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Sold a 160 x 200 cm painting last week that I painted in 2019. It had been sitting in storage, first at the gallery, then in my studio, then back at the gallery. Five years. The buyer paid €4,800. The gallery takes 50%, so €2,400 to me. Sounds fine until you add up the materials: the Belgian linen, the oil, the cold wax, the pigments, the panels I had built for the stretcher. That's maybe €350 for a painting that size, depending on how many layers I burned through. Then the storage costs, I pay €180 a month for my studio, plus a separate small unit for older work. That painting took up wall space that could have held newer work. Hard to calculate exactly but it's not nothing. So €2,400 minus €350 materials, minus let's say €150 in storage over five years, minus transport to the gallery twice, minus the opening night I stood around drinking bad wine and making conversation. Per hour of actual labour? I don't even want to know. And this is a good outcome. The painting sold. Many don't. I'm not complaining exactly. I knew what I signed up for. But when students ask me about making a living as an artist I don't know what to tell them anymore. The math has never been worse and the rent has never been higher.

Mine: a small gallery in the 6th, the woman was charming, showed me a beautiful space, and then mentioned, lightly, that the previous painter had "left on bad terms" and she still had three of his canvases in the back room. I signed anyway. Guess what happened to mine when we parted ways. I ignored it because I wanted the wall. That's the honest reason. It cost me a year of work that sat in a storage room I wasn't allowed to see. So tell me the one you saw and told yourself it was nothing.

Early nineties, a gallery in a city I won't name held a room of my work for eight months. Nice contract, pleasant people, cup of coffee every time I visited. Just one thing, they never once put a piece on the wall. Finally asked where the work was. Oh, it's in storage. Very safe, apparently. I've told that story for thirty years and people always have a worse one. So what's the most polite way a gallery ever wasted your time? The one that cost you nothing and you never even got angry about until much later.

There was a commission years ago, a wall piece for a hotel lobby. They paid me well enough, I thought. But the scrap dealer I got the steel from held onto the offcuts for me, and a decade later I reassembled them into something that finally worked. Those offcuts sat in my studio paying rent for eleven years while they waited to be art. A museum in Brno asked for it, and I priced it like it was a new piece made in a month. €1,200. I didn't count the storage, the handling, the times I nearly threw it out, the re-welding when I finally understood what I had. Rented the van myself on the way up there, carried it in with their technician, fixed the mounting when their wall wasn't level. They were nice people. I like the museum. But I added it up on the drive home, which was the mistake. That offcut had cost me more in rent than the piece sold for. I still take these deals. That's the part that worries me more than the bad math, that I keep agreeing to them because I'm flattered someone wants the thing at all. Fifty-eight years old and still pricing like a student.

So I'm sitting in a cafe on the north side of town last Thursday, and this guy who runs a small space, maybe twenty pieces on the wall, no storage, no real lighting, asks if I want in on a group show. Fine. Then he says forty percent. And I heard myself say "sure" before my brain caught up. Here's the part I can't get past. I did the math on the drive home. A piece I've got six weeks into, the one with the torn photograph of a stairwell I've been reworking since March, my price is 3200. At forty percent I'm at 1920. That's not a commission, that's him taking the cost of the paper and the frame and part of my hands. And I said yes because I wanted the wall. I know the standard advice is walk away, know your worth, all of it. I've read those posts. But I've got four finished pieces and a fifth that won't resolve and no one standing in front of them except me and my friend Dani who says everything is "interesting." There's a version of this where I say no and stay home and make another thing nobody sees. Genuinely don't know if I made a bad trade or a fine one. Thirty percent I could live with. Forty feels like paying him to be looked at.