04/18/2026
Thoughts about pricing, value and craft:
I am having so much fun today in my little affordable art fair factory framing my miniatures. Over the years I’ve been very fortunate to have pieces collected by the City of Seattle, and I love the title of the collection: Portable Works.
These Littles are definitely portable works. It’s art that could be put in your pocket and carried on a journey. Placed beside the alarm click and the Bible in your hotel room. Wrapped in waxed paper in your backpack and protected by a peanut butter sandwich. I think Tolkein’s Hobbit would have several.
Then we get to pricing. Which system to use—? Emotion, attachment, logic, the Quora comment section where everybody knows the value and it’s either more or less than you can bear?
Most of these 4” pieces will be framed in exquisite little float frames. My galleries would say everything 4 inches has to be the same price. They’ll say use a ruler and inflexible logic and base your pricing on square inch. The artist says “Yes, but it took me three days to get the petals right on this drawing of a flower and a drawing takes five times as long as it takes me to do an abstract landscape. It’s not the same!” The poet says, at 1 o’clock in the morning as the landscape is emerging, “Isn’t this just like the view of Wyoming from the bubble car on that first amazing train trip across the country when you were 16 and sleeping sitting up?” So you have to ask, what is the value of Wyoming for the first time? Furthermore, what is the inflation value of memory when AI is taking all of our memories and baking them into a pie controlled by five corporations and selling us back our own lives as advertising? (Continued In comments, follow Spotlightnorth.studiotour for the latest on the upcoming show!)
