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A museum shop in Vienna picked up a small edition of my screenprints for their retail. I was thrilled, museum shop, right, that feels like validation. They paid €150 per print, wholesale. I sold them 20. I did the math yesterday because I was avoiding something else. Each print takes me about four hours from exposure to final trim, not counting the drawing time before that, not counting the screens I burned and then rejected, not counting the test proofs. So €150 for roughly six hours of work per print if I'm being generous about what counts as labour. That's €25 an hour if nothing goes wrong. Something always goes wrong. I'm not saying the museum shop ripped me off. That's just the going rate, they were fine to deal with. But I sat there thinking: I have an MFA, I've been doing this fifteen years, and I'm making €25 an hour selling to an institution that will mark it up to €400 and call it affordable art. And I said yes because I was flattered they asked. I don't know what the right number is. I just know that the gap between what feels good for the ego and what's actually sustainable keeps getting wider and I keep choosing the ego.

There's this tiny chai shop near Shanti Nagar double road, been there for maybe forty years, tucked between a jewellery showroom and a building that's already been sold for redevelopment. I've been meaning to paint it for months but kept putting it off, too many people, too much traffic, too self-conscious to sit there with my sketchbook. Finally went this morning at 6am. Sat on a plastic stool, ordered chai I didn't even finish, and painted for two hours while the guy who runs the shop kept peering over my shoulder and saying "akka, colour kammi" meaning I wasn't using enough colour. He wasn't wrong. Came home and finished it on the table. And I don't know, I just sat there looking at it and felt something I don't feel often, like it actually came out the way I wanted. The light, the shadows from the awning, the old board with the faded name. Took a photo, sent it to my husband, and he said "that's the one" without me even asking. I never know how to take compliments on my work. But I think I'll frame this one. For myself.

There's a Miller Syncrowave 250 at the shared shop I work out of some days. Been there twenty years. Last month the high-frequency start started sputtering. Now it's catching about half the time. Rest of the time the arc wanders and you get this weird snake-track bead. I keep asking the guy who runs the place to call a service tech. He says he'll get to it. Meanwhile three of us are just working around it, wasting gas and tungsten, telling ourselves it's fine. It's not fine. A machine that old, you respect it or you replace it. You don't let it limp along getting worse. Anyone else dealing with equipment that needs real maintenance and nobody's stepping up? Or is it just my shop that runs on deferred repair.

Been fighting with shop lighting for thirty years and I'm still not sure I've got it right. You need enough to see what you're doing to stone, but too much and you lose all the shadow work that tells you where the form actually is. I've got four different temperature bulbs clamped to beams in here and I swap them depending on the day. Right now I'm working under a single warm 60w on a drop cord because the piece told me it wanted to be seen that way. Sounds ridiculous. It's not.

i brought in a 30x40 acrylic for a commission frame job and the guy behind the counter goes "oh nice, decorative" with this little smirk. like yeah dude that's one of the functions of art. i hang it on walls. it's visually pleasing. do you want me to be miserable every time i look at it or what. i should've said something but i just did the customer service grimace smile and said "yep that's me" and now i'm mad about it in retrospect which is worse. if you're gonna be a framing shop art critic at least have the spine for me to argue back while we're both standing there.

some guy at a cafe yesterday saw me working on a sketch, came over, loved it, said he runs a "curated online gallery" (instagram account with 300 followers). wanted to feature me. for free. in exchange for "exposure to his network." i asked him how many sales his featured artists usually get from it. he said "well it's more about building relationships." so i said cool, let's build one where you pay me. he did not think that was funny. he left me his card anyway. the card had a stock photo of a paintbrush on it.

I took a finished portrait to get framed today and the woman behind the counter looked at it and said, with this sympathetic little head tilt, "oh, pastel. that's a shame, it's such a fragile medium, isn't it. not really archival." And then she showed me their "serious" framing options for oil paintings. I stood there holding my piece like a fool. It's a portrait of my friend's daughter, I worked on it three weeks, I got the light on her cheek right for the first time in maybe ever. And this woman just... dismissed it with one sentence. I didn't say anything smart back. I just said "oh" and let her frame it in something basic and left. And now I'm home and I'm so annoyed at myself for not saying anything. But also, what do you even say? It's not the first time someone's implied pastel is for hobbyists or children or people who don't want to commit to "real" paint. I keep thinking about that word. Fragile. Like my work is inherently less because of the dust on my fingers. Like the softness of it means it's weaker. Anyway. I'm going to keep using pastels because I love them. But I wish I'd said something. 😅

hung that thing on the wall of the booth three years ago and pretty much gave up on it. it's this beat-up brown leather jacket with a torn lining and a cigarette burn on the sleeve. i stitched some of his handwriting into the inside collar, just the word "fine" because that's what he always said when i asked how he was. someone bought it today. a guy maybe late 50s who didn't say much. just pointed at it and said "that one." didn't haggle. didn't ask about it. i don't know why that hit me harder than selling a painting. maybe because it's not even really mine to sell. or maybe because i'd forgotten something could just leave.

I brought in a small oil study yesterday, just a lemon on a blue cloth, to get it framed for a show. The woman behind the counter looked at it and said, very helpfully, "You know you could just take a photo and have the colors matched digitally, it's much more accurate than the human eye." "More accurate." To a painting. Of a lemon. I stood there with paint under my nails from a morning glazing session, holding a canvas where I'd spent two hours getting that particular blue right, the one that sits behind the lemon and makes it feel like you could reach out and take it. And she's telling me a printer would do it better. I said something polite in the end because I'm trying to be less of a bitch in public. But I wanted to say: the whole point is that it's my eye. My eye that spent twenty years learning to see. My eye that decides the lemon is a little more yellow-green on this side, that the cloth has a fold that catches the light a different way. That's not an error to be corrected. That's the entire painting. Anyway the frame is fine. But I'm still annoyed.

Three months wrestling this block. Seven hundred pounds of limestone. Had it laid out on the shop floor all summer, working it from the top and sides because I couldn't tip it without a rig I didn't have. Finally borrowed a neighbor's gantry this weekend, got it upright and onto the base without cracking anything or losing a finger. It's not finished. But it's standing. That's a different thing than lying down. When you work flat you're making a drawing in stone. Standing up, it starts talking back to you. Whole different set of decisions now. Took a photo of it in the afternoon light through the shop door. First time it's looked like a real piece. Might post it later if I don't talk myself out of it.

Okay so I've been telling myself for months that I'd approach some local shops about carrying my prints and cards, just small ones, the cute plant shop on my corner, a bookstore I love. And I kept chickening out because sending a cold email with prices feels so much scarier than just posting on Instagram where people come to you. But last week I finally just walked into the bookstore with a little portfolio and asked if they had five minutes. The owner was so nice she almost made me cry?? She said yes on the spot, picked four designs, and I spent the weekend hyperventilating over formatting a proper invoice. Sent it this morning. Then my partner found me on the kitchen floor and I had to explain that no I wasn't sad, this is just what success feels like apparently. Anyway if anyone else has done the wholesale thing for the first time, how long until you stop feeling like you're going to get caught doing something you're not supposed to?? Asking for a friend who is me.

Still sitting in the corner of the shop. A five-foot chunk of Indiana limestone I took on six years ago. Customer wanted a figure, paid half up front, then disappeared. I stopped waiting after year two but I can't bring myself to cut it up for scrap. Every few months I walk past it and think about what it wanted to be before I took the commission. I knew better. You never take on work you don't believe in just because the money's good. But I did, and now there's this block I walk around like a piece of furniture I hate. Anyone else got a piece like that? The one that should have been something else but you made the wrong deal and now it just sits there.

I had a local gallery interested in showing a few pieces and I was so excited until they mentioned I'd need to provide all the framing and they'd take 50%. No framing budget, no help, just "bring them ready to hang." Is that standard and I'm naive, or is that a sign they're not really invested? I've only done fairs and coffee shop walls so I genuinely don't know what's normal. What's the line between "that's just how it works" and "run"?

had a piece in a group show last spring and someone bought it opening night. first time a stranger paid four figures for something i made. felt like i'd done something wrong so i kept the price low for months after, $200, $350, like i was apologizing for the nerve of charging real money. finally bumped everything up this fall. not stupid high, just... what i'd need to make it worth pulling all-nighters and buying real materials instead of dumpster cardboard. lost about 40% of my instagram followers in the next three weeks. the algorithm punished me or whatever. but the people who stayed? they're the ones who actually buy. or share. or send a note that isn't "love this, wish i could afford it." i'd rather have 300 people who get it than 3,000 who treat my feed like a museum gift shop they're just browsing. still feels weird every time i type a number into an invoice. like i'm about to get caught.

okay I need to know if this is just me or if this is universal, how did you land your first gallery showing? like the real first one, not the group show your friend curated. I've been sending portfolios out for months and the closest I've gotten is a gallery that was really warm via email for three months, asked for more photos, said they'd "circle back," and then just... stopped replying. I followed up twice and nothing. I don't even know if I should keep emailing them or take the hint. my own answer is honestly embarassing, my first "gallery" thing was a coffee shop that let me hang stuff near the bathroom. which was nice! but I'm trying to level up and I feel like I'm doing something wrong. tell me your first real gallery story, good or bad. did you email? walk in? know someone? I need to know what actually works vs what we're all just guessing at

I took the prices off my shop page a few months ago. Not as a strategy, I just got tired of feeling like I was shouting numbers at people before they'd even seen the work properly. I put "please enquire" and my email. I expected silence. Instead I get these long emails now. People describing where they'd hang it, what the light is like in their kitchen at certain hours, which beach it reminds them of. Some don't buy. Some buy after three or four emails. The buying feels different when it happens, less transactional, more like they've already lived with the piece a while. The downside is real. Some people disappear the second they hear the number. I lost a sale this morning that way, a woman who'd written me three lovely messages, then just "oh, that's more than I thought" and gone. And I can't tell if I'm filtering for the right people or just making it harder for everyone. Not a tip. Just a strange thing I'm in the middle of.

Got the last of the granite for the memorial piece I'm working on. It was a beast to find the right color and veining. Took a few trips to the quarry, but this slab feels right. Now to get it back to the shop without breaking it.

Was buying a new pad of pastel paper at the art shop and then stopped for groceries on the way home. The cashier saw the paper sticking out of my bag and goes "oh, painting by numbers? my grandma does those." I just said no and smiled. But I've been thinking about it all evening. Why do people see someone with art supplies and immediately assume it's a hobby, a kit, something where you just follow instructions? Like the idea that someone might be actually trying to make something from scratch, badly or not, just doesn't occur to them. And I know it's not a big deal. It's a random comment from a stranger. But it's the thousandth time something like this has happened and I'm tired of feeling like I have to justify that what I do isn't just... coloring inside someone else's lines. Anyway. Put down a portrait tonight that I hated and scraped off with a razor. At least that was my own bad decision, start to finish.

poured a bunch of time into a proper little ad setup. proper targeting, a carousel of actual finished work, a link straight to the shop. figured if people complain about the algorithm maybe it's time to just pay the damn thing. $80 later I got 14 link clicks and one DM that said "I love this, any chance of a discount for a struggling artist?" I told them I was the struggling artist and the discount was already baked in by me not knowing what my time is worth. they did not buy the thing. I know ads are supposed to be a long game and you're not supposed to judge on one round. but man. I could've bought a nice stretcher frame for that eighty bucks and had something to show for it.

Had a piece ready for welding last month, a big steel armature that needed a structural weld I couldn't do in my own shop. Got a quote from a foundry I've used before for $600. Dropped it off. Picked it up and the invoice was $1,200. Foreman said the job took longer than expected because of the wall thickness and they had to re-jig the setup. No call to warn me, no authorization. Just the work done and the new price. I paid it because the piece was already in my truck and the client deadline was two weeks out. But I sat in the parking lot for five minutes first. That's the part I keep thinking about. Not whether they were right or wrong. Just that I sat there and decided to eat it because restarting somewhere else would have cost me more than the difference. Still don't know if that was smart or weak. Probably both.