Search

The algorithm pushed my old Mysore palace sketch from 2019 to 40k people this week. Four hundred likes on a painting I did sitting on a park bench with wobbly perspective because I was too lazy to walk around to the other side. Meanwhile the piece I spent six weeks on, the one where I measured everything twice and worked the light properly, is sitting at 31 likes. Three. One. I know the answer is supposed to be "just post more, the algorithm is random, consistency consistency." But I've been doing this long enough to notice a pattern now. The stuff that lands is never the stuff I sweated over. It's the throwaway morning sketch, the wobbly bench one, the half-finished thing I almost didn't scan. I don't know what to do with that honestly. Do I keep painting for the craft and accept the algorithm doesn't care? Or do I get smart and start churning out the loose quick ones that perform, and keep the serious work for prints and shows where it actually gets seen properly? Right now I'm doing neither and it's making me a bit cranky. Anyone else found a way to hold both, the work you care about and the work that works?

A gallery in Stockholm wanted to show my work last year. Nice space, good light, I was flattered. Then they sent the contract: 60/40 in their favor, plus I pay for framing and transport both ways. So if a piece sells for 4000 SEK, I get 1600 after costs if I'm lucky. I said yes anyway because that's what you're supposed to do. Get the exposure, get the line on the CV, get the credibility. The show came and went. Sold one small piece. Lost money on the whole thing. I've been thinking about it differently since. Not because 40% is unfair, galleries have overhead, I get it. But because I spent months making work specifically for that show, work that was slightly bigger and more "gallery-ready" than what I normally do, and none of it sold. The piece that did sell was a tiny thing I'd made in an afternoon, priced at 800 SEK, a scrap study I almost didn't frame. So the lesson I'm sitting with is: I bent my practice toward what I thought a gallery wanted, and it didn't even work. The thing that worked was the thing I'd have done anyway. I'm not anti-gallery. I'm just tired of pretending the math works when it doesn't, and tired of contorting my work to fit a room that mostly wants to see if you'll show up on your own dime.

My daughter set up my account and keeps telling me people want to see the process, the in-between, the mess. I get it, that's how it works now. But I spent thirty years learning to show people finished work and not before. A piece isn't a piece until it's out of the shop and on its feet. Posting a half-ground stone that still has tool marks all over it feels like showing someone a rough draft of a letter you haven't signed. She's got a point though. The numbers on the finished pieces are fine. The sketchbook photos do better. I don't like it but I'm not stupid. Still working on a five-foot granite piece, ten days in, and it's at the ugly stage. The one where you wonder why you started at all. That's the part she wants me to post. I keep telling her no one needs to see me sweat like that. Maybe she's right and the sweat is the part people actually connect with. I wasn't raised to show the sweat. You just did the work and let it stand.

The gallery that loved my work but never sold a single piece I had two years with a gallery that praised everything I sent them. Beautiful, they said. So refined. Sold nothing. Not one painting. When I finally asked what was wrong, they told me my work was too quiet for their foot traffic. Too quiet. They'd been hanging it in a back room where nobody went. I should have asked where they planned to put the work before I signed. That was mine. Has a gallery ever told you one thing and then quietly shown you it meant another? What's the line you'd never cross again in how a gallery treats your work?

I keep seeing this advice everywhere now: show the process, not the product. People love a time-lapse of hands pulling a print, the ink going down, the registration being slightly off. Fine. It works. I know it works. But here's the thing nobody says. The process is the part I actually need to be alone with. That moment when a screenprint is failing and I'm over-inking and the paper is curling and I have no idea if I should finish the run or throw it out, that's not content. That's thinking. I cannot perform it and also do it. So I post the okay version of the process. The ones that look like a craft video. And the real thinking stays off-camera, and I wonder if what gets seen online is just the choreography of the work, not the work. I've been going back and forth about this because the numbers are real. The 40-second pulling-a-print clip gets ten times the reach of the finished piece. But I started printmaking because of what the printed image says about copies and originals, not because I wanted to be an ASMR account for paper. Maybe the answer is boring: post the process that's already done. The work in the frame, not the work in the moment. Or maybe I'm just old-fashioned and the performance is part of it now and I should get over myself. What do you all do when the thing that gets attention isn't the thing you're doing?

Got turned down by a gallery years back. Owner was nice enough to sit down with me, which I respected. Then she told me my steel work was "very accomplished" but she couldn't see a way to sell it because "sculpture is a hard room and the collectors who come in here want something livable." Livable. My work's built to sit in the weather for fifty years and she wanted something that fit above a couch. Worst thing anyone's said about your work to your face? I still think about that one.

Went and looked at a space I was excited about, first meeting, and the guy says my work is "interesting but could use some polish." Told me my figures were "too raw" and asked if I'd consider softening things up for the clientele. I laughed at him. Literally laughed out loud. I do not paint things soft. That's the whole point of me. Walked out and never looked back. Still glad I did, but man it stings when you know they saw your work and just wanted a different person's work with your name on it. What's the worst note or comment a gallery or rep ever gave you? The one that made you question whether they even saw the same paintings you made?

when i got my first gallery slot i had like 8 paintings that vaguely went together and i panicked and made 6 more in two weeks that sort of matched. it worked but i look back and cringe at how scattergun that was lol. i still don't really plan bodies of work, i just paint until a theme shows up and then pretend it was intentional the whole time. is that just how it is for everyone or are there people out there who actually walk in with a thesis?? teach me your ways. or tell me you're also faking it, that works too.

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.

Back in the lean years I took a restoration job that paid a commission, not a flat fee. The contractor was a friend, the project was a Byzantine floor in a small church up near Kilkis, genuinely interesting work, and I was eating rice and beans so I said yes without asking the number that mattered. Eight months on my knees, in and out, matching tesserae that some other hand had set in the 6th century. Lovely job. When it was done he came by with a cheque and it all felt very brotherly until I did the division in my head driving home. €2.10 an hour. I knew the whole time it was cheap. I didn't know it was that cheap. I think some part of me didn't want to do the math because then I'd have to leave, and the work was the only thing keeping me sane in that period. I still take friends-and-family work at a discount sometimes. But I always write down the hourly number before I start, in the margin of the sketch, so I can't pretend later. If it comes out under minimum wage I either raise it or pass. The church floor was worth doing. The price was not.

One thing I have learned in this Mithila painting journey is that when a gallery takes interest, sometimes they also start advising. "Make it smaller. Less detail. More modern. This border is too much." They think they are helping. Myself, I have refused more than once. Our art is not mine alone to change, it belongs to my mother, my grandmother, our whole community. The fine lines and the natural colours, that is the story. When I hold firm, sometimes they respect it. Sometimes they walk away. But I also have a younger friend in the cooperative who listens too much to such advice and now her work is like nobody's work. She is stuck in the middle. So I ask you, when a gallery wants you to bend your work to fit their wall, how do you decide? Where is the line between being practical and losing yourself? I am curious what others do.

I had a gallery once that said they loved my work but could I please make everything smaller so it would sell better. Smaller prints, smaller paper, fit the customer's wall. I tried it and hated every piece. Felt like I was shrinking the ocean to put it in a cupboard. I said no in the end and we parted ways. Sometimes I wonder if that was stupid. Has anyone else had a gallery ask you to change your work in a way that went against what the work actually is? Did you bend, or did you walk?

A gallery in Athens wanted my work a few years ago, but they wanted it on canvas. I work in mosaic, on board or panel, because that's what holds the stone. Canvas sags, the smalti pops off, it's not the medium. They said "we can't sell mosaic, it's too heavy for our wall system." I said well, that's what I make. And I didn't get the show. Walked away from it. Still don't know if I was right or just stubborn. Probably a bit of both. What's the line for you? The thing a gallery asked you to change that you wouldn't, or the thing you did change and it worked out?

Okay I need to know if this is a universal experience or if I just got unlucky. I signed with a small gallery last year, they were lovely, took my pieces on consignment, paid on time when things sold... and then just. never put anything of mine in an actual show. My work sat in their back room for months. I'd ask about upcoming exhibitions and get "we're working on it!" until I finally just pulled everything out. Turns out they were basically running a storage unit with a storefront and living off artists who were too nervous to ask where their paintings were. Anyone else had a gallery that took the work but never hung it? Is that a red flag I should've caught earlier or is it just... how some places operate? What's the longest your stuff ever sat unseen somewhere?

The craziest part about selling at local art fairs isn't the selling, it's the people who come up to your booth and say they've seen your work online. Every single time I'm caught off guard. I've got maybe 400 followers and post whenever I remember to, yet twice this summer someone walked up and said "oh you're the one who does those fall barn paintings" like I'm a celebrity. Meanwhile the piece I actually poured weeks into and thought would finally be "the one" has sat in my living room unsold for six months. My 8 year old said it looks like a sad house. Not wrong honestly. Trying to just accept that the internet works in ways I'll never fully understand and keep painting what I like. The barns sell because people want a barn on their wall, not because they're my best work. Feels like it should bother me more than it does.

Let me tell you about my first proper gallery. Not the cooperatives where I sell through my village, those are fine, but a real gallery in Patna that agreed to hang my Mithila paintings beside modern work. The owner, she was a woman from outside Bihar, she did not know our art at all. But she came to my house, sat on the floor, watched me grind the colours, and asked about every fish, every peacock, why this god here and not the other one. She did not talk about selling that day. She just listened. That is when I felt our work was being seen properly. Where was the place that first took your work seriously? Which gallery, and what did they do that made you feel it?

I got a commission last year for a new piece at a decent European museum. 12k seemed like real money when I signed. Then I priced the steel, the timber, the electronics for the sound element, the rented van to haul it all, the two assistants I had to pay properly because I'm not an exploitative prick. By the time the thing was built and installed I'd spent about seven and a half. The rest covered four months of my life. I ate it because the work was good and I wanted it to exist and I'll probably do it again. The math never works if you count your own time. You have to not count it. That's the trick. You make art because you're compelled to and you finance it however you can and you pretend the hours don't exist. But sometimes late at night you do the math anyway and it's genuinely funny how bad it is. Like actually funny. I laughed out loud when I worked it out. Younger artists ask me how to price things. I tell them charge more than feels comfortable and then double it. Then I watch them not do that and I understand completely because I also don't do that.

Yesterday a visitor to the cooperative bought one of my smaller fish-and-lotus pieces for ₹1200. Three days of fine line work with the brush, the natural pigment, the handmade paper that I prepare myself. When I counted it out, it came to less than what a plumber charges for a single visit in Patna. I did not bargain. The price was fixed because the cooperative fixed it, and the cooperative fixes it low so that the foreign buyers and the art galleries keep coming back. My mother sold her best work for a sari and a sack of rice when I was a boy. So I should feel fortunate, no? But ji, here is the thing I cannot set aside. The same size piece, once a Delhi dealer resells it, goes for twenty times that and it hangs in a drawing room beside imported furniture. Nobody argues with that price. Only my hand is supposed to be cheap. I am not writing this to shame the young woman who bought it. She was kind and she chose my work. I am writing it because we do not speak of this enough. I have painted since I was eight years old. My fingers know these lines the way my mother's did. And some days I ask myself what my daughter's fingers will find worth doing, if this is the value of three days. I have been thinking of raising my own price for the pieces I sell directly, outside the cooperative. For a larger piece I want to ask ₹6000 and it frightens me to say it aloud. Have any of you fixed your own price after years of accepting what was given?

The older I get the more I think I've done this all wrong. When I was young and hungry I would walk into a gallery in Lyon with paintings under my arm, no appointment, nothing. Half the time nobody even looked at them. The other half I got a card and a promise that went nowhere. These days I send an email with three or four images, clean and simple, and I wait. It feels more respectful. But I also wonder if the walk-in shows something the email can't, audacity, nerve, that you actually exist in a body and your work has weight to it. I landed my first real gallery because the owner saw me set up painting the market on a Tuesday morning. Not the work, the process. She came over. So what do you do? Knock on the door with a portfolio, or fire off the email and hope? And has either actually worked for you, or is it all luck either way?

My main workspace faces north-ish and in winter the light is this flat grey thing that flattens everything I'm cutting. I know people who chase the sun around their house with their work, move their table every few hours. I just... work in it. Put a task lamp on it and get on with it. The colours look different when the piece finally gets into proper light anyway, I've learned to allow for it. My conservation teacher used to say you should only ever judge a mosaic in the light it's going to live in, which is fine if you're doing a floor for a church in Palaiokastritsa, not so helpful when your client's living room faces west and you're working under a cloud.