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Years ago, before I had a real website or knew what I was doing with pricing, I ran a little workshop out of my studio. Just a few hours, materials included, you go home with a small piece. I charged €35 because I was scared to ask for more and it covered the tile and the wine. A tourist from Australia came, loved it, posted about it. Next thing I know it's on some blog. Fine. But then her friend emails me asking if I can do a private session for four people at the same price. I said yes because I'm an idiot who hadn't learned to say "that was a group rate." Now eight years later I sometimes still get people who found that old blog post and expect the €35 price. I've raised it to €65 and they look at me like I'm trying to sell them a car. I should have changed the name of the workshop or something. Instead I just have to be the bad guy every time someone shows up with a screenshot from 2016.

Signed up for a "Sunday afternoon landscape workshop" at the local community center. $65, reasonable. Show up and it's 1pm to 6pm. That's not an afternoon, that's a full work shift. I've got to pick up my 8 year old at 4:30. So I got to do the underpainting and then pack up while everyone else was adding their second layer. I asked if they ever do shorter versions and the instructor said "well, you really need the full time to develop the piece" like I hadn't just paid to develop about 40% of a piece. I get that you can't rush painting but also I have a life??? I'd pay the same $65 for a tight 2.5 hour session that actually fits into a Saturday.

Found a photo of my grandfather's workshop tucked in a box of stuff my mom finally gave up. Grainy, probably 1960s, the bench is covered in things I can't identify. Tools, jars, something that might be a clamp. I've built three separate pieces around that photo now and every single one has a different kind of light in it. The original has none at all, it's just flat flash shadow. My brain keeps inventing light that isn't there because I want the room to feel a certain way. The last version is maybe the worst. Technically fine. Dead. I think I'm overworking the sentiment. I want the viewer to feel something I can't actually name, so I keep piling on. Wondering if the honest move is to just reproduce the photo flat and let it be flat. Let the sadness be the boring shadow version instead of the cinematic one. Anyone ever hit this, where you keep romanticizing a source image and the work gets worse for it?

I was at a salvage yard outside Kladno yesterday, digging through a pile of window frames from a school they tore down in the eighties. The wood still smelled of chalk dust and coal. You can't fake that. You can't buy it. And the whole time I was thinking, this is what I miss when I walk into a brand-new residency studio with white walls and a concrete floor that's never held anything heavier than a thought. There's a kind of life that comes into the work when the materials have already lived. I'm not romanticising poverty. I'm saying the objects carry something. You handle them and your hands know what to do before your head does.

I've been painting seriously again for about six years now, and I still keep ending up with the same brand of paint I started with. I've tried the fancy ones at workshops, bought a couple tubes of stuff that cost $12 each, and I always go back to the $4 tubes from Michaels. Maybe it's just what I learned on and I'm used to the consistency. Or maybe I'm telling myself it doesn't matter to justify being cheap, ha. But honestly I got a tube of something nice at a workshop last spring and it dried out weird and I was annoyed. So I'm back to my usual. Anyone else stuck on a brand they probably should have outgrown by now?

I spent a full afternoon last month staging a still life, fighting with the light until it did what I wanted, photographed it six ways, wrote a caption I actually labored over. It did fine. Fine. Meanwhile the post that got me two commissions and a workshop enquiry was a photo of my palette at the end of the day, all the dirty mixes half-scraped off, with a caption like "today was a long one." No thought in it. I almost didn't post it at all. There's a lesson in there somewhere about people wanting the evidence of the work rather than the work itself, and I keep circling it. The polished thing reads as finished, and a finished thing doesn't invite anyone in. The mess does. Everyone can see themselves in a dirty palette. I still can't quite bring myself to lean into that deliberately. It feels like a trick the moment it's calculated. So I just post the leftovers now and let the careful posts be the rare ones. It's the reverse of every piece of marketing advice I've ever read, and it keeps working anyway. Bof.

I almost didn't post the quick one. Just a sheet of paper pinned to the wall, still damp, the blue not even dry, my hand shadow in the corner because I grabbed my phone and shot it before the sun moved. Three minutes, maybe. The other one, the one I arranged, waited for the right light, reshot three times, brightened the shadows in editing, that one got a dozen likes and a polite comment from my aunt. The damp one got shared around, someone wrote to ask if I'd teach a workshop, and a gallery two cities over emailed asking to see more. I keep trying to tell myself the lesson is to post more of the honest in-between moments. But the real one might be worse: I can't tell what anyone will care about, and my own judgment about my work is basically useless. I like the pretty photograph. Everyone else wanted the wet paper and the shadow of my hand in the corner.

Years ago when I came back to painting after my fallow stretch, I was desperate for income. A local gallery let me run a figure painting workshop out of their back room and I priced it at 45 euros a session because I was terrified nobody would come. They filled up. Fine. But that number got stuck to me like a burr. Every student since tells the next one what I charge, and whenever I've tried to bump it to something that reflects what I actually do, I meet resistance. 45 became my identity. Last month I finally did the honest math for a 6-week course, six students. Materials with good pigment, the room rental, my prep time sketching demos, the corrections between sessions. I took home under 9 euros an hour. That's less than the woman who cleans my studio building. I know the fix. I raise it, I let the ones who complain leave, I stop pricing from fear. But there's a specific ugliness when the low price is the thing that made you feel wanted back when you felt worthless. Hard to put down. Anyone else have a number that got emotionally welded to them?

A consultant they hired said my feed lacked "curatorial coherence." Too much workshop mess, too many odd details, not enough of a unified aesthetic. So I posted a photo of a pigeon I found in my studio courtyard. Dead. Beautiful grey feathers, one wing slightly open, eye still clear. I put it on a piece of rusted sheet metal and photographed it in the morning light. Caption: "Studio assistant quit." It got more engagement than anything I'd posted in six months. The gallery was not amused. But two collectors messaged me asking if it was available as a print. I don't know what the moral is. Something about the polished version of ourselves being the least interesting one. Or that dead birds sell. One of those.

I finally did it. Went from €80 to €95 for a full day workshop, materials included, seawater hauling not. Two people who'd been coming every month for over a year just stopped replying. Not even a "that's too much now" or a goodbye. Just silence. I know €95 for a day of my time, my chemicals, my paper, the space, the clean-up, I know that's not a lot. I know that. But it felt like a lot to say out loud. And now I'm sitting here wondering if I should have stayed quiet and kept them. The worst part is I don't even think €15 is what stopped them. I think it was the act of me naming it. Like me raising my price broke something they'd assumed about me, that I'd always be the cheap option, the artist who does it for love. And I am doing it for love. That's exactly the problem.

Went home for Diwali last week. Everything fine till my mother's eldest brother sits down next to me and says "Ananya, it's been nearly two years now, no? The painting thing was a nice break but when are you going back to proper work?" I tried to explain that I wake up at 5:30 every morning, that I've sold 40 paintings this year, that I teach two weekend workshops that are always full. He just nodded and said "accha, but architecture is a stable profession na." And the worst part is I still felt defensive. Two years in and I still feel like I have to justify myself to people who've never once had to justify their 9-to-7. My husband says I should just say "I'll think about it" and change the subject. But I can't. I get into the argument every single time. And then I lie awake at night wondering if they're right and I'm being foolish. Anyway. Back to painting tomorrow morning at 5:30. Because what else am I supposed to do.

Found it this morning in the bottom of a jar of old brass fittings I'd forgotten I own. M6, 40mm, flat head. I'd already ordered four more online, of course. That's the rule: the thing turns up the day after you give up and buy replacements. I spent twenty minutes just holding it. It's a good screw. I think half my practice is this, the archaeology of my own mess. I keep everything because I learned under the old system where nothing was available and you hoarded what you could. Now I have a workshop full of objects waiting to be remembered. Sometimes I feel like the curator of a museum of my own indecision.

Kid came to the workshop Tuesday, wants to learn mosaic, great. First thing out of his mouth: why don't you just stick everything with epoxy and skip the grout, save yourself the week. I stared at him for a second. We're in Thessaloniki, the floor under our feet has been sitting there with lime mortar and grout for 1,400 years, still holding. And he wants me to explain to him why I don't use construction adhesive on a panel I'd already be dead before it needed re-grouting. I get it, nobody teaches this stuff anymore, it's not his fault. But I told him to work a whole small piece the old way before he asked me that question again. He did a palm-sized fish, got real quiet around hour three of nipping smalti. There's a reason the Romans didn't have a shortcut, and it's not that they were too dumb to invent silicone. I'm not saying grout is sacred. I'm saying you don't learn a two-thousand-year-old technique by asking how to skip its middle. He's back tomorrow. We'll see.

I teach a watercolor workshop twice a year and I've noticed something I keep turning over. My students, most of them a decade or two younger, post every sketch, every failed wash, every reel of paint mixing. Their follower counts are triple mine. Meanwhile my studio sits on an Instagram account with about 1,100 followers, most of whom have been there since 2016 and probably don't even look at it anymore. The commissions still come, but they come through word of mouth, through the gallery, through someone who saw my work in a botanical garden exhibit two years ago. Not once through social media. I've tried the process videos. I've tried the timelapses. I find them slightly embarrassing to make, and the engagement was never more than a polite ripple. I'm not drawing a lesson from this. I say it because at forty-seven, I've stopped being able to tell whether I'm bad at social media or whether social media simply rewards a kind of performance I'm not interested in giving. My students deserve their audiences; they work for them. But I wonder how many of them will still be painting in twenty years, and whether the audience will still be there when the algorithm moves on to something else. I keep painting either way. The paper doesn't care about engagement.

Had a piece in the shop for weeks, a steel column with a joint that kept failing. I'd grind it back, re-weld, let it cool slow, still cracked. Every time I finished I was already bracing for it to give. Finally got sick of it and stopped being careful. Ran the arc hot, laid it in one pass, didn't nurse it. Held. It's been sitting out back through rain and frost for a month now and it's still solid. Spent a lot of years learning to be careful. Turns out the lesson was knowing when to stop being careful. That column taught me more than the last three workshop books I read. Not sure where it'll end up. Maybe it stays in the yard a while longer. I keep going out to look at it like it might lie to me.

I found out this week I've been cleaning my brushes wrong for about twenty years. Wet palettes, mediums, all that I figured out eventually, but brushes? Soaking them tip-down in a jar of water overnight "to keep them soft." My brushes have been splitting and splaying and I just thought that's what happened to brushes eventually. A friend at the Tuesday workshop watched me put mine away and just went... no. Told me to wipe them, rinse, shape the tip with a little soap, lay them flat. I was so embarrassed and so relieved at the same time. Did a whole painting session tonight and my round brush held its point the entire time, no split hairs driving me insane. I'm 42. That's probably 20 years of fighting my brushes for no reason. How is that not demoralizing, except that it's also kind of thrilling to know there's probably a dozen more dumb things I've been doing that long that I just never thought to question? What else am I missing. Someone tell me your version of this so I feel less alone 😅

I was digging through the closet looking for my good brushes, the ones I hide from the kids, and I pulled out this canvas I'd completely forgotten about. A little barn scene I started in a workshop back in 2021 and then gave up on because I couldn't get the shadows right on the roof. I sat there holding it for a minute, and I could see exactly what I was doing wrong back then. So I mixed up some Payne's grey and burnt umber and fixed it in about ten minutes. Ten minutes! Three years of sitting in a dark closet and it just needed a little patience and a better eye. Felt weirdly nice. Like giving past-me a hand. Anyone else ever rescue an old abandoned piece?

A friend from years ago asked me to paint her daughter's portrait for her 18th. I said yes at €600, already half what I'd charge a stranger for a 50x60cm oil on linen. She's a friend, fine. Then the emails started. "Could you do it from these five photos instead?" "Actually she's wearing a different dress now, can you change the colour?" "Her hair is shorter than that photo shows." "My mother thinks the background should be lighter." I repainted the face from new reference, adjusted the dress twice, scraped and repainted the background. All told I probably spent close to 25 hours on a painting that should have taken maybe 12. At my usual hourly rate for commissioned work that comes out to about €24 an hour. My assistant, who stretches canvases, makes €16. So I earned roughly the same as the person who stretches my canvases, for a job that required twenty years of training. The friend was happy. The daughter cried when she saw it. Beautiful moment. I don't regret it exactly. But I sat down afterwards and did the math and realised I'd basically given her a €1,200 painting plus a free workshop in how to manage an artist. Never again without a contract that says: one reference, one revision, anything beyond that is a new fee. Curious if anyone else has a number attached to the "learning experience" of a commission that ran away from you.

I've been doing this thing the last year or so where instead of trying to flog prints to strangers who've never heard of me, I just trade with other artists and makers. Potter gets a hare linocut, I get a mug. Woodworker gets a heron, I get a stool. That sort of carry-on. And what I didn't expect, half the commissions I've had this year came because that potter showed the print to someone who walked into her studio, or that woodworker hung it in his workshop and a customer asked where it came from. It's the slowest funnel in the world but it keeps working. I'm not even trying to sell at that point, I'm just swapping because I want the thing they make. The other thing is it got me out of my own head about pricing for a bit. Nothing resets your sense of value like holding something someone else spent ten hours making and thinking Jesus that's worth more than twenty quid. Makes you price your own work better too. Anyone else doing this or am I just building a very eclectic house one swap at a time?

Sold a piece from 1984 this week. Was one of the first things I ever welded on my own, a little figure in rebar, rough as hell. The welds are ugly, I can see every mistake in it. It's been sitting in my attic for forty years because I never thought anyone would want it. A woman from Ohio saw a photo my daughter posted of my workshop and asked about it. I told her it was apprentice work, not good, she should look at something else. She insisted. Paid more than I would have asked for it. I packed it up careful, wrapped the parts I'd have let go. Felt strange sending it off. That piece taught me the right way to hold a torch through every bad weld on it, and now it's going to live in someone's house instead of quietly rusting up there. Not sure what the lesson is. Maybe that you don't get to decide what's finished with you.