Why Every Unfinished Project Is a Liability (What Bad Debt Taught Me About Creative Work)
For a stretch of my accounting career, part of my job was reviewing a company’s accounts receivable and asking an uncomfortable question nobody wanted to answer out loud: which of these balances are actually going to get collected, and which of them are just sitting there making the balance sheet look healthier than it is. […]
Why Every Artist Needs a Monthly Close (What Reconciling Books Taught Me About Creative Work)
For twenty-some years, the last week of every month looked the same to me. Before anything else happened, the books had to close. Every account got reconciled, every transaction got matched to something that actually explained it, and nothing moved into the new month until the old one had been fully accounted for. It didn’t […]
How to Develop Your Own Art Style (A Practical Process, Not a Personality Trait)
A while back I wrote about the moment I realized my style hadn’t been a decision at all. It had already formed quietly, in the background, while I was busy thinking about something else. I stand by that. It’s true. But it’s also incomplete, and I’ve heard from enough artists since then to know it […]
Why Most Artists Undercharge (And What Auditing Taught Me About Pricing Art)
Early in my accounting career, I audited a small manufacturing company that had been pricing its flagship product the same way for eleven years. Nobody could tell me why. The number wasn’t wrong exactly. It covered materials, covered labor, left a thin margin on top. But nobody in the building had actually recalculated it in […]
Curating a Cohesive Art Portfolio From Work That Wasn’t Made to Match
A collector emailed me last month asking for a link to my “portfolio.” I sent her three places: my website, my Etsy shop, and my Instagram grid. She wrote back a few days later, politely confused. The website felt like one artist. The Etsy shop, built around print bundles I’d assembled over different years, felt […]
Why Your Art Style Keeps Changing (And Why That Might Not Be a Problem)
A collector once asked me a question I didn’t have a good answer for. He had bought a print from an early Miami architecture series I’d made, the warm, sun-bleached storefronts I still return to now and then. A year later he messaged me about a newer piece, something looser and more abstract, built from […]
Artistic Voice vs. Technique: Which One Actually Makes Work Memorable
A few months ago I sat next to a much younger artist at a small print fair in Miami. Her booth was two tables down from mine, and during a slow stretch of the afternoon we started talking the way vendors do when nobody is buying anything. She told me she had spent the last […]
Why Finishing the Image Is Only Half the Job
There is a particular kind of satisfaction that comes from closing out a file. You have spent hours on it. The color is balanced. The texture reads the way you wanted. The composition finally stopped fighting you. You flatten the layers, export a high-resolution version, and lean back for a moment feeling like the project […]
Why Consistent Art Style Isn’t the Same as a Repetitive Portfolio
A few weeks ago I got a message from another artist who had been following my work for a while. She said she liked what I made, but she was hesitant to develop a consistent style of her own because she didn’t want to end up “making the same image over and over.” I understood […]
Building an Artist Visual Identity People Recognize Before They See Your Name
For a long time I assumed a signature style was something an audience simply grew to recognize the longer they followed my work. Enough exposure, I thought, and the recognition would take care of itself. Someone would scroll past enough of my pieces, and eventually a kind of familiarity would settle in, the same way […]