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Started posting the shop floor last month. Chips on the ground, the jig I built to hold a 400-pound slab while I cut it, the hours of grinding nobody sees. Figured process content was the honest version of what everyone else does with their reels. Engagement dropped by about a third. The finished pieces still pull the likes. People want the clean picture of the thing, not the dirty work underneath it. The thing is, the people who did stick around are the ones asking real questions. About joints, about stone density, about how you keep a weld from cracking when the piece moves. That's worth more to me than the numbers I lost. But I won't pretend it didn't sting watching the count go down. I'm a grown man and I checked the likes on a Tuesday like it mattered. It doesn't. It still got me.

I spent the whole month on one painting of my daughter reading in the armchair by the window, and the calf of that figure refused to be right. Not the whole leg, just the one muscle. I repainted it maybe six times. Each time it looked fine in the first hour and then it was wrong again the next morning. Thursday I finally stopped trying to fix the drawing and instead I looked at where the light actually fell on her calf at that hour, not where I thought it should fall. I had been painting a calf in general. She has a specific one. The whole painting snapped together after that. Not because I finally made the muscle work. Because I stopped working from memory and started working from her. It is so humbling to need forty hours to remember the one thing I tell my students on day one. Anyway. She saw it this morning and said, "Now I look like me." That was the whole month, right there.

My gallery, after fifteen years, asked if I could start working on a smaller scale. The new collectors, they said, want something that fits above the sofa. I pointed out that I already have a small format, it's called a sketch. That didn't land. I know the market has gone that way, everything compressed into a domestic object, something you can rehang when you repaint the wall. But there is a size where a painting stops being a painting and becomes a furnishing. When I have to ask myself if the piece will clear the hallway of whoever buys it, I have stopped thinking about colour and started thinking about logistics. I didn't say no. I said let me think about it. And now I'm sitting with the fact that I said that, and what it costs me to keep the door open. Forty years ago I made work on paper you could fold and put in a drawer. Nobody asked me to then. Genau, times change.

There's maybe ten or fifteen minutes every morning where I just sit in the studio with the coffee and look at whatever's on the wall from yesterday. I don't touch anything. I don't think about what to do next, not deliberately. I just let the painting sit there and let myself sit there. It took me years to understand this isn't procrastination. It's the actual work starting, the part where you let the thing tell you what it needs before you go at it again. My wife thinks I'm just staring into space. Maybe I am. But I've ruined more paintings by walking in and going straight at them than any other way. Anyone else have a ritual that looks like doing nothing but isn't?

Took me years to admit I'm useless for the first hour in the studio. Coffee, walk around, stare at the piece, move a tool I don't need, leave again. Used to call it procrastination and push through it. Made worse work. Now I just accept it. First hour is for warming up the eyes, not the hands. The real work starts when I stop forcing it. What do you do in that dead time before anything happens?

okay this is such a ridiculous thing but i literally cannot start working if the room is above like 72 degrees. my watercolor dries too fast on the page and i get this panicky feeling like i'm racing the clock instead of actually painting. i have a little thermometer on my shelf that i glance at probably twenty times a day and if it's too warm i just sit there grumpy waiting for the air to shift. my partner thinks i'm insane because i'll open the window in december. like sorry i know it's 40 degrees out but my WASHES need this. it's funny because when i was in school i painted in this unventilated basement studio that was basically a sauna in spring and i convinced myself i just had to adapt. but now i'm like... no. i can just make the room the temperature i need. that's allowed. it's still a weird shock to realize i get to decide these things. anyway what's your weird non-negotiable studio condition that sounds insane when you say it out loud

I keep my palette clean maybe the first hour of a painting. After that it's just layers of dried paint I mix into, scrape off, add more on top. Someone told me last week I should clean it between sessions and I looked at them like they'd suggested I set my hair on fire. I know painters who treat their palette like an altar. Wipe it down, lay fresh piles, everything in its place. I've tried. I last about twenty minutes before I start working wet into wet and the whole thing turns into a crusty ruin again. There's something about the chaos that helps me find colour faster, I think. I don't have to decide, I just pull from whatever's there and adjust. Today I've got a smear of burnt sienna that's been there since Tuesday, a pool of medium I accidentally spilled, and what might be ultramarine or might be cobalt, I can't tell anymore because it's mixed with the grey from yesterday's shadows. It's fine. The painting is coming along. Maybe I'll scrape it clean when this one's done. Maybe not.

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 don't know why but i literally cannot start throwing or handbuilding unless i've spent like 10 minutes just... touching the clay. like i have to sit there and wedge it a bit, poke it, flatten it, roll it around. my hands have to remember it first. it's not preparation really, it's like a weird ritual. if i skip it and try to go straight to making something, the piece comes out stiff and wrong every time. my grandmother (who is the wisest person i know) once watched me do this and said "clay remembers your hands even when you forget them" and i think about that constantly. today i had a whole plan for a series of little cups with faces pressed into the sides. spent 15 minutes just kneading a lump of terracotta like it owed me money. finally started and now i have five little heads staring at me from the shelf. vale, worth it. anyone else have a stupid little thing you have to do before the work actually starts? or am i just a weirdo with clay dependency issues

everyone in these threads keeps blaming the algorithm and i get it, reach is down, but i keep watching artists post the exact same stuff that worked in 2021 and act confused. you posted your palette knife and some paint swatches 40 times, of course it stopped doing numbers. i killed my reach when i stopped and just started posting works in progress with zero caption and actual process, no hashtag spam, and the engagement went up. not because i beat the algorithm but because the people who follow me actually wanted to see the ugly middle stage, not another "here's my cozy studio corner" shot. the algorithm is not your enemy, your content being boring is. posted that with my full chest. come at me.

Somewhere along the way I stopped showing finished pieces and started showing the torn paper pile on my studio floor. Rough edges, the ugly rejects, the stack of book pages I was deciding not to use. Not deliberate. I just got tired of curating. The emails I get now are from people who ask about the process, not the pieces. A collector in Oslo bought three things because she said she wanted to own the part I hadn't thrown away. Still small numbers, but the conversations are better. I think showing the finished thing invites people to judge it. Showing the mess invites them in. Two weeks ago I posted a photo of my hands covered in paste and got more genuine replies than anything I've put up in a year. No idea if this scales. But I'd rather have forty people who care than four hundred who scroll past.

A gallery in Munich took a big 180 by 140 oil and cold wax piece in June. Sold it last week for €9,800, which is a good number for me, I'm not complaining. But I got curious last night and added up the actual studio hours. Not the staring at the wall hours, the hands-on hours, plus prep and varnishing and the two days I spent just getting the surface right. It came out to about €41 an hour. And that's not counting the years behind it, the materials, the studio rent, the gallery's cut which was already off the top. €41 an hour is what a plumber charges in this country and he doesn't have to paint over the work and start again. I don't know what the point is exactly. I think it's that nobody prices the thinking hours. You can't invoice for the Tuesday you just sat with it and didn't touch it, but that Tuesday is in the painting. The gallery would laugh at me if I tried to build that into the price. So we all quietly eat it and pretend the canvas took two weeks. Not going to raise the prices. The market here holds what it holds. Just wanted the number on the table once.

I'll start: early on, a gallery owner loved my work, wanted a show, then told me there'd be no commission split because the "exposure" was payment enough. I was young enough to almost say yes. What's the worst offer you actually got from a gallery? The one that made you laugh or just made you walk.

Scanned a pastel this week that I nearly didn't bother with. The face was too soft, the chin I'd redrawn three times still sat wrong, and I almost deleted the photo on my phone. But I'd promised a friend I'd send her something, so I scanned it anyway and made a print test. It's the first thing that's sold twice in two days. Small A5 edition, €18 each, and both buyers DM'd the same thing, "the quiet one." The one I thought was a failure. I keep having this happen and I don't know what to do with it. My eye is ruthless and probably wrong. The pieces I'm proud of sit there, the ones I want to bury get attention. Is it that people feel the struggle in a piece? Or is my judgment just genuinely off about what works? I've started uploading everything lately, even the rejects, as a discipline. It's not a strategy, it's me not trusting myself less. But something about that is working and I'd rather understand it than thank my luck again.

Six months on one piece of granite. I don't usually work that slow. Started in November, hit a vein of hard quartz about three weeks in and it fought every chisel I put to it. Nearly scrapped it twice. Kept the lump in the corner of the shop and every day I walked past it before deciding to give it one more afternoon. Pulled the last tool off it this morning. No polish, left it the way it came off the stone. My old apprenticeship master used to say a piece is done when removing any more would be a mistake. This one is that. It's not going anywhere fancy. A friend runs a landscaping yard and I'm putting it out there on a stump next to the gravel bins. See if anyone touches it. That's the real test, who stops to run a hand over it. My daughter said I'm being stubborn about the gallery stuff again. Maybe. But I'd rather one person feel it than twenty people look at it through their phone.

Started three canvases this week and killed all three by Thursday. Overworked, muddy, the cold wax turning to glue because I wouldn't stop pushing. You know that feeling when you can feel yourself making it worse and you keep going anyway. This morning I scraped one of them down to the linen with a palette knife. Just a ghost of yellow ochre left in the weave. I thought, good, now it's a fresh surface and I've got nothing. Sat with it for an hour. Then I took a tube of Prussian blue and a rag and just wiped it across, thin, no plan, no composition. Let it dry forty minutes. Came back and put one mark on it, a single stroke, cadmium orange, right through the middle. Stood there. That was it. That was the whole painting. It's small. 60 x 80. But it has something the other three didn't have. It knows when to stop. I don't learn that lesson, I relearn it every time.

The steel door into my space on the edge of Žižkov is a joke. Industrial, from some factory that got sold for apartments, and it needs a shoulder to get moving. Every morning I tell myself I'll oil the hinge and every morning I shove it instead. I think I've decided the struggle is part of starting. Like the work can't begin until I've earned entry. Which is nonsense, but nonsense that gets me through the threshold. Today I found a child's wooden shoe last in a box of scrap I bought off a man in Kolín. Someone wore that thing maybe 1940s, the heel worn smooth on one side. It doesn't fit anything I'm building. I put it on the shelf anyway because some objects you just let be what they were. Not everything has to become art. That took me fifty years to learn and I'm still not sure I believe it.

this never happens to me. usually by the third session i'm convinced it's garbage and i'm just moving paint around out of spite until something clicks or i give up. but this one just... worked from the start? i kept waiting for the other shoe to drop and it just didn't. it's a big one too, 36x48. neon orange background with a figure sort of dissolving into it. been staring at it dry on the floor for two days trying to find the thing i'm gonna hate about it and i keep coming up empty. feels wrong honestly lol. like i'm getting away with something.

A few months back I got tired of hearing myself say that social media doesn't matter, so I did the thing I said I'd never do. I paid one of those agencies. Fifteen hundred euros for a month of "organic growth strategy." They sent me a plan that was basically: post every day, use these hashtags, engage with bigger accounts, tell your story more. The only concrete change was that I started posting my work with the same three hashtags as everyone else, and my feed became a wall of pictures of paint that said nothing. I do have a story. It's just not a tidy one, and it doesn't fit in a caption alongside a grid flourish. I cancelled after three weeks. The one useful thing that came out of it was noticing I'd stopped enjoying preparing a canvas. That was never supposed to be content. That's the part I keep. So bof, lesson learned the expensive way, but at least the money bought me that clarity. What's actually working for you right now, or is everyone else also just shouting into the same three hashtags?

A gallery owner once told me at an opening, "your work is exactly what we're looking for, we must talk properly." I followed up twice over three months. Casual warm replies, never a date, never a no. Then it just faded. I still don't know if it was politeness, or if I said something wrong, or if that's just how it works sometimes. I've started asking myself: is an enthusiastic "we must talk" from a gallerist worth anything at all, or is it just the sound they make at openings? And at what point do you stop chasing and file it under noise? Curious if anyone has actually turned one of those warm-nothing conversations into an actual show. Or do you write it off the moment there's no calendar in the first reply?