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A gallery in Leipzig asked me for a small edition of risograph prints for their holiday market, 50 copies, two colors, A3. I said €250 because I thought riso was cheap to produce and I'd breeze through it. I forgot to account for the test prints, the misregistration on the first 15, the fact that I had to reorder one of the inks mid-run, and the two full days I spent separating the layers because the files the gallery sent were trash. Total cost of materials plus my time: somewhere around €17 an hour. For printmaking. That's less than I paid for the paper. I keep doing this thing where I price the work as if the thinking part is free. As if the years of knowing how to troubleshoot a bad registration or choose paper that won't ghost count for nothing. I just factor materials and a small gesture toward labour and call it done. I'm raising the next edition to €600 and I already feel like I'm being greedy. Which is insane, because €600 for 50 prints, two-color, A3, with original art, that's €12 a print. That's nothing. But the feeling is there anyway.

Six weeks ago I deleted the app off my phone. Not the account, just the app, because I kept opening it while standing at the sink and I couldn't tell you one thing I'd seen. Came back last week, posted a detail shot of the piece I've been chewing on since March. Somewhere around the fourth layer of acrylic the paper starts lifting and you get these little blisters that look like the surface is breathing. That's what I photographed. 11 likes. Two comments, one of them from a guy who wants me to check out his print-on-demand service. Here's the part that surprised me: it didn't sting. Usually I'd post, then check my phone forty times over two days, then feel like a vending machine that nobody was putting coins in. This time I posted it, closed the app, went back to the studio and tore a page out of a 1970s phone book for the next layer. I did lose something though. A woman who'd bought a small piece in 2022 messaged asking where I'd gone. I hadn't seen it for three weeks. That one actually bothered me. So now I'm trying to figure out if the account is worth keeping at all, or if I should just have an email list of eleven people and a note on the wall. Anyone else cut back and find the math worked out better than they expected?

She set the account up in March and then talked me into a price list. "People need to know what things cost before they ask." So there's a page now. Small maquette, £1,200. A one-metre limestone figure, £9,000. A welded piece depends on the steel. Three months. Two emails. Both from sculptors asking how I got the stone at that rate. The commissions that did come in this spring came the old way, from a man I did a fireplace surround for in 2011 who passed my number to his brother-in-law. No prices discussed until he stood in the yard and looked at the thing. I'm not saying the page is wrong. I'm saying I haven't figured out who it's for. Somebody with £9,000 to spend on a garden piece doesn't want to comparison-shop it like a fridge, and somebody without it isn't my customer anyway. If you sell work at this kind of money, what do you actually put on the site. Numbers, or just the work and a phone number.

Hired a social media manager back in January. Young guy, sharp, knew all the algorithm talk. Two months, 400 dollars a month. He got my follower count up by about 900. Sold exactly one small piece out of it, and that buyer told me later he found me through an old gallery listing, not the account. Meanwhile I've sold four pieces this year to people I met at shows and studio visits. Not a single one looked at my Instagram first. The account is a business card at best. Somewhere to point people so they know you're not a scam. I'm not saying the internet is worthless. I'm saying paying someone to make it look active while the actual work sits in a studio is backwards. The work is the marketing. Everything else is just where you point people after they've already decided they want to look. Dropped him in March. Account's been quiet since. Nobody's noticed except the algorithm, and the algorithm was never buying anything anyway.

A gallery in Barcelona wants to do a small solo show in October, my work, but also some documentation of process, which is fair, the whole thing is basically tidepool alchemy. They asked for my notes on the seawater development, dilution ratios, exposure times, how I account for different salinity levels. And I sat down to write it and realised I have none. I just know. I've been doing this so long I can feel it, the weight of the paper, the way the light sits, the smell of the water. I never standardised any of it because every print is a different day, different sun, different batch of Atlantic. I told them I'd put something together and now I'm staring at a blank page trying to remember how to explain something I only understand with my hands. I think this is the gap between making work and showing it. The making is private and intuitive and full of failure and small victories nobody sees. The showing asks you to translate all of that into something legible. I don't know how to do that without flattening it.

What's the longest a gallery has dragged their feet paying you after a sale? I'm not talking about the standard "net 30" that turns into net 90. I'm talking about the one where you had to email six times, where they had excuses every time, where you started to feel crazy asking for money they already collected from a collector. My record is 5 months. Small gallery, loved the space, they sold three pieces in the first month. Then silence. Every time I followed up it was "accounting issues" or "the collector hasn't paid yet" (which I later found out was a lie). Finally got paid after I threatened to name them on a Facebook group. Felt disgusting the whole time. Tell me your worst. How long? Did you ever not get paid at all?

I do open studio stuff now, which is a nice way of saying I leave the door to my studio open and hope someone wanders in. Last month a guy came in because he thought it was a garage and stayed 40 minutes. Bought a small oil head study for €180, cash, and told me it was because it looked "unfinished in a way that felt honest." Then he posted it on his own account. Not mine. His. In his hallway with a lamp I would have told him to move. That post did more for me than the last six months of my own grid. I have no idea what to do with that information. I've been trying to build this tidy little funnel of print sales and reels and it turns out what actually moves the needle is standing next to a wet canvas smelling like turpentine while someone talks themselves into it. Which is not scalable and I can't put it in a caption and honestly it makes me want to delete everything and just paint with the door open and stop pretending I understand the internet. Do any of you sell in person and just... not bother with the rest? Or am I about to talk myself out of something that's quietly working

ok so this is going to sound so small and obvious but I've been doing the whole "post consistently and engage in comments" thing for months and it's fine but it's also like... waiting for people to find you? and I got sick of it?? So last week I picked 12 accounts, not big influencers, just people with really good eyes who share art they love, some are collectors, some are just normal people with nice feeds. And I sent each of them a genuine message, like "hey I saw you reposted [artist]'s work the other day and I think you'd like what I do too, here's my latest piece" with a photo attached. No templates, no pitchy stuff. Six of them wrote back. SIX. One bought a small study on the spot, two said they'd keep me in mind, and the other three just had really nice conversations that made my whole week. One of them runs a tiny gallery I didn't even know about and invited me to submit for a group show. I think I got scared of DMs because it feels like bothering people? But if you're genuine and you actually looked at their feed and you're not just copy-pasting, it's... not bothering them?? It's just a person saying hi?? Anyway I'm doing it again this week with a different batch. Thought I'd share in case anyone else is staring at the algorithm like it owes them something lol

Namaste to all ji. I want to ask one thing which I keep thinking about. Myself Ramesh, Mithila painting from Madhubani, Bihar. My son made this account for me. Always I have sold through the cooperative here, and through people who come to our village for the work. Gallery matter is new for me. Some months back I carried three paintings rolled in cloth, took the bus to Patna, and simply walked into a gallery there and asked to show. The man was polite, he looked at everything, and then said email is better, send photos. Only. So I came home with the same three paintings in the same cloth. Now I am confused which way is correct. To walk in and let them see the actual work with their own eyes, or to send photo by email first like a formality. In our tradition the painting is to be seen with hands and eyes, not in a small phone picture. But maybe that thinking is old. So tell me honestly, how do you all do it. Email first, or just go and stand there. And which one has actually worked for you. Tell me I am wrong if walking in is a foolish thing now.

I used to put a translucent signature across everything I posted. Took maybe ten minutes per image, and I did it for years, mostly because everyone said to. Six months ago I stopped, out of irritation more than strategy. The lines were ugly and they sat right on the paper texture, which is the whole point of the work. Result: nothing changed. Two people asked about a print that was already sold, which is the normal rate, and I still find my images on a moodboard account with 90k followers and no credit. So the watermark never stopped that part either. I just had uglier photos of my own work. Now I post a photo of the piece on the wall in my studio, slightly crooked, with the window light coming across it. Sales of the small ones went up a little. I think because it looks like an object that exists in a room rather than a file. Not sure that's the reason. But I'm keeping the crooked photo. Curious whether anyone else dropped the watermark and regretted it.

A small collage went to a collector in Utrecht last month. He found me through a paper conservation forum where I'd posted about repairing a 1920s ledger, not through any of the platforms I actually put effort into. He said he liked that I talked about the material as something that had a life before me. I've had an Instagram account for six years. It has brought me one sale that I know of. The forum post took twenty minutes and cost nothing. I'm not going to delete anything. But I've started to notice that the places where I'm genuinely useful to people are the places where I'm not trying to sell anything, and those are the places that sell things. Which is annoying because you can't really manufacture that on purpose. I spent two hours last week trimming a batch of edges for a show in Malmö. That part doesn't go anywhere. It just is the work.

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. 🙏

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.

For two years I sold small collages at 400 kronor. Maybe 12 a year, mostly to people who found me through the studio's open house. Fine. Then in November a woman bought one, paid, and emailed me a week later to say I had underpriced it and she felt slightly embarrassed owning it. Not a compliment exactly. More like a correction. I raised everything to 900 in January. I assumed I'd sell nothing. I've sold nine since. Same work, same photos, same quiet account I post to about once a month. I don't fully trust my own explanation for this. Part of it might just be that the people who follow quiet paper work are not price sensitive, they're attention sensitive, and 400 signals "hobby, don't bother remembering the name." Part of it might be that I got three pieces into a group show in February and that did more than any price change. But I keep thinking about how much time I spent making the work look accessible, low stakes, easy to own. I was lowering the price and lowering the stakes at the same time. Nobody told me to. I did it because I was nervous. Still nervous. Higher number though.

I am not against it, I just wanted to see the number. 31 hours. Photographing, cropping, writing captions in English when I think in Swedish, checking if something landed, checking again. In the same month I finished four pieces. So roughly seven hours of posting per finished work, and none of that time goes into the work itself. What I noticed most is that the checking is not one task. It is forty small ones. That is what eats the day, not the posting. I have not decided what to do with the number. Maybe nothing. But I stopped posting the studio table shots on Sundays and nobody noticed, including me. That felt like useful information.

The gallery that loved my work but never sold a piece A gallery in my city took me on years ago, warm people, they hung my paintings properly, good light, private views with real collectors in the room. And nothing ever sold. Two years. Not one piece. They kept saying the work was beautiful, serious, exactly what their clients should want. Eventually I asked, gently, who was buying what. It turned out everything that moved was small, abstract, or cheap. My big figurative interiors just sat there looking at everyone. So my question is more of a confession with an ask: when did you figure out that a gallery's taste or enthusiasm has nothing to do with whether they can sell you? And what was the sign you ignored for too long? For me it was the phrase "we love it, give it time." They loved it for two years. My bank account did not.

I have spent two years being told I need to show the process. Reels of the underpainting, close-ups of the brush loading, all of it. It does bring people. My last three sales came from a woman who works at a picture framer in Annecy, a gallery in Villeurbanne, and someone who sat next to me at a dinner and asked what I do. Not one from the internet. The reels do bring something, to be fair. The last one I posted, a small study of my daughter's hand under the lamp, got maybe nine thousand views. Two emails about it. Neither asking to buy anything. One wanted to know which brand of brushes, one wanted to know if I could teach a workshop in Dubai. So voilà, the reach is real. It just has nothing to do with the painting leaving the studio. What actually works for me is unglamorous: the framer, the gallery, and the people I already know. That is the whole strategy. It feels like a strategy from another century and I suspect it is one. I keep the account going anyway. I am not sure why. Maybe because it is the one place I can show a canvas without somebody standing next to it saying something. But I have stopped pretending it is a business tool. It is a window. Windows are not doors.