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Had a collector ask me last month what a life-size figure in limestone would run. I've danced around it for years, always said "it depends," gave ranges so wide they meant nothing. This time I just told him. 14,000. He didn't blink. I think I could have said 18 and he still wouldn't have blinked. The math is the part nobody sees. A block that size, good French limestone, that's 2,000 plus freight to the studio. Then the roughing-out alone is two to three weeks. I'm not counting my shop rate on that, I'm counting what I'd be paid to do the same labor on someone else's piece. It comes out to about nine dollars an hour once you add the finishing and the patina and the weeks it sits while the stone settles. Nine dollars an hour for a skill it took me thirty years to build. And the guy was ready to pay more. I'm not sure what that says about me or about the market, but it sits wrong. I've been charging what I was afraid to charge, not what the work is worth. Still. Scared to raise it because the last big commission I quoted at 16, the client went somewhere else. Might have been the price. Might not have. But it's in my head now.

A college friend asked me to paint her parents' house in Malleswaram before they sell it. Old tile roof, that green gate, the whole thing. I said four thousand. In my head I was being generous because we go back eighteen years and she's been kind to me. It took me four sittings on location plus two days finishing at home. Paper, the travel, the auto fares, and I redid the roof twice because the light changed and I got stubborn about it. Last week I was at a group show and a painter I know, roughly my level, nothing fancy, was quoting eighteen thousand for the same size house portrait. Same paper. Same city. Same kind of work. I'm not angry at her. I'm angry that I did the sum in my head as "what would she be comfortable paying" and not "what is this worth." Thirty-odd hours of my life went into that painting and I priced it like a favour, which it wasn't, because a favour is something you give free. The thing is I have three more enquiries waiting and I don't know if I can say twelve thousand out loud without my voice doing something strange. That number feels made up. It isn't, obviously. It's just that I've been undercharging for so long that the correct price sounds like a lie.

This is the thing that sits in my stomach and I am saying it here because who else will understand it. Last season I made two Kohbar paintings of the same size, same handmade paper, same natural colours, same two weeks of work. The one sold in Patna through the cooperative for 4,000 rupees. The other went to a gallery in Delhi and the buyer paid 32,000. Out of that, the gallery kept a big portion and I got somewhat more than Patna rate, but the buyer's price was 32,000. Same painting, same hands. Only the city was different. People say, Ramesh ji, then send everything to Delhi. But the Delhi wala takes his cut, and he wants a name, a story, photographs, a certificate, in English. Also he wants it fast and in bulk, which is not how this work goes. And the Patna buyer is my own people. How to tell them the price is double now? They will say I have become greedy after going online. So I keep two rates and it does not sit well with me. My son says this is normal business. Perhaps. But my mother would have sold one painting, taken what was fair, and not thought about Delhi at all. Any of you who sell in your own town and also outside, how you are managing this? Or you have also just accepted two prices and kept quiet about it.

Sold a queen-size quilt to a lady from Georgia last month for $450. Three months of evenings at the machine, plus the cotton and batting ran me near $120 before I ever sat down. Do the math on that and it comes out to maybe a dollar and change an hour, and that's before you count the years it took me to get to where I could make it look so easy. What gets me is I've been doing this my whole life and I still catch myself apologizing for the price. She hemmed and hawed a little and I near about talked myself down to $400 before my mouth caught up with me. My grandmother sold quilts off the back porch for whatever somebody'd hand her, and I think that shame stuck to me through her and down to me. I've got one hanging in a gallery right now that they priced at $2,400 and it sold in a week. Same hands made both of them. Same patience. I'm too old to keep acting like that first one was the honest price.

Six canvases. Six. I thought I was saving time, buying them already stretched by people who supposedly know what they're doing. Every single one has a little depression right in the middle, like someone pressed a fist into it before the glue dried. I sized them anyway, hoping it would tighten up. It didn't. Now I've got to either strip them and re-stretch myself or paint around a soft spot for the next three months. I know the answer is "do it yourself." I do. But sometimes you just want to buy a thing and have it be the thing you bought, non? I'm too old to be surprised by this and yet here I am, surprised.

I buy the Arches oil paper in the big pad, the 350gsm. Been using it about four years, always the same. Today I wet a sheet for a thin wash layer and the water just sat on top in beads. It's like they oversized it. I let it dry, tried again, same thing. Had to scrub the surface with a stiff brush to get any tooth back. Anyone else hit this batch? Or is this just what happens when a brand gets big enough to stop caring. I know I should probably just size my own paper and stop complaining. But I liked the convenience and I'm annoyed about it.

For two days my son has been photographing my paintings for the website. He has made a white cloth, two lamps borrowed from the neighbour, and he is very particular about the angle. Forty paintings he has done. It is good work and I am grateful, because before this we were only selling through the cooperative in Darbhanga and whatever the buyers who came to the house would take. But here is my difficulty. On the screen, my Kohbar and my Durga all look the same size. The line which I pulled for three days with a squirrel-hair brush looks thin like a hair, and the fish which I made the size of my palm looks small like nothing. A painting is not made to be looked at in a small box on a phone. It is made to be sat in front of. He is telling me this is how people buy now, they will not come to Madhubani to see. Maybe he is right. Still I am thinking we should put one photo where he has kept a matchbox beside the painting, just so the person knows. My mother never measured anything in her life and now I am measuring for a machine. If any of you are selling your work this way, kindly tell me one thing. Do you send the actual size, or the person will understand by themselves?

Two months back a shop in Patna approached me, they wanted twelve paintings of peacock and fish for their wall, same size, same border, all to be delivered in five weeks. They said 4,000 rupees per piece, take it or leave it, because "it is folk art only, no?". I did the sum that night on the back of an old paper. Handmade paper comes to near 400 for that size, colours I make myself but still the gum and the stone grinding takes days, and one painting of that size with fine line takes me not less than three days if my eyes are cooperating. Twelve of them in five weeks means I am not sleeping and I am not teaching the girls who come on Sunday. So it was not 4,000 for a painting, it was 4,000 for three days and a piece of my name on their wall. I said no. My son said I am mad, that a shop order means regular income. He is not wrong in the account book sense. But this same shop will sell it to a customer in Delhi for fifteen or twenty thousand and put a small card saying "Madhubani, Bihar" and my name will not be on the card. Here is what I want to ask the people in this group who have gone through such talks. When a buyer says the price is fixed but the quantity is good, do you hold your number and lose the order, or do you name a price for the bulk and keep the fine line thinner, less work, honest about it? I have done both in my life and I am still not sure which one keeps the art alive and which one only keeps the kitchen running. 🙏

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.

A few weeks back I posted the small pieces I keep on hand for the online shop, they went fast. Then a message: "these are lovely, why don't you make them bigger?" Polite, interested. I told them the truth: the small ones are 30 cm by 30, three weeks of work. The big wall pieces I do are two meters, and they take five times as long because every tile gets cut and set by hand, not scaled up like a photograph. The bigger version isn't the same thing enlarged. It's a different animal, and it costs accordingly. Silence. Then: "can you do me one at 60 cm for the same price?" That was the whole conversation. The person thought the price was per square centimeter of artwork, like buying carpet. Not per hour of kneeling on a floor with a hammer and nippers. I get it, nobody knows what anything costs if they've never had to make it. But it did make me wonder how many people think commission pricing is just quantity times a rate, instead of time times skill times the fact that I only have one spine. Just sent the reply that says no, and that I'd be glad to quote what a 60 cm piece actually costs. Curious to see if they come back.

I had a gallery once, small, reputable, right city, who said they liked the work but could I do smaller. The large canvases were too hard to place, they said. I thought about it for about a week, felt like I was selling out, and then I did it. Made a whole batch at 80x100cm, same approach, same treatment. And you know what, it was fine. Some of them I still like. The relationship didn't last anyway, for other reasons. So tell me: what's a compromise you made for a gallery that you don't regret? Or the one you do?

Found a painting of someone's dachshund from 1983 yesterday. Terrible painting. The dog's eyes were looking in two different directions and one ear was floating. Frame was trashed, matting was that pilled velvet stuff. Bought it anyway. Took the painting out, put it in a drawer. I don't know why I do this. I have a stack of bad pet portraits now and no use for them. But throwing someone's dog away felt wrong. Same thing happens with photographs. Estate sales, flea markets. I've got a shoebox full of people I don't know. Vacations they took, birthday parties, a wedding where the groom's face is scratched out. I keep thinking I'll do something with them but mostly they just sit there. Maybe it's just cheaper than therapy. Or a different kind of hoarding.

I did the math on my last edition of 12. Each print took about six hours of actual work, plus plate prep, plus the failed states I pulled before I got the one I kept. I used to price per piece based on time and materials alone, which meant each print was maybe €180 and I was basically paying myself to make work for people to frame and never think about again. Then I flipped it. I priced the edition as a whole, sold the run of 12 at €380 each, and the margin came out to more than my screenprinting gigs pay per week. Same hours, same copper, same ink. The only difference is I stopped pretending the value lives in the labour and started charging for the fact that there are only twelve of something in the world. Feels almost dishonest. Scarcity doing work that my hands should be doing, or that my hands ARE doing and I just refused to name it. Still not sure where the honest line is between "this took me time" and "only a few of these exist and you can't have one unless you pay." But I'm not going back to per-hour pricing either.

I got a commission last year for a new piece at a decent European museum. 12k seemed like real money when I signed. Then I priced the steel, the timber, the electronics for the sound element, the rented van to haul it all, the two assistants I had to pay properly because I'm not an exploitative prick. By the time the thing was built and installed I'd spent about seven and a half. The rest covered four months of my life. I ate it because the work was good and I wanted it to exist and I'll probably do it again. The math never works if you count your own time. You have to not count it. That's the trick. You make art because you're compelled to and you finance it however you can and you pretend the hours don't exist. But sometimes late at night you do the math anyway and it's genuinely funny how bad it is. Like actually funny. I laughed out loud when I worked it out. Younger artists ask me how to price things. I tell them charge more than feels comfortable and then double it. Then I watch them not do that and I understand completely because I also don't do that.

just spent fifteen minutes digging through the cabinet under my sink for a jar lid that fits the one I'm using for brush water. none of them do. now I'm using a cracked ramekin that's definitely going to leak onto my desk at some point today and I just decided I'm fine with that. this is a recurring thing with me. I'll be at the thrift store and see a perfect little container for something but I won't buy it because I'm not sure what it's for yet, then three days later I'm using a yogurt cup with the label still half on. every single time. my whole studio is like this honestly. nothing quite fits or works the way it's supposed to and I've stopped fighting it. the wonky table I have to shim, the shelf that's bowing, the lamp that only stays on if you don't breathe near it. feels like the space adapted to me instead of the other way around.

Was painting a pine stand this afternoon (trying to salvage a canvas I started two months ago and abandoned) and I grabbed a flat brush on a whim instead of my usual tiny round. And wow. One stroke and it actually looked like pine needles. Not a hundred fussy little lines that all run together. Just... one confident sweep that did the job. I've been doing landscapes since I picked painting back up and I never even questioned what I was grabbing. Just assumed smaller = more control = better. Turns out I was making everything twice as hard for no reason. Got me thinking what else I'm doing wrong out of pure habit. Anyone else have one of those "wait, THAT'S how you do it" moments way later than they'd like to admit?

A gallery I have worked with for eleven years asked me in March for three small, easily shippable pieces for a fair booth in the autumn. "Something that sells itself," was the phrase. Which in practice means the same painting I have made fifteen times already, in a size that fits a car. I said no. Not out of pride exactly. I am 52 and I have done the years where saying yes to everything was the only way to keep the lights on. But I know how that ends: you make the easy thing, it sells, and then the easy thing is what you are known for, and every year after that you are asked for more of it in slightly different colours. What I offered instead was one large canvas, one mid-size, and one small. He was quiet on the phone for a while and then said the large one would never sell at a fair. It did not, at the fair. It sold four months later, to a private collector in Basel, at more than the booth piece would have brought. So in the ledger I am ahead. But the relationship is cooler now, and I am not naive about what that costs. The market does not reward the refusal, it just eventually forgets to punish it. The honest part is I do not know if I was right. I know I did not want to spend five months of my life on something I could have painted in my sleep. Whether that is integrity or just stubbornness at my age I could not tell you.

i raised my prices in march. 450 to 850 on the mid size canvases, the 60x80 ones. sold one in nine days to a guy who runs a bike shop, paid full, didn't haggle, thanked me for my time. i thought ok. this is the part where it clicks. raised again in june to 1400 on the same size. crickets. not "too expensive" crickets, just silence. three inquiries since then that all went "love your work!! do you have anything smaller?" which i now understand is code for a different number entirely. what's annoying is i know the advice is right. the 850 sale proved there's demand above where i was. but i can't tell if 1400 is a real ceiling or if i just killed the discovery thing by fiddling with it. i'm not consistent, i post when i finish something, sometimes twice a week sometimes twice a month. so the raise landed on a feed that already forgets i exist between paintings. the other theory, and i hate this one, is that 850 was the "i can justify this on a card" number and 1400 is the "this needs a conversation with my partner" number. completely different buyer, not just a different price. anyway i'm painting the big one for the show in october and telling myself the answer lives in there. it does not live in there. it lives in a spreadsheet i refuse to open.

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.

A panel, 20 by 30 cm. A little olive tree, smalti and salvaged stone, the kind of thing I can hold in two hands. I quoted 340 euros to a woman who found me through a friend of a friend, and she came back with "but it's only small, can you do 150?" Here is the thing about small. Small is not less work. Small is the same hands, the same cutting, the same three kilos of tesserae sorted by tone before I set one of them down. The size of the finished piece has almost nothing to do with the hours. If anything I lose money on small work because the setup eats a bigger share of it. I said no, and I said it kindly, and I explained the hours once. Not a lecture, just the arithmetic. She went quiet for two days and then wrote back and took it at 340. I am not posting this to be praised for holding the line. I am posting it because I nearly said yes. I stood in my kitchen at eleven at night doing sums in my head and thinking, well, 150 is 150. That is the actual danger. The number is small enough that you can talk yourself into it and then you have taught someone what your work costs. What I want to know is how the rest of you answer the size argument, because mine is getting tired and I would like a better one.