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Namaste to all ji. I want to ask one thing from those who have approached galleries. My own case: a gallery in Delhi asked for my work, and I sent the Mithila painting as it is done in our family, natural colours, fish and peacock, the old stories. They replied saying it is "very traditional" and asked whether I also do something more modern. I did not change. I said this is the work, this is what my mother and grandmother did. Nothing came of it. But I am still thinking. Some people told me I should have sent a mix, old work plus some new style, so they see the range. Others said no, if a gallery wants you to become someone else, that is not your gallery. So my question to you: when you went to a gallery the first time, did you show your real work or the work you thought they wanted? And how did it go for you. Tell me honestly, I will not feel bad. 🙏

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?

Do you write the email, or do you go and stand in the room? I'll admit my method. In 2003 I drove to a gallery in southern Germany with three rolled canvases in the back of the car and no appointment, and I stood in the doorway until someone came out. It worked. They took two pieces, and one of them sold within the month. I have never once repeated that success, and I have sent maybe forty careful emails since, of which perhaps three got a real answer. So I genuinely don't know which is the better way now. I suspect the walk-in only worked because it was 2003 and because I was too young to know better. But I meet people who swear the email is the only professional route, and their work is no better than mine. Which one do you do? And has it ever actually worked, or do we all just keep doing the thing that worked once?

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?

Namaste to all ji. I want to ask one thing which I keep thinking about. Myself Ramesh, Mithila painting from Madhubani, Bihar. My son made this account for me. Always I have sold through the cooperative here, and through people who come to our village for the work. Gallery matter is new for me. Some months back I carried three paintings rolled in cloth, took the bus to Patna, and simply walked into a gallery there and asked to show. The man was polite, he looked at everything, and then said email is better, send photos. Only. So I came home with the same three paintings in the same cloth. Now I am confused which way is correct. To walk in and let them see the actual work with their own eyes, or to send photo by email first like a formality. In our tradition the painting is to be seen with hands and eyes, not in a small phone picture. But maybe that thinking is old. So tell me honestly, how do you all do it. Email first, or just go and stand there. And which one has actually worked for you. Tell me I am wrong if walking in is a foolish thing now.

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?

working on a piece right now, about 30 x 40, acrylic wash over a torn paper ground, and there's a found photograph in it. my brother's kitchen. bad exposure, his hand at the edge of the frame, you can see a dish towel on the counter. the problem: the photo is the best thing in it. people look at the piece and go quiet and I know they're not looking at my paint, they're looking at him. which fine, that's the point, but it also means I could put a brick next to that photo and get the same reaction. charcoal underneath it feels like decoration now. I've done this before and I don't think I've ever solved it. the photo does the emotional labor and the rest of the surface just hangs around it. I keep telling myself to bury the photo deeper, varnish it, tear it, so you have to work to find it, but every time I try it reads as precious instead of honest. not really asking if I should take it out, I know I shouldn't. asking how you get the rest of the surface to earn its place instead of standing next to the thing that actually matters. or is that just what this kind of work is and I should stop fighting it

Myself Ramesh, Mithila painting from Madhubani district in Bihar. I want to ask something to those who have dealt with galleries. My first attempt was not by email at all. There was an exhibition in Patna where I had sent two paintings through a cooperative, and a gallery person saw them there and asked who is the artist. That is how my first proper show came, not by applying but by someone seeing the work hanging. After that I tried emailing some galleries in Delhi, and mostly no reply came. So my experience is: the work has to be seen by eyes. But I know many artists now send portfolio by email only, and some gallerists say never come without appointment. So tell me ji, which way you did it? Email with photos first, or you carried the paintings and went? And for those who walked in, did they see you or send you away? I want to know what actually works, because I am still learning this side of things. 🙏

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.