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I did the math on a recent sale because I was trying to convince myself it was worth it. Large oil and cold wax, 160 x 200 cm, worked on it for about six weeks on and off. Gallery takes 50%, which is standard here. Fine. Then: stretcher bars and canvas, oil, cold wax medium, pigment, about €280 because I don't buy cheap canvas. Transport to Berlin in a hired van because it wouldn't fit in my car, €120. Insurance for the transit. The opening, where I bought drinks for a few people and we all went to dinner after, and I picked up the bill because the gallery director looked at me and I knew I was supposed to. That was about €340. So €4,200 becomes €2,100 after commission. Subtract €740 in costs I can track. That leaves €1,360. Then maybe six weeks of work, but not full-time weeks, so call it 18 days. That's about €75 a day. And I haven't paid tax on the €2,100 yet. I don't know what to do with this information. The painting is sold. The collector is happy. The gallery wants more. And I'm sitting here thinking I should feel good and instead I feel like I ran a small business that lost money on a job. Which I did, if I paid myself minimum wage. The problem is the painting wouldn't exist without those weeks. I can't separate the time from the thing. And the gallery can't sell a painting they never see. And I can't get the painting to Berlin for nothing. So the costs are real and the math is bad and I don't have a solution. Just the numbers.

It's sitting on the shelf above the palette, unopened, and I've been walking past it for two weeks. Flake white, the real one, with lead. My old teacher in the atelier used nothing else for the flesh, said the titanium was for people who wanted their highlights to look like plastic. He was a difficult man and mostly right. Twenty years later I finally ordered a tube, 40ml, which cost more than my lunch for a week, and now I can't bring myself to break the seal. Part of it is the safety business, of course. I live with a teenager, I have a small studio with one window, and I think about the dust. Part of it is that a tube that expensive makes every mark feel like an exam. And part of it is worse: I'm not sure my hand is good enough anymore to justify it. That's the real reason it's still closed. Bof. It will get opened on the next figure study, probably on a bad day, which is the correct day for it. Does anyone else do this? Buy the good thing and then leave it on the shelf like a hostage?

There's a gallery in my town that turned me down flat about eight years ago. Polite rejection, but firm. At the time I took it personally and questioned everything. Two years later that same gallery closed. I don't wish anyone out of business, but it turned out my work found a better home at a small natural-history museum instead, where the director actually understood the tradition I work in and let me paint what I paint. That rejection was a mercy in hindsight. Anyone else have a "no" that turned out to be doing them a favour? What did you do with the work they turned away?

The commission was real. 3 metres, smalti and salvaged marble, over the reception desk of a small boutique hotel here in Kalamaria. Two months of work minimum, probably closer to three, plus materials. 2.400 euros. I said no, and then I spent a week wondering if I was being proud for no good reason. Because that money would have paid the rent for a while, and I am not in a position where 2.400 is nothing. Nobody in my business is. What killed it was the invoice. They wanted it all declared, clean, taxes paid, which is fair, that is their position. But then you take out EFKA and the tax and what is left is closer to 1.300, and the smalti alone for that size is over 600. So I would have been setting small stones by hand for three months at about the rate of a person who stands at a till. The till at least ends at 3. The galling part is that nobody there would look at a marble floor and ask for a discount. They know what stone costs. But the hours? The hours are invisible, so they get negotiated. I am not asking if I was right. I know I was right. I am asking what the rest of you do when the number is insulting but the money is real. Because I don't have a good answer for that yet.

I've shown with the same gallery in Berlin for twelve years. When we started, I signed their standard agreement without really reading the resale and secondary-market clauses. Stupid, I know. You think you're being gracious, above the business, and you're really just being careless with your own livelihood. Last spring a collector who bought two big canvases from me in 2016 sold one at auction for nearly four times what he paid. Fine, that's his right, that's the market, whatever. But then I learned my contract gives the gallery a cut of that resale, a percentage that runs indefinitely. Not to me. To them. For a painting I made and they sold once, a decade ago. I did the math on it. That one resale paid them more than my last three new commissions combined. And I sat there feeling petty for even noticing, because they were good to me when I was nobody. But nobody works for free, and I have a family. I raised it with them, gently, at our last meeting. The director went a little quiet and then said we could "look at restructuring" for new works. New works. The two paintings already out there, nothing to be done. I don't know what I'm asking here. Maybe just that someone who's been at this longer than me tell me whether this is normal, whether I'm the fool for not having read the fine print at 34, or whether everybody learns this exact lesson the same way and at the same cost.

I just finished a 50x65cm interior piece for a client in Paris. Painted it over about six weeks, it came out well, one of those where everything clicked. She paid my price without blinking, €1800. Pleased with that part. Then she asked me to deliver it framed. And I thought yes, fine, I'll take care of it, I know a good framer. The frame cost €520. The glass alone was nearly €200. I ate that cost because I'd already quoted her a flat price and felt stupid going back. So my real rate for the painting dropped to €1280. And that's before the canvas, the oil, my time. I'm not sure what the solution is except to state it upfront: "Prix hors encadrement" and mean it. Or add a framing fee that's transparent. But I know myself, I'll forget to say it next time too, because I'm thinking about the painting and not the business of the painting. And then I'll be pissed off again. Anyone else have this? The hidden costs that feel too small to mention but add up to a real bite.

Mine was pure nerve. I carried a portfolio of urban sketches into this small gallery near MG Road, fully expecting to be told they don't take walk-ins. The owner's assistant said they were busy, and I almost left, but I'd come all that way in the heat so I just stood there awkwardly until someone finally looked at my stuff. She flipped through maybe four pages and said "bring these back properly framed." That was it. No contract, no email, just that sentence. I got paid in the end, eventually, after chasing. But that one sentence changed everything for me. How did yours happen? Did you cold-walk like me, or did they spot your work online first? I'm genuinely curious which path actually gets you in the door these days.

So I'll tell you what happened and you can decide if I'm codding myself. Start of the summer I got sick of the whole rigmarole. The Facebook page was at me every day, "boost this", "your reach is down", and I was spending a solid hour a night liking other people's posts so they'd like mine back. Feels like being back at school doing favours for lads who'd still not sit beside you at lunch. So I just stopped. Six weeks. Didn't delete it, just left it there like a shed you don't open. Two things came out of it. First, nothing happened. No cliff, no fall off a ledge, the exact same trickle of sales as before. Which tells me the hour a night was doing absolutely nothing except making me feel busy. Second, and this is the bit I can't fully explain. I stuck a wee sign on the table at the Saturday market in Galway. Just a laminated card, "if you'd like to hear when there's a new print, write your email here". Real pen, real paper, and I stand there like an eejit with a clipboard. Went from 61 names to 128 over the six weeks. I think people are just tired. They'll give you their email when you ask them face to face and there's a crayon involved for the small one, but they won't click a link you put under a photo of a heron. I've gone back on the page now, but it's down to one post a week and I don't read the comments on the boosted ones anymore because there's no speaking to them. Anyone else find the thing you were most afraid to stop doing was the thing doing the least?

Set up at a local fair this past Saturday and made a dumb mistake. I hung my favorite little still life right at the front of the booth, eye level, where everyone turns the corner. It sold before 10am. Great, right? Except the next 31 paintings just sat there for the rest of the day. The piece that would have pulled people deeper into the booth was gone before the crowd even showed up. I did the math on the way home. Sold one $65 piece and maybe 4 greetings cards. Meanwhile the booth next to me, a jewelry maker, had her whole display set up so there was no single focal point, and she was busy all afternoon. I think I keep treating this like a gallery wall when it's really a storefront. People browse the front, something catches them, they step in, they stay. Next fair I'm putting the good stuff in the middle and keeping the doorway bits simple. Anyone else hit this? Or am I overthinking crowds that mostly want a free mint?

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.

Three years ago I built a walk-through room for a small Kunsthalle in Germany. Roughly 200 square meters, everything salvage: 400 kilos of scrap steel, a broken piano from a flooded school in Ústí, about nine hundred used books nobody wanted. Six weeks of work, two helpers paid properly. I asked for 11,000 euros. All in. Materials, wages, my time. They said yes so fast I heard it before the last syllable left my mouth. That sound is the worst sound in this business. Not the money, the speed. It means I was wrong by a lot. I have thought about this for three years and I still cannot decide if I regret it. The piece was good. It existed. People walked through it. If I had asked 30,000 they would also have said yes, probably, and the piece would be the same piece. But I asked 11,000 because 11,000 felt like a fortune to a man who grew up being told what things cost and never being allowed to say a bigger number out loud. The part that annoys me is not the loss. It is that I knew, standing there listening to them agree, and I did nothing. Just nodded like an idiot with a forklift. I have a quote going out on Thursday for something similar in Brno. I have written 34,000 on it twice and deleted it twice. Thursday I will find out which version of me is sending the email.

It went off this morning, at 8:40, which is earlier than I have voluntarily done anything in some time. A small application, honestly. Modest money, one year, to make a proper voucher set of the county's native umbellifers, pressed and painted, with the field notes transcribed alongside. The sort of thing that gets done once and then lasts a century in a drawer. I have been drafting it for eleven weeks. Not because it is difficult. Because it is the first thing I have written with a committee at the other end since I left the lab, and I had convinced myself that a painter has no business asking for research funds. Ridiculous, when I write it down. My training is right there. The hand has only changed medium. The part that nearly stopped me was the references. I sat with the citation style open in front of me like a woman meeting an old acquaintance at a funeral and not knowing whether to embrace. Anyway. It is out of my hands now, which is the only dignified place for it. I am going to go and finish the second leaf of a birch that has been fighting me since Tuesday, and I am going to try very hard not to refresh my email.

Seven years I did the Christmas markets circuit around Galway, and sure I loved the craic of it, the whole gang of us makers propping each other up over cold tea at half nine. But I started doing the sums on it last year and the amount of hours I was standing on my feet to shift maybe thirty prints at a tenner margin each... you'd get more per hour stacking shelves in Tesco. So I pulled out of the big one this winter. No table, no fairy lights, no man trying to haggle me down to a fiver for something that took me two days to carve. What I did instead was dead boring. I printed a plain little catalogue, four pages, black and white, every piece photographed flat on the kitchen table with the kids' homework shoved out of frame, and I posted the damn thing to about forty people who've bought off me before or who run the small galleries I've dealt with. Old school. Envelopes and stamps, like a man posting letters to his granny. And it worked. Sold twenty-three prints before December even got going. People wrote back, some of them just to say they liked the look of the hare on page two, no purchase, and that's grand too. The gallery in Westport took twelve on the strength of a paper catalogue and a phone call. I'm not saying markets are dead. I'm saying I was so busy performing the selling I forgot the actual selling. Nobody wants to scroll you at a draughty hall in November when they can sit in their own kitchen and pick what they genuinely like off a table of your work. Turns out the thing that worked was the most old-fashioned thing I could have done, and my phone never once told me how many people saw it.

A small gallery in Kreuzberg offered me a solo room in November. Four weeks, no fee, they take 40 percent. I said no, or rather I said give me two days and then I said no, and I have been slightly uneasy about it since. The reason is boring and unglamorous: the prints pay for the plates. My last edition of 30, at €40, sold out in three weeks, entirely through Instagram DMs and one afternoon at a bookshop table. The etching plates for that series cost me €260 each. I am not running a business, I am running a very slow machine that eats copper and occasionally gives back rent. What I cannot decide is whether this is good sense or cowardice. A solo show would be the thing you are supposed to want. But the last group show I did, six months of emails and a wall text nobody read, and I sold nothing and met two people. The print sales are not prestige. They are just the medium doing what it is designed to do, which is to be multiple and cheap and travel. I keep thinking about Benjamin and then feeling like an idiot for thinking about Benjamin while counting €40 notes. Somewhere in my head there is a version of this where the gallery leads to the collector who buys the whole suite. I have not met that person. I have met about ninety people who own one print and hang it in the kitchen, and honestly those are better conversations. Anyone else made this trade, or is it just me rationalising?

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.

A small shop on Rua de Cedofeita asked if I could supply twelve small cyanotypes for their Christmas table. Twelve is not many. I said I would think about it and then thought about it for three weeks, which is embarrassing to admit. The money was fine. What I kept turning over was the word supply. If I make twelve in a batch, in one week, with the same mix and the same paper, they will be almost the same. Almost. Cyanotype does not really let you repeat. The sun here in November is weak and low, so a print that took twenty minutes in July takes an hour and a half now, and it shows, the blue goes softer. Seawater I collect at Foz, sometimes it is clear, sometimes full of sand after a storm. So twelve pieces that are meant to be identical will be twelve small arguments with the weather. I do not want to be the person who makes the same print twelve times. I also do not want to be precious about it, because a shop shelf is a real place and real people, and I am not so busy that I can pretend otherwise. In the end I said yes to six, different sizes, and told them plainly that no two will match. They seemed happy. I am still not sure if I was protecting the work or just stalling. If you make things by hand, how do you decide when a batch is still yours and when it has become a product? I genuinely do not know where that line sits for me.

There's a hotel in the old town here, small one, maybe fifteen rooms, family-run. The owner saw my work at a group show and asked if I'd do a large piece for their lobby, a view of the Saône at dusk, something calm. I said yes before I'd even thought about money. When we sat down to talk, he told me honestly he had almost no budget. The hotel barely survived COVID, they're still digging out. I said fine, I'll do it, just cover my materials. He looked relieved and ashamed at the same time. So I painted a 120x80 for the cost of oil and linen. About €280. The painting took me maybe sixty hours. I don't need to do the math again, I already did it and it's stupid. But here's the thing, it's in a place where people sit and look at it every morning over breakfast. The light in that lobby at certain hours is actually beautiful and the painting sits in it the way I hoped. I see it sometimes when I walk past. I don't regret it. I'm not saying this is a sustainable strategy. But a painting that lives well somewhere, even for nothing, I don't know. Sometimes that matters more than the hourly rate. And then sometimes I think I'm just telling myself that because I'm bad at business. Anyone else done a free or nearly-free piece that you still don't feel bad about?