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Two people this month have suggested I start a Substack newsletter. A former student who now does very well on social media told me I was "sitting on a goldmine of expertise" and letting it go to waste. The gallery that represents me sent an email suggesting it would help with "audience building." I have a small pile of beautiful, unused Moleskine notebooks and a perfectly good fountain pen. I also have a quiet studio, a waiting list for my classes, and more work than I can comfortably finish. I am not sure what problem Substack is meant to solve for me, and at 47 I find I am becoming less interested in solving problems I do not have. I understand the argument. I teach techniques that are hard to find elsewhere. I have opinions about pigments and paper that people might want to read. But the pitch always assumes the thing you are not doing is the thing you should be doing, and I am not convinced that is true. Writing a proper newsletter takes time and thought. I would rather put that into another painting or a better lecture for my students. Has anyone else here pushed back on this pressure and been glad they did? Or do I sound like someone who will regret this in a year.

I had a piece in a group show last spring. Small gallery, decent neighborhood foot traffic. They took 40% commission. That's fine, I know the deal, rent's real. But I also had to pay for my own framing. Print the postcards myself. Supply the wine for the opening. They asked if I could "activate my network" on social and tag them in stories every day leading up to it. So I'm paying to make the work, paying to present it, doing their marketing for them, and they take 40% of whatever sells. And I walked away thinking I was lucky to be there. I don't have a tidy conclusion. I'm still trying to figure out which part of this is normal and which part is getting played. Because I keep hearing about how the model is broken for artists but I don't see a lot of alternatives that aren't just "go viral on tiktok" which is its own kind of nonsense.

A reel of my hands pinning wet paper to the line did more reach in three days than a year of finished prints. I watched the numbers climb and felt nothing but a small cold dread. That's not the work. That's me doing chores in front of the sun. I know the argument. People buy the maker, the process, the story. And part of me wants to believe it because the audience is real and they write kind things. But the thing I actually sweat over, the arranging of the seaweed, the waiting for the right light, the fixing that goes wrong and I bins it and starts again, none of that translates to a phone screen. So what's left is me standing there with a squeegee. Maybe I'm old-fashioned about what counts as showing the work. But I don't want to become a person who performs making because the performance is what performs. The prints keep coming either way. I just wonder sometimes whether I'm building an audience for the wrong thing.

So here's one I'm still chewing on. I do a run of hares, hand pulled, edition of 40, €180 a sheet at the markets and it sells grand. Steady, not mad, but grand. A small gallery in town got in touch about stocking a few and the girl was lovely on the phone, then she says the price is the issue, that for their online shop they'd want it at €120 "for the digital crowd." And I said yes. Which surprised me, because I'm usually the stubborn article who'd rather sit on a box of prints for a year than be told what they're worth. Here's the thing though. They sold 11 in three weeks at €120. My own stall did 4 in the same stretch at €180. So the gallery made more off my work than I did, the buyer got a bargain, and the poor hare went out into the world at a price I don't really believe in. Money's money and I'm not above it, there's a fella carving in a shed in Carna and two small ones wrecking the gaff, but I don't think I'll do it again. Feels like I taught a whole new audience that my work is a €120 object. Anyway. I don't think there's a clean lesson in it, I just wanted to say it out loud to people who'd get it. Curious if anyone's done the same and regretted it, or done it and not.

I run a small letter, once a month, and about a year ago I stopped sending it to the whole list. Now roughly half of it goes out in the post, printed on the same paper stock I use for my study sheets, folded, hand addressed. It costs me a fortune in postage and an afternoon I could spend painting. The reply rate is around thirty percent. The email version gets maybe two percent. What those replies actually contain: a woman in Devon asking what blue I use in the shadows of white flowers, a retired pharmacist who noticed I'd labelled a specimen with the wrong collection date, a teacher who wanted the whole letter in the classroom. None of that happens by email. Email replies are "lovely, thank you." The envelope gets a letter back. The part I did not expect is what it does to my teaching. Everyone tells you to grow the list, run the free download, build the funnel. I did the arithmetic and it says the opposite. Four hundred people who open an envelope are worth more than four thousand who open a tab, and I cannot explain that to anyone selling me a course on audience growth. I am not recommending this. It is expensive, it does not scale, and I am fairly sure it will never make me a name people recognise at a market stall. I just know which version of my work is actually reaching someone, and it is the one with a stamp on it.

So a Barcelona-based clothing brand reached out, they wanted to use photos of my pieces styled with their new collection for a lookbook. I thought cool, my wonky little ceramic heads next to nice linen, why not. They offered 400€ and a bunch of clothes, I said yes. The second I posted the announcement, the comments were... not mean exactly but disappointed. Like I was selling out. "Oh so we're doing fast fashion now?" "Mateo no." A couple people said it felt off-brand. And ok, I get it. But also, I'm 27, my kiln is held together with wire, and 400€ is 400€. The brand is small, Spanish, not Zara. They make stuff by hand too, different material but same energy. I felt good about it until I didn't. I don't know. I still think independent artists and independent brands can help each other without it being gross. But the reaction made me second-guess everything. Has anyone else done a collab that felt right but your audience just wasn't there with you? How do you tell the difference between selling out and just... making rent?

After a decade of charging what I thought was reasonable, 800€ for a 40x50cm oil, I finally did what my husband's been telling me to do for years and raised them to 1,100€ for the same format. Same canvas, same hours, same me. Just finally stopped apologising for what I ask. I lost one client. A woman who'd bought three paintings from me over the years, always asked for a small discount, always got one. She sent a polite email saying she couldn't justify the increase. I wrote back, equally polite, that I understood completely. And honestly? The relief of not painting for someone who sees your work as something to bargain over is worth the lost sale. The other clients didn't blink. One said she'd been waiting for me to raise them. That stung more than the loss, in a good way. I know the numbers are different for everyone, different city, different medium, different audience. But I wish someone had told me ten years ago that the fear of losing clients is usually worse than the reality. The ones who value what you do will stay. The ones who don't were already costing you more than they paid.

There was a print fair in Leipzig two weekends ago, small, mostly German editions dealers and a few of us artists. I brought thirty etchings, three editions, and I had this spreadsheet before I went, mentally, about which ones to push because they did well on Instagram. The "engagement" ones, the moody close-ups people save. You know what sold? Not those. It was the piece I almost didn't pack, a silly little riso of a basil plant, because someone's grandmother in Bologna might have grown basil and it made them laugh. Three people stopped just to tell me it reminded them of a kitchen. One bought it. I keep thinking about that gap. The internet told me people wanted the dark architectural work. The room told me they wanted a basil plant and five minutes of talking about their nonna. I've been optimizing for the wrong audience because the online one is the only one that gives me numbers. The fair gave me 600 visitors on a Sunday and I learned more than a year of analytics. Not sure I have a tidy solution. Just noticing that the algorithm has quietly become my gallerist and I'm not sure I hired it.

Here is a real number: a plate I spent eleven days on in October, hard ground, aquatint, the whole slow liturgy, came out so badly bitten that the lines closed up. I posted it. 34 likes, two comments. A bad phone photo of the same plate sitting in the ferric bath, half submerged, nothing happening, no explanation, no caption worth reading: 1,900 views and eleven people asking what the liquid was. So the lesson is obvious and I hate it. It's not the failure they want, it's the process. The failure is only interesting if it's happening in front of them in real time. A finished bad print is just a sad object. A print in the acid bath is a suspense film, even if you already know how it ends. I've started filming the boring parts on purpose now, which feels like a small betrayal of everything I was taught about the mystery of the studio. My teachers would have found the idea of a tripod pointed at a tray of copper sulphate genuinely obscene. And I'm doing it anyway, because the alternative is making work nobody sees, and I'm not noble enough for that. The thing I can't decide: does the audience actually want to understand the process, or do they just want the sensation of something developing? I suspect the second, and I suspect I'd rather not know.