked. Got an email last week from their new director. Young guy. Said they're shifting focus to artists with "stronger direct engagement." Which means they want me to do their job for them online. I got a 400-pound granite piece in my studio right now that nobody's seen. I'm trying to figure out if I should drag it out and film myself grinding on it, or just keep working and see what happens. Neither option feels right. Anyone else getting this from their gallery lately? The "we love your work but also can you become a content creator" talk?

Myself Ramesh, Mithila painter from Madhubani. All my life I sold through the cooperative or when someone came to the house. Tourists sometimes, or people from the city who heard about the village where the painting women are. My son, he is in Patna for his job, he took photos of maybe eight of my pieces, a fish with the lotus, a Durga, two peacocks, some others. He put them on WhatsApp status and also in some groups he is in. I did not think much of it. Now in the last month I have sent six paintings by courier. To Delhi. To Bangalore. To one address in Dubai even, a man whose mother is from Darbhanga originally and he wanted something for his wall. These people never touched the paper, never saw the pigment. They saw a phone photo and they trusted it. This is strange to me. In my market, the buyer wants to see the line work up close, wants to know the colour is natural, wants to hold it. But my son says this is how it works now. I am grateful, truly, but also I am thinking, what if the photo does not show the real thing? I use geru and rice paste and lamp black, the photo cannot show that. But the buyers are happy when the parcel arrives. I do not understand this new way but I cannot argue with the orders. Anyone else selling traditional craft online and feeling this same confusion?🙂

I keep seeing this advice everywhere now: show the process, not the product. People love a time-lapse of hands pulling a print, the ink going down, the registration being slightly off. Fine. It works. I know it works. But here's the thing nobody says. The process is the part I actually need to be alone with. That moment when a screenprint is failing and I'm over-inking and the paper is curling and I have no idea if I should finish the run or throw it out, that's not content. That's thinking. I cannot perform it and also do it. So I post the okay version of the process. The ones that look like a craft video. And the real thinking stays off-camera, and I wonder if what gets seen online is just the choreography of the work, not the work. I've been going back and forth about this because the numbers are real. The 40-second pulling-a-print clip gets ten times the reach of the finished piece. But I started printmaking because of what the printed image says about copies and originals, not because I wanted to be an ASMR account for paper. Maybe the answer is boring: post the process that's already done. The work in the frame, not the work in the moment. Or maybe I'm just old-fashioned and the performance is part of it now and I should get over myself. What do you all do when the thing that gets attention isn't the thing you're doing?

I spent years putting only the final work online. Perfect lighting, good photo, the painting resolved. Crickets, mostly. A few likes from other painters. A few months ago I was frustrated with a figure painting, the hand was wrong for the fourth time, the whole thing looked a mess, and I took a photo of it on the easel with my palette旁边, just to vent to a painter friend. I put it on Instagram almost without thinking. That post got more comments than anything I'd put up in six months. People like to see the struggle. They like to see that you also don't know what you're doing for a while. I think for a long time I thought showing process would somehow diminish the finished work, like revealing the trick. But most people aren't painters. They have no idea what goes into it, and watching something get ugly and then get pulled back out of the ugly, that's the part they actually want to see. I'm still not comfortable with it. I was trained to show only the resolved thing. But I can't argue with the numbers, and more to the point I can't argue with the fact that the conversations are better. People ask real questions instead of just saying "beautiful." Wondering if anyone else has found that the unfinished, uncertain thing gets more traction than the polished final version.

This happened two weeks ago. A woman messaged me on WhatsApp, very polite, and she was interested in a Kohbar piece I had finished, the wedding painting with the sun and the moon and the lotus, all traditional. She asked the size, the price, all fine. Then she said, "Can you tell me what colours exactly are in it? I need to see if it will match my apartment's vibe." My son was standing there, I showed him the message. He laughed. I sat for a minute. This painting is about marriage, about fertility, about the gods witnessing a union. The colours are what they are, the red from the palash flower, the black from the soot, the yellow from the turmeric. They come from the earth, they are not chosen for a vibe. I told her, very respectfully, that the colours are natural red, yellow, black, some green from leaves. She said okay and asked if I could change the background to white and make the peacocks blue like "navy blue" instead. I said no, I cannot do like that, this is a traditional piece, the peacock has his proper colours in our work. She didn't buy it. Of course. I am still thinking about this. Not angrily. I understand she is from a different world. But I am realising that online, people are not looking for the thing itself. They are looking for something that fits into their already-made life. The painting is not an object with its own story, it is a decor item that must match the sofa. My question is not to complain. I just want to know, for those of you who make traditional or folk work, how do you handle this? When the buyer wants the art but does not want what the art actually is. Do you adjust and survive, or do you hold the line and lose the sale? I am torn.

I'm a chronic email-er, which honestly took me forever to even get comfortable with. But last fall I was in a town with one gallery I'd been chasing online for like a year, and I figured why not just... walk in. I brought three small pieces in a tote bag and asked the woman at the desk if she had two minutes. She was so nice about it, looked at everything, kept one for their submissions pile, and I basically floated out of there. And then I never did it again because the idea of doing it a second time makes me want to crawl out of my skin haha. So genuine question for the people who DO the walk-in thing regularly: how?? Do you book it ahead or just show up? Do you bring work or just talk? And has it ever actually turned into something, or is it more of a warm-up for the email later? I need to know if I'm missing out by hiding behind my keyboard forever.

My son helped me put some of my paintings on Amazon last year. Small things, mostly, fish motifs, a few Lakshmi pieces for Diwali time. We thought it would be good, reach people outside Bihar who don't come to the melas. Six months now. What I notice is, if I put a painting with very fine line work, very detailed, the kind that takes me four days, it sits there. No sales. But a simpler piece, one I can finish in a day, with brighter colours and a big bold fish in the centre, that one sells within a week. Same size, same paper, same story behind it. I don't understand this. The detailed one has more of me in it. More tradition. But the simple one is what people want to buy. I am grateful for the sales, do not mistake me. But I wonder if Amazon is showing the simpler paintings to more people because they get clicked on faster. Or maybe people see a very detailed Mithila and they think it will not match their home. I am not complaining ji. Just trying to understand. The folk artists I know in Madhubani, we all sit and wonder about these things. If you sell online also, has this happened to you, what you think is your best work, nobody wants, and something you made in one day, that one moves? 🙏

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.

Group show in Berlin, 2019. Curator with a good reputation, well-known space, the whole thing sounded serious. She said there was no budget for artist fees but the exposure would be valuable. I was between shows anyway so I said yes like a fool. I built a room installation. Three weeks of work, rented a van to drive materials up from Prague, stayed in a friend's flat but still bought food and beer for two weeks, paid an assistant for two days of help mounting things. I kept receipts out of spite, I think. Total cost to me: 38,400 CZK. About 1,500 euros then. The exhibition got a mention in Artforum online. One collector came through and later commissioned a small piece. That commission paid 800 euros. So I lost 700 euros and gained a line in a newsletter nobody remembers. I tell young artists this story now and they nod and then they still do the same thing. I did it too when I was their age. Maybe you have to learn it yourself.

My daughter convinced me to post a short video of me roughing out a block of limestone. No finished piece, no music, just the sound of the chisel and my hands doing what they've done for thirty years. It got forty-some thousand views and three commission inquiries. The carefully lit photos of finished work I post get maybe two hundred. I don't fully understand it and I don't trust it. But it made me think most people online don't want to see the art. They want to see the labor. The sweat and the noise and the hours. And I'm not sure that's a bad thing, just a different thing than I thought I was selling.

Okay so I saw that post about ugly websites converting and it got me thinking because honestly? My own marketing feels like that sometimes. Like, I'm supposed to be this "artist" with a clean brand but my process posts are always so chaotic, sometimes I even accidentally show my dirty mug or a paint smudge on my arm and omg, the engagement on those is SO much higher than the perfectly curated ones. People seem to like seeing the actual work and not just the finished product. It feels super counterintuitive to the whole 'aspirational' vibe that marketing gurus push, but I'm getting more comments and saves on the messy stuff. Anyone else finding that the more you lean into the imperfect, the better things perform? It’s kinda making me want to just dump all my WIPs and sketches everywhere lol.