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Someone in a crit last week said my collage work has "a consistent gesture" which I think was a polite way of saying every torn edge I make curls the same way. I checked three old pieces this morning. Yeah. Every single one, the paper rolls toward the same side. I tear with my right hand, pull down and left, every time, for years. It's like finding out you have a signature you never signed. Not sure if this is a thing to fix or just lean into. It's not a bad look honestly, the curl catches light. But now that I've seen it I can't stop seeing it, and knowing it's muscle memory kind of grosses me out. Anyone else ever find a habit this dumb baked into years of work?

So I'm building up a piece from my brother's old photographs, torn into strips and laid into acrylic washes. Twelve panels, all mounted on the same board with the same wheat paste I've used for years. Eleven are fine. The twelfth, the one with his handwriting on the back that shows through where the paper's thin, is lifting at the corners and curling like it's drying out. Only that one. I've pressed it twice, weighted it overnight under a stack of old canvases, and it came back up by morning both times. Which makes me think it's not the paste, it's the panel, maybe a coat of something underneath that never fully cured. Half of me wants to pull it up and remount it clean. The other half thinks the lift is the best thing in the piece and I should stop fighting it and just seal it where it sits, mid-curl, like the photo's trying to peel off the wall. But then it's a gimmick, not a decision. I don't know. Has anyone here had a panel that only misbehaved in one spot and did you ever figure out why.

so this is small but it nags at me. for two years my instagram bio listed the materials. acrylic washes, charcoal, torn paper, found photographs. it read like a recipe. people scrolled past it. fine. last month a small space in the city put me in a group show, the kind where the wall label gets more attention than the work. the curator asked me to send the "proper" line, the one that goes on the checklist. so i copied it into the bio. the full formal thing, medium and dimensions and the year. two days later a follower was gone. no comment, no DM, just gone. probably the "torn paper" phrasing being replaced by something with a semicolon in it. the strange part is the enquiries actually went up. three of them. all the same flavor, asking if the piece was for sale and where. so the dry formal line is doing the work the soft bio refused to do. i keep thinking i traded a description for a job listing and i don't know if that's a loss. the label says what it is. it doesn't say what it is. and the person who left never bought anything anyway. still. i miss the old line a little.

Working on this piece built around a found photograph from the 70s, this woman standing in a doorway, someone's aunt probably. I tore the paper around her and layered it onto a board with charcoal and acrylic. But there's this one hinge point where the photograph meets the torn paper and it just won't sit right. I keep adjusting the collage thinking the composition is off, then yesterday I realized the piece works fine everywhere except exactly where those two papers meet. The problem is the junction itself, not what's around it. Every fix I try makes it worse. I pulled a strip of paper off and now there's a gap, so I'm just staring at this torn edge like it's going to solve itself. Anyone else ever had a piece where one seam is the whole problem? Where you keep blaming the surrounding work and it turns out to be the one physical joint you chose?

A woman bought one of the small ones in November, 24x30, six pieces of torn paper and a lot of nothing. I asked 3,200 kronor. She paid without blinking. That is the part that stays with me. Not that she paid it. That it took her four seconds. I priced it by counting hours, which is the wrong way to price anything I make, because the hours are mostly me standing at the window deciding not to glue something down. Comes to maybe 700 an hour if I only count the cutting. If I count the thinking it is a joke. So now I have a number that works and I am afraid of it. Not afraid to say it again, afraid that it was luck, that the next person will look at the same size and hear the number and go quiet. And I have already caught myself, twice, drafting a lower figure for a piece that is actually harder. A 40x50 with hand-torn edges from a 1940s Swedish reader. I sat with the email open for an hour. The conservation work pays by the hour and nobody argues about it. Paper is paper. The art is the only thing I do where the price has to come out of me. Anyway. I raised the small ones to 3,600 this month. Nothing has sold since. I am not sorry yet but it has only been three weeks.

picked up the panel I've been fussing over for six weeks. told them I wanted it floating, nothing touching it, just hovering. $340. it does float. it is an inch off the wall. the artist friend who helped me hang it said it looks exactly like every other floated piece in every other show and I think she's right, which is the worst part. I spent six weeks on torn paper and a wash I finally stopped hating and now the thing anyone sees first is a shadow gap. not even sure why I'm mad. mostly at myself? I could've bought a real frame and had the piece read as a painting. instead I paid a guy named Dale to make my work look like it's being careful.

The piece was 30x40, acrylic wash and torn paper over a photo of somebody's grandmother's kitchen. Client found me through a friend of a friend. 900 felt generous when I said it out loud. Then I actually sat down with the receipts. Panel 62. Mediums, call it 140 because I wasted a whole tube of a grey I ended up hating. The photograph was a scan and a print, 34. Frame, because it needed one and I didn't trust them to pick it, 210. Shipping 55. That's 501 gone before I touched it. What was left was 399 and maybe 60 hours. I don't work fast. I re-tore the same paper corner four times. So roughly 6 an hour, and that's before the gallery takes a cut if it ever shows. The part that actually bothers me isn't the number. It's that I knew it was low when I said it. I said 900 because I could hear myself about to say 1400 and it scared me. Fear has a price and mine is 500. Quoting a new one next week. Same size, same materials. I'm going to say the higher number and just sit there.

I'd been sitting on the same numbers for three years. A 40x50cm mixed media piece was 380 euro, framed, and had been since 2021. In January I changed it to 460. Didn't announce it. Just updated the page and waited for the emails asking if it was a mistake. Nothing. Two of the same three people who always buy came back in February and paid it like it was normal. I spent the whole month braced for a conversation that never happened. Which should feel good and mostly does, except now I keep doing the arithmetic on the years I didn't raise it. That's roughly 80 euro a piece times eleven pieces. I don't want to say the number out loud. The annoying part is I know exactly why I waited. It wasn't strategy. I was afraid someone would ask me to justify it and I'd hear myself apologizing halfway through. I did keep one thing cheap, the small torn paper pieces at 90. Those I'm not touching, they're the ones people actually live with and I like that they go out into the world at that price. Anyway. If you're sitting on an old number, the silence on the other side of raising it is deafening in a good way.

Sold a small piece at the flea market on saturday. Lady asked what the torn paper was about, and I told her it was from my brother's old notebooks. She bought it before I even finished the sentence. No reel, no hashtag, no "link in bio." Just me standing there with cold coffee and my actual story. Meanwhile I've got 40 something posts on instagram this month, maybe three genuine interactions. Someone called the same kind of piece "cluttered" in a review a while back and I've been second-guessing the layering ever since. The lady at the market didn't care about composition rules. She wanted to know whose stuff it was. I keep thinking the market is the hobby and the feed is the real thing. It's backwards. The market is the only place people actually look at the work with their eyes and take it home. The feed is just me performing being an artist for strangers who scroll past. Don't really know what to do with that besides keep hauling the tent on saturdays.

I've had this thing leaning against the studio wall for close to a year. Torn paper over an old photo of a stairwell, charcoal, a wash that went muddy and I kept anyway. Never hung it because hanging it felt like deciding it was done, and it isn't, it's just... not going to get better. Anyway I hung it in the hallway. Where I have to walk past it about twenty times a day. Not for anyone else, there's nobody to see it there. And it's different in there. The light comes in low off the landing around four and the torn edges stop reading as torn. Whole thing goes soft, like the stairwell is breathing. A year against the wall and I only actually looked at it because I moved it four feet. Feels a bit stupid to call that a win. But I've made peace with the muddy part now, which I couldn't do in the studio. The studio is where I fix things. The hallway is where I just live with them. Anyone else have a spot in their place that does this? Or am I just going to end up hanging everything in the hallway.

Not a strategy thing, I just ran out of steam after the studio flooded and I couldn't get to the good light for a week. Anyway, three weeks, nothing posted. Two people emailed. One of them had seen a piece at a group show in March and had been sitting on it, and the other found my website through somebody's link roundup. Neither of them mentioned my feed. Meanwhile the last six months of regular posting got me roughly four DMs, all asking if a print was available and then going quiet when I said the price. Which is annoying because I actually like posting. I like the mess and the bad lighting and the half-torn paper. It's just strange to have the thing I do for myself be so reliably worse at getting work out than doing nothing at all. Starting to think the algorithm rewards the version of you that's a shop window, and the people who buy want the version who's in the back room with the fluorescent light on, ignoring them.

printed 50 copies of a small zine back in february. 12 pages, mostly the torn paper series, one page of scribbled notes I almost cut because they made no sense out of context. cost me about $180 at the local copy shop, which felt stupid at the time. sold 41 of them at $14 each. meanwhile two of the actual paintings from the same series are still leaning against my studio wall, unsold since november. I think people wanted the story cheap enough to take home without having to commit to a wall. or maybe the notes page did it, still not sure. either way I'm now the person who sells zines, apparently, and my gallery contact thinks it's a gimmick. he's wrong but he's also the one who'd know I guess

I tear everything by hand, deliberately, because a torn edge catches light in a way a cut one doesn't. That part is fine. But then I mount it on a straight-cut board, square corners, and I line the whole thing up so it sits dead level in the frame. Spent yesterday on a small piece, maybe 18 by 24, and the torn paper was doing what I wanted, soft grey page from a 1953 Swedish almanac, one warm ochre scrap, a lot of white. Then I squared it off and it went quiet in the wrong way. Not calm. Just corrected. I keep telling myself the frame is the discipline, the edges have to hold the tearing in. But I'm not sure that's true anymore. Maybe the tearing is the piece and the square is me being afraid of it. Anyone else flatten something out of a piece and only notice after? Or is this just what mounting is and I should stop thinking about it.

for years I had "DM for pricing" at the bottom like everyone told me to. the reasoning was always that talking to people gets you further than a number on a page. then a friend who sells furniture online said something that stuck. she said the only people who ask about price are the ones who already want it, and you're making them jump through a hoop to find out they can't afford it. so in march I put actual numbers up. the torn paper pieces at 240, the big charcoal ones at 900, a couple of small ones at 85. lost nothing. no angry messages. what I did lose was about an hour a week of the same conversation, the one where someone says "and what would something like this run" and then goes quiet. and I got three sales off people who told me later they'd been watching for months and only bought once they saw I wasn't going to ask them to negotiate over DMs like it's a rug in a market. the thing nobody warns you about with hiding prices is that it makes you look like you're deciding how much each person is worth. I wasn't doing that. I just didn't want to be told my numbers were too high. which is its own problem, and putting them on the page mostly cured it, because the number stops being a thing I have to defend in a chat window and starts being a fact on a page.

So a gallery I won't name messaged me last week. Not a show. A "featured artist spotlight" on their account. €180 for one grid post and three stories. They were very warm about it, said they love my torn paper work, said it would introduce me to "collectors and curators." I sat down and did the math like the logistics person I used to be. Their account has 11k followers, most of whom I'd bet have never bought a piece of art in their lives. At €180 that's basically paying for a lottery ticket with worse odds than the actual lottery. I said no and they got cold immediately, which told me everything. Here's the part that bugs me. Two of my friends said yes to similar offers over the last year. One got a single comment. The other got nothing at all. Both of them said it felt good to be asked, like being validated, and I get that, I really do. Being asked feels like being chosen. But nobody asks you to pay to be chosen. I'm not anti paying for stuff, I pay for the booth at the local print fair, I'll pay for a listing that actually puts work in front of people who collect. This just felt like renting a room in someone else's house. Anyway. Curious if anyone else keeps getting these.

Took a piece in to get framed this week. Older guy, been doing it forty years, probably knows his stuff. He looks at the work for a long minute and goes "this is interesting, but why not just commit to canvas? you'd probably sell more." And I stood there going... what does that even mean. Commit. Like torn paper and acrylic washes and a few layers of charcoal is me chickening out. Like there's a correct material and everything else is me being indecisive. Didn't say much. Paid for the frame. It's a nice frame, he did good work. But I've been chewing on it for three days. There's this whole school of thought that if a thing isn't easily categorizable it's not finished. That mixed media is a phase before you find your real medium. Nobody says that to someone who only paints. They say "strong palette" or whatever. But the minute you're not pure, you're just... hedging. Ma'am I'm 45. I'm not hedging. I've been at this long enough to know exactly what I'm doing and it is not a compromise.

There's a piece I've had in my studio for about 18 months. Scrapbook of my brother's things basically, torn paper, his handwriting on receipts. Never priced it, never even framed it properly. It was never for sale, it was just mine. Last month a woman came to the studio, someone's friend, and she stood in front of it for a really long time. Asked what I'd want for it. And I said a number out of pure panic, no thinking at all. $650. She didn't even blink, said yes, and now I have to actually let it go and I keep stalling on the handover. I don't even know if $650 is right. It might be way too low for what it is to me, or way too high for what it is as an object. I've never been good at pricing the ones that matter. The safe commercial stuff I can price in my sleep. The thing I actually care about and I just make up a number on the spot. Taking it off the wall tonight to wrap it and I keep finding reasons not to.

Took a cardboard box of torn paper out to the curb this morning, old failed washes I finally gave up on. Neighbor Dave comes shuffling over, all friendly, says "oh good, you're getting rid of those scraps" and asks if they're compostable. They weren't scraps. They were a week of work I'd already mourned and buried. But I stood there and said "yeah sure, probably fine" and let him carry them off. I don't even know why that's stuck in my craw. He wasn't wrong. They were going in the trash either way. But watching him walk away with a box of stuff I'd spent days on, calling it compost... felt like someone grinding out a cigarette on a photo of your dead dog. which is dramatic but you know the feeling. Anyway I'm not speaking to him for a while. He won't notice. that's the part that gets me.

took down a reel that hit 12k views the other day. it was me assembling a torn-paper piece, sped up, and it got the biggest reach i've had in months. and the comments were full of people asking for the finished piece and the story behind it and i just... couldn't. because the piece was about my brother and i wasn't ready to hand that to strangers holding phones at 2am. so i deleted it. and i've been second-guessing it all week because that's the whole game right, you're supposed to chase the reach. but i made the thing for me. the sharing part was the part i never wanted. not posting the process anymore. or at least not that one. some things stay in the studio, even if the algorithm would've loved them.

Somewhere along the way I stopped showing finished pieces and started showing the torn paper pile on my studio floor. Rough edges, the ugly rejects, the stack of book pages I was deciding not to use. Not deliberate. I just got tired of curating. The emails I get now are from people who ask about the process, not the pieces. A collector in Oslo bought three things because she said she wanted to own the part I hadn't thrown away. Still small numbers, but the conversations are better. I think showing the finished thing invites people to judge it. Showing the mess invites them in. Two weeks ago I posted a photo of my hands covered in paste and got more genuine replies than anything I've put up in a year. No idea if this scales. But I'd rather have forty people who care than four hundred who scroll past.