Search

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.

First gallery that wanted my work. Small place, nice enough. Owner walks the show, stops at every piece, says she loves the work. Then she asks if I can make the pieces smaller. And lighter. And maybe in a different material. She basically wanted a different sculptor. I said no and that was the end of it. Probably cost me a show but I figure you show them what you do or you don't. Anyone else had a gallery try to reshape your work into something it isn't? Did you bend or walk?

I don't do a lot of gates. Forge work, small stuff, brackets and railings. But a neighbor down the road wanted a gate for the side of his house and asked what I'd charge. I said 4,800 and thought that was fair money. Steel was 900. That's the cut sheet, tube and flat bar, one delivery. Then I stood in the shop for six days. Cutting, fitting, tacking, squaring, correcting the square because the frame pulled, welding it out, grinding, wire brushing, two coats of primer and a topcoat, letting it cure, then hauling it over in the truck and hanging it with two of us because it's a heavy bastard and the posts weren't plumb to begin with. Six days at the bench plus a day of finishing and a half day hanging, and I was in it about 2,600 in materials and consumables. So call it 2,200 for eight days of my life before anybody takes a bite. That's under 300 a day for work that will still be standing when I'm not. I knew the number was soft when I said it out loud. I said it anyway because he's a neighbor and because I'm still figuring out what to charge for the things I don't do often. The work I do every week I can price in my sleep. The work I do twice a year, I guess, and I guess low. It's hung. It's straight. He's happy. I learned what a gate costs me, and it's not 4,800.

first gallery that ever showed interest in my work, small space, local, I was thrilled, and the owner asked if I could "scale down" my pieces so they'd fit the wall layout better. I did it. made a whole series at like 12x16 inches. they sold okay but I hated every single one of them. never again. what's the weirdest thing a gallery has asked you to change about your work to fit them? and did you do it or walk?

First gallery that ever took my work, small place down the country, fella ran it out of a converted shed near the sea. Took six linocuts on consignment, sold two in eight months, paid me eventually. Nothing glamorous. But I was buzzing for weeks after he said yes, d'you know that feeling? Like someone finally saw the thing you'd been doing in a room on your own and said that'll do. What was yours? The first gallery that gave you a shot, how'd it happen, what were the terms, was it as grand as you'd hoped or a bit of a let-down? Love to hear the stories.

I've been on the same portrait for almost three weeks now. Not the whole portrait, the jaw. Left side, the shadow under it, where it turns toward the neck. There is a specific thing I want there, a softness, and I keep getting it and then losing it in the next stroke. Soft pastel is unforgiving in this one way that keeps humbling me. You can't glaze over a mistake and pretend. You lift it with tape, you go back in, and the paper is a little more tired each time. I'm on Fabriano Tiziano, the grey, and at this point that whole corner has been worked so hard it's gone shiny. New pastel slides off it. So now the fix is to stop, and I don't want to stop, because stopping means admitting I have to start this one again. I know the problem is that I'm painting the jaw from thinking instead of from looking. But that's the easy sentence to write. The hard part is that I can no longer see which of the five versions was the true one, I've stared so long. I put it against the mirror and it looks fine. I photograph it and it looks dead. Which do you trust? For what it's worth the ear on that side finally works. Small mercy.

Today I want to tell one thing which made me very happy, so kindly bear with me. There is a girl in my class, Sunita, maybe fourteen years. When she first came she would sit at the very back and would not lift the brush. Her lines were shaking, and she used to hide the paper under her leg so nobody would see. Some of the other girls laughed also. I did not scold anybody, only I told her, bamboo nib is not to be afraid of, it is only a small stick, if your hand trembles the line will tremble, so first make your mind quiet, then the line. For many months she only did the border work. Straight lines, small dots, the easy things. Honestly I thought maybe she will leave the class like so many do when the school exams come. Today she came early, before everyone, and put down a full sheet. Kohbar, the marriage chamber painting, complete. The lotus in the centre, the fish pair, the bamboo grove, the sun and moon in the corners. Her line is still not steady everywhere, I can see where the hand stopped and started again. But she has done the whole thing herself, and the proportion is correct. That much I can say with straight face. I have been doing this work since I was small, learning from my mother, and still I will say this. When a child who was frightened of the brush completes a kohbar, that is a bigger thing than any sale I have made. Money comes and goes in this work, that is one separate sorrow. But the form going forward, into hands younger than mine, that is the real question for all of us. I have kept her painting carefully in the cupboard, wrapped in cloth, because the paper is still new and the colours are setting. Her mother does not know yet. She wants to show when the whole family sits together on Sunday. I told her, do one thing, do not touch it again with the brush now, let it be as it is. First work should stay first work, with all its small mistakes, so that after ten years you can look back and see how far your hand has come. Now she is asking me for a bigger sheet. So I am thinking, for the girls who finish their first kohbar, maybe we should do something small, a proper ceremony, sindoor and sweets, like we do when a student is given her first needle. If anybody here has done such a thing in their own teaching, I would like to hear how you did it.

Today my old lamp stopped working. That small bulb I have been using since years, since my son first set up this corner for me. I thought I will just work without it for some time. But the light was different, softer, and for the first time I noticed the colours on the paper are not at all what they look under that bulb. The red was deeper, the blue more true. I have been painting with this light for so long I forgot what the colours really are. Maybe it is the same with the work itself. You sit in one way of seeing for years and you think that is the truth. Then something small moves and you see again fresh. I fixed the lamp after some time, of course. But I kept the new bulb dimmer than before. Some things are better not brought back to the old brightness. 🙏

Small thing that worked, and I feel a bit dumb about how long it took me. I paint at night, usually 9 to 11, and I'd been posting finished pieces on my page. Nice enough, a dozen or so likes, nothing moving. In March I started posting the mess instead. Palette with three days of dried paint on it. The jar of water that's basically mud. One photo of my 11 year old's spelling list sitting under the canvas because that's the only clean paper in the house. I don't know why that did it but it did. Two people messaged asking if I teach, which I do not, and a woman asked if she could buy the small barn piece before I'd even said anything about selling it. That's never happened to me off a finished photo. The annoying part is the finished photos still do nothing. I put the same barn piece up after, nicely lit, and it got nine likes and one comment from my aunt. I keep wondering if I've just trained people to want the mess and now I have to keep finding messes to photograph, which sounds like a second job. Also my table is genuinely gross and I'm not sure I want that to be my brand. Anyone else had something take off that you didn't mean to post?

I spent years emailing galleries the way you're supposed to, brief, professional, a link to my work, a polite request to be considered. Got nowhere. Then I tried something different: I sent one gallery director a handwritten letter on good paper, with a small original study tucked inside, a lily I'd painted from their city's botanical garden. She called me the same week. I'm not sure I'd recommend that approach to everyone, and it probably only worked because my work is small and botanical and the gesture fit. But it made me wonder what actually cuts through. What's the one email, or approach, that actually got you a reply?

In Mithila painting the fish is not just a fish. It is the sign of plenty, of the bride's house, of water that gives life. I have painted it since I was a boy sitting beside my mother. So you would think the eye is easy by now. But this week I made a small piece for a buyer in Delhi, a wedding gift they said, and I painted the fish three times and tore each one. The body, the scales, the fine lines, all fine. The eye. The eye came out dead every time. Too round and it is a doll. Too thin and it is angry. The fish looks like it is not seeing anything. My mother used to say the eye is where the fish remembers the river. I sat with that all evening. Then I stopped trying to make it perfect and I made it the way she used to, a small curve like a comma, almost careless. My hand remembered before my mind did. Why is it that the thing we know best is the thing that betrays us most? I am curious if others here also have one motif, one small part, that has been your enemy since the beginning no matter how many years. Not the big work. The small thing nobody else would even notice.

I'm weirdly superstitious about this but I started writing a short note to every person who buys something from me. Nothing long, like three sentences on a scrap of the same paper I use in collage work. Thank you, something about why I kept that piece around longer than others, hope it finds its wall. It's been maybe four months now. The thing that's getting me is the replies. People write back. Not always, but often enough that it's shifted something. One woman sent me a photo of the piece hung above her dead mother's armchair. Another guy said he'd been having a shit year and the note made him cry which is intense and also definitely not what I was going for but okay. Here's the part I don't know how to think about: it's not scalable. Obviously. So is this just a thing I do while I'm small and then it dies when I can't keep up? Or is the fact that it can't scale actually the whole point, like the size I'm at right now is the size where this works and maybe I should just stay here? I don't have an answer. Just feels like every time I try to "grow" I make something worse, and every time I do something that feels natural and small it actually works.

I started signing the front of my pastels again. For years I only signed the back, because signing the front felt like announcing myself, like saying "this is good enough that I stake my name on it." And I wasn't sure it was. But I was going through old pieces this week and I found a portrait from two years ago that I'd forgotten, and it was... actually good? Not perfect, one eye sits a little high, but there was a life in it I don't think I could fake. And it's unsigned on the front, just a pencil note on the back, and it made me sad. Like I'd hidden the thing that made it mine. So now I sign the front of everything I manage to finish. Small, in the corner, soft pastel or pencil depending on the paper. My name, in my bad handwriting, which I've decided I'm allowed to have. It's a tiny thing but it feels like stepping out from behind something.

I have a small interior study I've been fighting for weeks. A corner of my studio, the chair by the window, nothing grand. It never sat right. Every time I looked at it I knew the light was wrong but I couldn't say why. This morning I woke before the alarm, went down in the half-dark, and there was that particular grey Lyonnais light, the flat diffuse one that comes off the river. And I saw it. The painting had been lit like an afternoon in my head, warm and golden, but the room itself only ever looks like this. Grey. Honest. I mixed a little ivory black into everything, cooled the whole thing down, and it just... clicked. Two hours, gone. Funny that the answer was to make it less pretty. I think I'd been painting what I wanted the room to be instead of what it is. The chair looks more like the chair now than it ever did with all that fake sun on it. It's still not the painting I thought I was making. It's better.

Working on a small steel piece for a guy's garden, three eighths plate, nothing complicated. Last pass with the grinder, the wheel caught an edge and kicked, and I put a gouge across the face about two inches long. Right where the light hits. Spent ten minutes with a flap disc trying to blend it out. Made it worse. Then I stopped. I've been doing this over thirty years and the thing that took the longest to learn is that the mark usually stays. You chase it, you take more off than you meant to, you end up with a soft patch that reads as a mistake from across the yard. So I heated it and worked the gouge into the texture instead. Now it's just part of the surface. Delivered it this morning. He didn't notice. Nobody ever does. Took me until my fifties to stop fighting the piece. Still forget sometimes.

Not a complaint exactly. I set out to paint a sky last night, ended up with the whole thing the color of dishwater, wiped half of it off with a rag and liked what was left better than anything I've done in months. I think the problem is I keep buying tubes because the color looks nice in the store. Cadmium orange looks amazing in the rack. It does not look amazing next to the greens I actually use. Eleven year old told me my paintings "all look like the same day" and I've been thinking about it for a week. Anyway. Working on a small one, 8x10, of the field behind the elementary school at pickup time, all that flat winter light. If it stays grey I'm going to call it done and stop fighting it.

Working on a small piece tonight, maybe 14 x 18, and I tore a strip the wrong way. The fibers came apart rough and pale instead of the clean deckle I wanted. I put it down anyway, three millimeters off where it was supposed to sit, and left it. That off-strip is the only part of the whole thing I keep returning to. The rest is correct and I feel nothing about it. This happens maybe once a month and every time I spend an hour trying to decide if it's judgment or just fatigue. The conservation side of my brain says put it back where it belongs. The other side says no. It's still on the table. I haven't glued anything down. Some nights the work is deciding what to leave messy, and I'm not good at it.

My brother's girlfriend works at a small museum in Verona, the kind with a decent contemporary collection and a shop that tries. She asked if I'd do an edition of risograph prints for them, small run, 50 copies. I said yes because family, because I liked the museum, because I told myself it was exposure with a little money attached. I charged €80 per print. My cost per print was about €4 in materials, so I felt fine about it. Generous even. I signed and numbered them, packed them myself, paid for shipping. She sent me a photo yesterday. They're on the shelf at €180. With a little acrylic display stand I didn't know about. And I sat with it. I get it, the museum has overhead, the shop has margins, the frame around the print is worth something. But I did the math on my time and it came out to something like €12 an hour including the design work. The museum is making a 125% markup on my labor and I'm the one who did everything but put it on the shelf. I don't know what the right number would have been. €120? €150? I'm scared to ask for that because I'm not a name yet and I keep thinking, what if they just say no and I lose the connection? But also, what's the connection worth if it's structured like this?

I sent work to a small gallery in Gothenburg years ago with no idea what "consignment" even meant. I signed the paperwork without reading it properly and spent the whole opening night hovering near my pieces like a nervous parent. Nobody told me I'd spend most of the night talking about process instead of looking at the work. What do you wish someone had told you before your first showing? The practical stuff especially, the stuff nobody puts in the contract.

My studio is basically a stack of things I've kept because the paper was good. A 1937 Swedish school atlas, a box of receipt stubs from a locksmith in Mölndal who closed in the eighties, a lot of endpapers from books too far gone to save at the conservation studio. Today I was working on a small piece, maybe 20 by 25 cm, mostly empty. I had a scrap of what I thought was a nice aged ledger paper pinned to the wall for two weeks, waiting for the right spot. Turned it over. It's the back of an envelope. Someone's address in pencil, half rubbed out. The good side is the envelope interior, which has a waxy coating, and it will not take paste. It just sits there on top of the glue like it's refusing. Two weeks of looking at it. I should have checked in the first minute. I keep things because the paper is good and then I don't look at the back, because looking at the back is admitting I might have been fooled by the front. I've kept it anyway. It's on the wall, wrong side out now. I don't have a plan for it.