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A collector came to the studio last month, saw an interior I'd finished weeks earlier, wanted it. I named my price, nine hundred euros, which for me is honest but not bold. They said yes immediately. And instead of relief I felt guilty, like I'd overcharged, like I should have said eight hundred if I was being fair. Sit with that for a second. I'm doing a thing I've trained twenty-five years to do, at a price that nets out to about forty euros an hour before materials and studio costs, and the guilt lives in me because they didn't flinch. I keep a ledger of every finished painting, hours, materials, price. It's brutal reading. Nine hundred sounds like real money to people who don't know the hours don't end when I stop painting. The stretching, the varnishing, the framing, the emails, the schlepping. Everyone who pays for the painting pays for approximately one painting's worth of unpaid work around it. I know what the actual answer is. Raise prices until the flinch comes from the other direction. I've added maybe ten percent in three years. I'm scared of the ceiling because I don't know where it is, and the collector who says yes too fast terrifies me more than the one who negotiates. Anyway the painting is gone now and the guilt faded. But I keep thinking about what it would feel like to name a price and not apologise internally for it.

Took a commission for a carved limestone piece last winter. Eight weeks of work on and off. Quoted $4,800 and the client said "that's it?" which I should have read as a warning about myself, not a compliment. I broke it down after delivery. Stone cost $620. Studio overhead, sanding discs, carbide, the rented truck to haul the block, my time at what I actually worked, it came out to about $11 an hour. I've been doing this thirty years. I still price like I'm afraid someone's going to find out I'm not worth it. The client was happy to pay more. I was the one who couldn't ask. Raised my rate last month for the first time in four years. $65 an hour. Feels like robbery. That's the whole problem.

Came into the studio this morning with a photo on his phone. Golden retriever, nice enough dog. Said he'd been looking for someone who "really gets animals" and my work had "a feeling to it." Then before I could say anything: "But I'm not paying gallery prices. You're in your studio, it's not like it costs you anything to paint." I said the paint costs something. The canvas costs something. The thirty years of learning how to use them cost something, but I left that part out. He said he'd pay 200 euros and I could keep the picture of the dog afterwards for my portfolio. I said no and he acted like I'd insulted his grandmother. Genau. The portfolio argument. As if the privilege of painting his dog was its own reward.

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.

I did a screenprint edition last month, 50 copies, three colours, hand-pulled, on nice 300gsm. Cost me about €450 in materials plus probably 30 hours in the studio. Sold 7 so far at €40 each. That's €280. Even if I sell every last one I'm barely breaking even on materials, let alone labour. And I know the advice. Raise the price. Build a mailing list before you print. Test the market with a preorder. All sensible. But there's something about making the edition first, committing to it, that's the whole point for me. The risk is part of the form. If I only printed what I'd already sold, it'd feel like a different practice entirely. I'm not complaining exactly. More trying to figure out where the line is between doing something for the work's sake and just being bad at the business side. Because I think I'm genuinely bad at the business side. But I also think the people who are good at it sometimes make work that's too safe. Any other printmakers here just accepting they'll lose money on editions because the object matters more than the margin? Or am I deluding myself.

Sold a 140x140 oil and cold wax piece to a regular collector for €1,100. Then I saw the invoice from the framer. He'd paid €400 for the frame, plus delivery, plus the wall hanging rig. I did the math on my end afterwards: between the stretcher, the oil, the cold wax, the months of drying time sitting in my studio, and the actual painting hours, my rate came out at around €14 an hour. The frame he chose costs more per square meter than my painting does. I'm not saying the price was wrong. He's passed on two smaller pieces since, he's serious, and €1,100 for a painting that size from a mid-career artist in this country is roughly where the market sits. But there's something slightly absurd about a piece that took me a year of thinking and painting being worth less than the aluminium profile holding it up. The real problem is I'm the one who has to be the one saying the number. The framer never flinches. I do, every time. I keep asking myself what the actual number should be, and the honest answer is I don't want to find out by losing the collectors who made this a living in the first place. That's the trap, and I know it's the trap, and I'm still sitting in it.

I just finished an edition of 25 screenprints that took me four months from the first drawing to the last pull. Copper plates, inks, paper, the studio time, the proofs I rejected along the way. Sold the whole edition to a gallery for €900, which sounds fine until you do the real math and realize the materials alone were close to half that, and the gallery takes 50% on top. So I made 25 objects by hand and I think I netted something like €6 an hour. The gallery is happy. The collector is happy. I'm the only one who knows the number. The part I keep turning over is that I priced it like a print. Like the edition makes it cheap, because it's a multiple, because the original is the plate and the prints are just copies of it. But each one of those copies took my hands on it. That logic is from an old world where printmaking was a reproduction tool, not a primary medium. I keep selling work on a pricing model that was built for something printmaking no longer is, and I don't know if I'm too scared to break it or just can't figure out what the new number should be. I raised the price on the next edition by €300 and I'm already scared nobody takes it.

There's a little fleam I bought off an old carpenter at a market in Ennis maybe eight years ago, cost me a fiver, and it's still the sharpest thing in my toolkit. Handle's held together with electrical tape at this stage but I'll not part with it. Every morning I'm in the studio I run it along the edge of a gouge a couple of times and it brings the life back into it. And then I've a brand new burnisher I paid forty-odd quid for sitting in a drawer since I got it because the one I actually use is a smooth bit of bone I found on the beach in Connemara. Kid you not. Dog dug it up, I cleaned it off, and it's the perfect thing. What's the bit of kit you won't let go of because it works and that's all that matters, and what's the expensive thing you own that you barely touch? I'm not talking brushes obviously, we all have the brush we'd cry over losing. I mean the odd bits.

so i finally got into a group show at a legit gallery last spring. was so excited i didn't think it through. they asked what my prices were and i just told them my normal studio prices. forgot the gallery takes 50%. so i sold a painting for $400 that the buyer paid $800 for and i took home $200. less than the cost of materials and the frame. did the math on the drive home and literally pulled over. the gallery was happy though. great exposure lmao

Sold a big charcoal piece for $400 three weeks ago. Was so excited someone wanted it I didn't think twice. Then the custom frame arrived yesterday, $280 with glass and shipping, and I just sat there staring at the invoice like an idiot. So net on that one is $120 for what took me about nine days of work, and that's before any studio rent or charcoal. I keep doing this. I price from "will they say yes" instead of from what the work actually costs me. And the worst part is I'd already told everyone how happy I was to sell it, so now I'm just quietly wearing it. Trying to actually write out my real numbers tonight. Hours, materials, the whole ugly math. If it comes out to $3 an hour again I might scream. Anyone else price from fear and regret it every single time?

I've been selling small etchings for €180 since 2021. Same size, same paper, same amount of work. Three years of the same number while my studio rent in Berlin went up twice and the price of copper plates nearly doubled. Last month I finally raised them to €240. Not a huge jump. Still probably too low for the time that goes in. But I did it. Then a former professor, someone whose opinion I actually respect, saw the new price list and said, in that careful tone, that the pricing was "ambitious." Asked if I was worried about "pricing myself out" of the market. The market being what, exactly? The market of people who think art should cost as much as a nice dinner? I didn't say what I wanted to say, which is that I know etchers in London charging £400 for a similar plate and nobody calls that ambitious. I just said I'd think about it. Now I'm sitting here wondering if I should have raised them more, or if I'm actually wrong. The math says €240 is still a bad hourly rate when you add up drawing time, plate prep, printing, editioning. But the voice of that professor is stuck in my head.

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.

A gallery in Paris, small but respectable, reached out last year. They wanted a solo show. I was flattered, obviously. Then the director came to the studio, looked at what I had, and said: "You need to produce twice this many in half the time." She wanted me to work smaller. Looser. Less glazing, more direct painting. "People don't look that closely anymore," she said. I thought about it for a week. I have a daughter in lycée, a mortgage, the usual reasons to say yes. But I paint slowly because the paint itself dictates the speed. You can't rush oil. You can fake it, but it shows. I said no. She was surprised. I think she expected me to be more desperate. Six months later, I still don't have a show. But I'm finishing a triptych of my daughter reading in the late afternoon light, and it's the best thing I've ever done. The shadows on her neck took me three weeks to get right. I don't know if that was the smart career move. Probably not. But I'd rather have the painting.

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?

I keep two lists on my phone. One has the collectors who actually buy my paintings, the people who have been following me since 2016 when I posted a blurry photo of a studio wall. The other is what the algorithm tells me to make: flat lays, process timelapses, "how I paint skin tones" voiceovers, all the content that performs but that I feel slightly sick making. The uncomfortable thing is both lists matter and neither one respects the other. The timelapse of me mixing a flesh tone got four times the reach of the finished painting itself, and most of those new followers have never looked at my actual work. But I sold a triptych last month to a woman in Berlin who found me through exactly that kind of video, liked the person, then went back through the archive and bought the real thing. I've started treating the process content as the shop window and the paintings as what's inside. The window has to be well dressed or nobody comes in. But I also stopped pretending to myself that the window is the art. That distinction was costing me more than the algorithm ever has.

had this little brass sharpener, must've been twenty years with me. came from some market stall in ennis, cost a euro maybe. kept it in the same tin as my carving tools. and the blade's been gone off it for about three years now, I knew it, I knew it was just chewing the pencils instead of sharpening them, but I couldn't bring myself to throw it out. it'd been everywhere with me. first studio, second studio, the shed phase, the kitchen table phase. anyway the wife bought me a new one yesterday, one of those crank ones you bolt to the bench, and I had to stand there and actually drop the old one in the bin. felt daft, felt like I was putting down a dog or something. the new one's fierce good though. grand twist on it. might name it.<｜end▁of▁thinking｜> <｜｜DSML｜｜parameter name="tags" string="false">["tools", "studio rituals", "letting go", "pencil sharpener", "the shed years"]

Finally worked up the nerve to raise my portrait rate. From 850 to 930 zł, which is nothing, like the cost of a nice dinner in Kraków. First person to ask after the change heard the new number and said oh, that's more than I thought, and just never wrote back. And the stupid part is I knew exactly what I was doing. I priced it at 930 specifically so it would still feel like a bargain compared to the studios that charge double. And I still felt like I'd done something rude. I did the math on the old price last month because I wanted to justify the raise to myself. 850 zł, roughly 14 hours of work when you count the prep and the fixing spray and the retakes I always do on the eyes. That's about 60 zł an hour. Less than I made answering emails at my old office job. Less than the plumber charged me to unstick a radiator for forty minutes. So logically I know I was right. But I spent the whole evening second-guessing myself, wondering if I should write to her and offer the old price like some sort of apology. Didn't. Woke up annoyed at myself either way. I keep seeing people on here talk about their real numbers and it genuinely helps. So here's mine and I'm not proud of it: I'll probably still say yes to anyone who asks nicely, at whatever they want to pay, because I can't stand the quiet after a no.

The number was 2 400 euros. A still life, peonies and a copper pot, a bit larger than what I usually accept. The gallery in the 6e took fifty percent. I did the arithmetic on the metro home and it came to about eleven euros an hour for the six weeks, before the panels and the lead white. I said yes anyway, and I said yes again the following year, because the wall credit is real and I am not going to pretend otherwise. What I did not say yes to was the framing. They wanted it in a gold leaf moulding that cost me 380 euros, and the commission on the sale did not cover it. Nobody warns you that the frame is your problem and the gallery's aesthetic. So now I quote the frame separately, always, in writing. It reads as fussy. It has saved me a small fortune. The part I still cannot decide: the client who buys through the gallery pays 4 800 and thinks that is what the painting is worth. The client who comes to the studio pays 2 400 for the same work. I have no clean answer for that and I am not sure I want one.

Sold a large piece last month, 140cm square, oil and cold wax, three weeks of solid days in the studio. €1,400. I did the math after because I couldn't not. Between the good linen, the cold wax, the pigment, the turpentine, and what I'd have paid anyone doing the carpentry on the stretcher frame, materials alone ran close to €380. That's before a single hour of my time. Stack the hours on top and I'm somewhere around €7 an hour for the year of this trade I've been inside since 1992. Then yesterday a woman from the opening asks, very bright, what I'd charge for one of my "quicker, smaller ones." As if the speed is the variable. As if the three weeks is where the cost went. I said the same price per square metre and she laughed like I'd made a joke. She hadn't understood it was the price. I don't know if I'm undercharging or the whole enterprise is just bad math by design. Probably both. I've been afraid to raise prices for four years because the gallery says the market here is what it is, and the market is what it is partly because we all keep saying that to each other.

I was pulling rotten timber out of a skip behind a demolition site and there it was, buried under plasterboard. Old Czech welding mask, the glass is green-black and pitted, the leather's stiff as a board. Cost me nothing. It's sitting on a shelf now, facing the wall, and it's got more presence than half the things I've paid good money for. I don't know what it's going to become yet. Maybe nothing. Maybe I'll spend a month figuring out how to use it and then I won't. That's the part of the process nobody talks about, the sitting around, the letting things decide what they want to be. My assistant asked me yesterday what I was doing with it. I said I was waiting. He didn't get it. Most people don't. But you people probably do.