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Not the work. Not the process shots, not the long text about the 2009 installation in a former slaughterhouse that took me four years and a divorce. One photo, from 2016, of the empty room before I filled it. Bare floor, bad light, a radiator I never removed. I spent maybe six weeks building that website. A friend's son did the code for a case of beer and I wrote the texts myself, badly, in two languages. The whole thing performs like a shop window and the only thing people stop to look at is the space before anything happened in it. I don't know what to do with this. Part of me wants to take the photo down out of spite. Part of me understands exactly why it is the one. People want to see the room they could walk into, not the thing I finally decided to put there. Anyway. I am not going to optimize anything. I am 58 and I have watched too many artists become their own marketing department and I would rather spend the four hours rebuilding the radiator section than in a dashboard. But I looked, and now I know, and it is a little funny and a little sad.

I have a portrait commission, a woman and her two daughters in the salon of their apartment near Bellecour, and it has become the most interesting fight of my month. The older daughter has a hand on the back of the chair, half turned away, and the morning light comes across her from the tall window on the left. I left the raw umber and lead white of that hand loose. A few strokes, the structure showing, the warm ground coming through. It is the best thing in the painting. Honest light does that, it does not need the whole thing described. The mother loves it. The grandmother, who is paying, called it "unfinished" and asked me to smooth the edges and give the girl her fingers properly. So now every Tuesday we talk. And I find I cannot entirely dismiss her. Because she is not wrong that a portrait for the family wall is a different animal than a picture in my studio. It will hang over a sofa where children will run past it. It is not meant to be looked at, it is meant to be lived with. But the moment I nail down those fingers the whole thing goes dead. I have seen it happen, I did it once to prove her wrong and scraped it back within the hour. I have not told her that. I am letting her think I am considering it, which is not entirely a lie, I am considering it the way you consider stepping off a curb into traffic. Voilà. That is the whole of it. The painting is due in March and I have no idea which of us is going to win.

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.

I did that last year. Small room in a collective space downtown, knew the people running it had zero budget and the foot traffic was basically the other artists. The work didn't sell. I don't regret it though, the hang was respectful and they treated the work properly. I keep going back and forth on whether that was naive or just... fine. Part of me thinks a quiet room with the right person handling the work is worth more than a bad gallery that moves pieces. Anyone else take shows knowing they'll be a financial wash? Do you ever consider that a win?

There was one place I should've walked out of during the first meeting. Owner spent 20 min talking about how much foot traffic the block gets, never once asked to see the work, then said "we take 60, but you'll make it up in exposure." I signed anyway. Obviously. Didn't place a single piece in five months, and when I finally asked for the inventory back he got weird about it. So what's yours? The thing you saw and went "yeah that's probably fine" and it was very much not fine. Or the opposite, if you've got one, the flag you were sure was bad that turned out to be nothing.

went out to a mall that's been half empty since 2009. security guy found me crouched in the food court taking close-ups of the carpet. he wanted to know if i was with the demolition crew. i wasn't. i just wanted the carpet. 1970s orange and brown, that pattern that pretends to be geometric but is really just chaos with a ruler. it's worn down to nothing along the path people walked to the old Sears. you can literally read the foot traffic from 40 years ago in it. nobody designed that. it just happened. he let me stay. sat on a bench and watched me for a while and then said his wife used to work at the Orange Julius there. i got maybe 30 usable frames. most of it's garbage, the light was flat and the place smells like wet carpet and nothing. but two of them are the actual thing. the good stuff is almost never in the interesting place. it's in the hallway you walk past.

Found a collector's email from April sitting in my spam folder this week. They had asked about one of the cold wax pieces, the big grey one with the red seam through the middle. I never saw it, never answered, and then on Monday they wrote again, in that patient way people write when they assume you're busy and important. Two sentences. Wanted the painting, asked if I'd hold it until their move in September. It sold in three messages. No reel, no process video, no hashtag. I'm not saying social media is worthless. I do it, I have a person who helps me format the videos, and the contact sheet post the other week genuinely brought traffic. But I've been watching the numbers this year and the through-line is uncomfortable: almost every sale that mattered came from a private email, a studio visit, a gallery forwarding my name to someone. The public work keeps the name warm, but the money moves in the quiet places. Naja. I keep posting anyway. But I go through my spam folder now like it's a second studio, and I wish I'd started doing that ten years ago.

i still think about the gallery owner who spent twenty minutes telling me about their "exposure package" and what it would normally cost an emerging artist, as if i was supposed to be grateful they were waiving the fee i'd never have paid in the first place. what's the most creative payment offer you've gotten from a gallery? i'll start, someone once offered me a split where they'd take 60% AND i had to cover my own materials. when i blinked they said "think of the foot traffic."

I had a piece in a group show last spring. Small gallery, decent neighborhood foot traffic. They took 40% commission. That's fine, I know the deal, rent's real. But I also had to pay for my own framing. Print the postcards myself. Supply the wine for the opening. They asked if I could "activate my network" on social and tag them in stories every day leading up to it. So I'm paying to make the work, paying to present it, doing their marketing for them, and they take 40% of whatever sells. And I walked away thinking I was lucky to be there. I don't have a tidy conclusion. I'm still trying to figure out which part of this is normal and which part is getting played. Because I keep hearing about how the model is broken for artists but I don't see a lot of alternatives that aren't just "go viral on tiktok" which is its own kind of nonsense.

Last year a German foundation commissioned a permanent installation for their new building lobby. Big civic space, lots of foot traffic. They had the budget. I quoted €28,000. I spent six months collecting material. Three months building. Two weeks installing on site with a helper. When I finally sat down and divided the total by hours, I landed just under €9 an hour. Before tax. Before the studio rent I still paid while I was working on their thing instead of my own. I knew it while I was doing it. You always know. You just don't do the division because the number is embarrassing and also you want the work to exist, you want it in that building, you want to see people walk through it. So you pretend the math doesn't apply to you. I don't regret it. The piece is good. But I keep the calculation now. I write the hours down from the start. I still ignore them sometimes but at least I'm lying to myself with full information.

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?

So I had a watercolor in a group show at this small gallery downtown, nice space, good foot traffic, I was genuinely excited to be in it. It sold opening night, which felt amazing for about ten minutes until I did the math on my take-home. They took 50%. Half. And I get it, they have overhead, they promoted the show, they poured the wine, whatever. But I walked away with $175 on a $350 piece and I spent差不多 two weeks on it. That's like... $12 an hour if I'm being generous to myself. And I had to frame it myself too. I texted my old professor from school and she was like "yeah 50% is standard for emerging artists in that kind of space" which made me feel both better and worse somehow?? Like oh great so this IS the deal, I'm just supposed to accept that half my labor disappears because someone else has a storefront. I don't know. I'm not trying to sound ungrateful, the sale itself was validating. But I keep thinking about how many more hours I'd have to work just to make rent off that kind of split. My partner was like "well now you have a gallery relationship" and I'm like ok cool but the relationship doesn't pay for my gouache tubes lol. Anyway. For those of you who've been doing this longer, do you just build the commission into your pricing from the start? Do you negotiate? Or is 50% just the price of entry and I need to shut up about it?

We've been trying to get more structured with our Instagram Reels. For ages, it felt like throwing spaghetti at the wall, you know? Lots of effort, not much to show for it. But this past week, we finally had a sequence of three Reels focusing on a step-by-step process for one of our smaller products just… take off. Like, double the engagement we usually get on any given post, and a noticeable bump in traffic to that product page too. It’s not a huge viral moment, but for us, it feels like a breakthrough after so much trial and error. Makes all the late evenings worth it, mostly! 🙂

I keep meaning to bring a speaker in and I keep not doing it. So it's the little grey radio, antenna snapped off years ago, and it sits on the windowsill where it gets exactly one station if the window is open a crack and none if it isn't. Right now it's a mattress warehouse jingle, and I've heard it so many times that I've started humming it while I mix washes, which is a new low. The thing is I can't work in silence. Tried it. Spent a whole afternoon staring at a half-finished panel of my mother's old kitchen wallpaper and the silence got so loud I could hear the radiator tick. Put the radio back on and got three hours in. My friend June works with headphones and full albums and no interruptions, very disciplined, and I've decided I don't want that. I want the mattress jingle and the traffic report and the local guy who does the obituaries on Sundays. It's company. Somebody's in the room. Anyway. The panel is still ugly but it's less ugly with noise.

The right one has been painted shut since before I took the lease, eleven years now, and I have never once asked the landlord to fix it. There is a reason and it is not a good one. The left window faces the courtyard, where the neighbours hang their washing and someone two floors down plays the same three Satie pieces badly all summer. The right one faces the street. Traffic, the tram, the skip that has been full of plasterboard on Ranstädter since April. So I work in half-light by choice, basically, and I have started to think this is not a preference but a superstition. The canvases I have made in this room were all made facing away from that window. If I open it I will find out something about the work that I do not want to know yet. Naja. It is also just laziness. Both things can be true. Who else has a thing in the studio that is load-bearing and has no business being load-bearing.