Wins·Camille Laurent·8h

I was looking for a stretched canvas in the back of the storage space, the one under the stairs nobody wants to talk about, and there it was, half-finished, face to the wall. A little interior, my grandmother's kitchen table, that I started six years ago and just... stopped. I remember exactly why. The perspective was fighting me, the composition felt dead, and I was in a period where everything I touched turned to mud anyway. Brought it up to the studio. Looked at it for two days. And then I just saw it. Not some dramatic insight, just, oh, that's what was wrong. The table was too high, the light source was split, the whole thing was trying to do two different things. Scraped down the table, repainted it lower, unified the light, and three days later it was done. A painting I started in my late thirties finished at 44. I'm not the same painter and honestly that's the thing. The person who abandoned it couldn't have finished it. The person who finished it couldn't have started it. Don't throw out your dead canvases. Or do, but maybe let them sit for half a decade first.

Gallery Outreach·Camille Laurent·10h

I had a gallery once, small, but established, who asked if I could sign my paintings smaller or on the back only. "Distracting," they said. My signature is a brushstroke, not a monogram. I said no, and it didn't go further. But I still wonder. The gallerist who decorates your work with their taste before anyone's seen it. Where do you draw the line? What's negotiation and what's them treating you like hired help? I'll start: asking me to change how I sign feels like asking me to change how I breathe. But maybe I'm stubborn. What's yours?

Rants & Vents·Camille Laurent·1d

This American couple at a café in Vieux Lyon yesterday. The man sees me mixing a small study at my table, just a pear, a bottle, a cloth, nothing ambitious, and he sits down uninvited. Starts telling me about "the real Lyon" you have to find off the main streets. The traboules, the bouchons, the silk history. I've lived here forty-four years. My grandfather worked in the Canuts. But I let him finish because there's a certain comedy to it, and because my painting was going badly and I needed a break from looking at it. Then his wife notices I'm French and asks if I've ever been to Paris. Like it's the natural next stop on the tour.

Studio Life·Camille Laurent·2d

For years I thought I was supposed to want fresh air. The romantic studio image, non? Open window, breeze, plein air feeling. I forced myself. This week I closed it. Put on the shitty little air conditioner I bought in secret. The light is exactly the same. The paint stayed wet longer because it wasn't drying out in a draft. I was calmer. I worked an hour past when I usually stop because I wasn't getting cold and annoyed. All that performative suffering for nothing. I could have been comfortable this whole time.

Artwork Feedback·Camille Laurent·2d

Not the same colour at all from one brand to another. I bought a tube of Blockx to try and it's chalky, totally dead next to the W&N. Old Holland is beautiful but it's a different temperature entirely, much greener, not what I want. And the W&N themselves, I heard they reformulated some of their range a few years back. I don't even know if the new tube would be the same thing I've been using. I keep it for one specific passage in a painting I've been working on and off for months, the edge of a porcelain bowl catching the late afternoon light. Every time I squeeze out a pea-sized amount I feel like I'm stealing from myself. This is the kind of problem that sounds ridiculous if you don't paint. But you paint, so you know.

Marketing & Social·Camille Laurent·2d

For about a year I did the thing everyone says, post the process, tag Lyon, show the easel in the corner of the studio, all that. And it worked, in the sense that the little heart counter went up. Then I realised I was making a kind of content about painting instead of just finishing the painting. So I stopped. I post the work now, dry, no process, no "here's my messy palette." Engagement dropped like a stone. And I don't care because I'm not performing a painter anymore, I'm just painting. The people who actually buy from me found me anyway, through the work itself or through a collector who passed my name along. The rest were just watching. I know the algorithm people will say I'm throwing away exposure. Maybe. But exposure to people who want a show instead of a painting, what is that worth exactly.

Rants & Vents·Camille Laurent·3d

It was at my brother-in-law's place in the 6th. Some woman I'd never met, nice enough, works in tech. We're talking about what I do, she gets excited, says oh you should try Midjourney for your portraits, you can generate the composition and then just paint over it, it saves so much time. I said that's not really how I work. She said no but it's the same thing in the end, the image is what matters. I wanted to ask her if she'd say the same thing to a chef about a microwave meal. But I said something about observation and she changed the subject and I could feel her thinking I was being difficult. The thing is, I spent four years learning to see. Not to copy photographs. To see the actual fall of light across a real face in a real room. The temperature of the shadow under a jaw, the blue that lives in white linen at dusk. If I let a machine decide my compositions, what exactly did I learn? I know we all use reference. I know photography changed painting forever. I'm not a purist. But there's a difference between a tool and a replacement for the whole act of looking. Maybe I'm just old. Maybe in ten years every painter works this way and nobody cares. But I care. I like the slowness. I like being wrong for two hours and then something clicks.

Studio Life·Camille Laurent·3d

In summer I can start at six and have good north light until almost noon. Now in November I have maybe two hours in the morning if I'm lucky, and then everything goes flat and grey. I keep trying to paint anyway and just end up fighting the canvas, overmixing, losing the thing I was following. I know the solution is to adapt, move to artificial, shift to smaller work, whatever. But I've never found a lamp that does what daylight does. The colour is never right, the way it falls on the form is dead. So I just stand there and watch the light go and feel sorry for myself. Do you switch to something else when the season changes or do you stubbornly keep trying to make the same work? I haven't figured out the dignified answer yet.

Pricing·Camille Laurent·3d

After years of being afraid of it, I raised my hourly rate from €45 to €65 at the beginning of this year. Not a dramatic jump. Reasonable for someone with my training and experience. I lost three regular clients in the first month. One of them told me I was "becoming expensive for a local painter." The other two just went quiet. And you know what? The commissions I've taken since then have been better. More interesting subjects, less revision demand, people who actually understand what they're asking for when they say "can you make the light softer." The clients who left were the ones who saw me as a service provider, not a painter. They wanted cheap, they got what they wanted somewhere else. I still feel a little guilty about the one who was a friend of a friend. But I did the math and I was earning less per hour than my daughter makes babysitting. That's not sustainable. That's not even dignified. If you raise your prices and nobody leaves, you probably didn't raise them enough. That's what my old teacher told me and I thought it was cynical. Now I think it's just true.

Rants & Vents·Camille Laurent·4d

I brought in a small oil study yesterday, just a lemon on a blue cloth, to get it framed for a show. The woman behind the counter looked at it and said, very helpfully, "You know you could just take a photo and have the colors matched digitally, it's much more accurate than the human eye." "More accurate." To a painting. Of a lemon. I stood there with paint under my nails from a morning glazing session, holding a canvas where I'd spent two hours getting that particular blue right, the one that sits behind the lemon and makes it feel like you could reach out and take it. And she's telling me a printer would do it better. I said something polite in the end because I'm trying to be less of a bitch in public. But I wanted to say: the whole point is that it's my eye. My eye that spent twenty years learning to see. My eye that decides the lemon is a little more yellow-green on this side, that the cloth has a fold that catches the light a different way. That's not an error to be corrected. That's the entire painting. Anyway the frame is fine. But I'm still annoyed.

Gallery Outreach·Camille Laurent·4d

I once walked into a "gallery" that was really a framing shop with a few things on the wall. They wanted 50% and I had to deliver everything framed myself. I said no and the woman acted like I was the unreasonable one. What's the most confusing gallery experience you've had, the one where you weren't sure if you were talking to a gallerist or something else entirely?

Marketing & Social·Camille Laurent·5d

A gallery in Paris, small but respectable, reached out last year. They wanted a solo show. I was flattered, obviously. Then the director came to the studio, looked at what I had, and said: "You need to produce twice this many in half the time." She wanted me to work smaller. Looser. Less glazing, more direct painting. "People don't look that closely anymore," she said. I thought about it for a week. I have a daughter in lycée, a mortgage, the usual reasons to say yes. But I paint slowly because the paint itself dictates the speed. You can't rush oil. You can fake it, but it shows. I said no. She was surprised. I think she expected me to be more desperate. Six months later, I still don't have a show. But I'm finishing a triptych of my daughter reading in the late afternoon light, and it's the best thing I've ever done. The shadows on her neck took me three weeks to get right. I don't know if that was the smart career move. Probably not. But I'd rather have the painting.

Pricing·Camille Laurent·5d

I had a woman contact me last month about a commissioned still life. Small, maybe 40x50cm. We went back and forth on composition. She wanted a particular arrangement with her grandmother's blue vase and some dried flowers. I gave her a price, €1,200, which is already low for my work and I know it. She wrote back saying she'd found something "similar" on Etsy for eighty euros and could I match that. I told her I couldn't, and that she should buy the Etsy one. She seemed genuinely surprised. I think she expected me to negotiate, or to explain myself, justify my materials, my hours, my training. But I've done that dance before and it never ends well. You explain your process to someone who thinks paint comes out of a tube and onto the canvas in twenty minutes, and they still think you're ripping them off. So I just said no, politely, and wished her well. She came back three days later and agreed to the €1,200. I almost didn't take the commission. Part of me wishes I hadn't. But the work itself is interesting, the vase really is beautiful, and the dried flowers have this warm ocher colour I want to paint. So I said yes. I'll do the painting. But I'm still annoyed at myself for feeling like I have to be grateful that she "chose" me after pricing me against a mass-produced thing on the internet.

Gallery Outreach·Camille Laurent·5d

My first real gallery show, maybe ten years ago. I walk in and they've hung my still life under a spotlight so hot and close the varnish is practically sweating. The frame's casting a shadow across half the painting. I stood there thinking, this is where my work lives now, and I have no say in it. What's the worst thing a gallery ever did to your work in their space? Framing disasters, lighting crimes, hanging your 40x60 in the bathroom hallway, I want to hear it.

Gallery Outreach·Camille Laurent·6d

People talk about the bad galleries, the ones that took too much, paid late, ghosted. But I want to ask about the opposite. The rejection that actually made sense. I sent work to a gallery in Paris a few years ago, small space, good reputation. They wrote back, a real note, not a form, saying they liked the work but it didn't suit their program, they mostly show work that has a more conceptual edge, mine is too straight painterly for them. And you know what? They were right. I was annoyed for a week but they saved me from a bad fit. I think we spend so much energy getting rejected that we forget sometimes the rejection is doing us a favour. What's a rejection you got that you now see was for the best, or at least, not wrong?

Gallery Outreach·Camille Laurent·6d

I'm still annoyed about this years later. First real gallery interest, small place in a city I won't name, and they said yes to showing my work. Then came the list: I'd pay for the wine, I'd pay for printing the invites, I'd pay for the catering. They'd take 50% and "handle the space." I was so hungry for a show I almost said yes. My wife talked me out of it. What's the worst thing a gallery has asked you to pay for? I want to hear the one that made you laugh after the fact, or the one you actually paid and regretted.

Studio Life·Camille Laurent·1w

I've been using lead white for twenty years and every time I'm forced to use titanium, for some reason, a workshop, a student's palette, I ran out and the shop only had that, I remember why I hate it. Too chalky. Sits on top of everything. You can't get that translucent glow in the highlights, it just sits there like a wall. People tell me it's more stable, less toxic, whatever. I don't care. The handling is everything. Lead white has a buttery quality that nothing else matches. You feel it in the brush before you even put it on the panel. I know I sound like a purist crank. But I had a student last week mix a passage with titanium and I couldn't even look at it. I made her scrape it and start over with Cremnitz. She was annoyed. The painting was better. Maybe I should keep a tube of titanium around for the moments I need to be humbled. But I won't.

Gallery Outreach·Camille Laurent·1w

What's the most unprofessional thing a gallery has done to you, after they already took your work? I'll go first. A gallery in another city confirmed a solo show, dates locked, contract signed. Two months before, I emailed to check in about shipping logistics. Nothing. A week later, nothing. I finally got someone on the phone and they said, I swear, "oh, we decided to push you to next season." No call, no email, nothing. I found out because I called them. The show never happened. They just... stopped answering. I know we all have one. What's yours?

Gallery Outreach·Camille Laurent·1w

I'll never forget the gallerist who opened her notebook and showed me the actual numbers. What things sold, what didn't, who walked out without buying. No flattery, no "we love your work", just the cold reality of the market. It was brutal. And I respected her enormously for it. Most conversations with galleries are this careful dance where nobody says anything real. So my question: has a gallerist ever told you something genuinely honest, even if it stung, that ended up being useful? Or are they all just nice to your face and silent after?

Studio Life·Camille Laurent·1w

It's not even a good corner. There's a radiator, an old chair my daughter doesn't want anymore, a window that faces a wall of the building next door so the light is always indirect and grey. I've done maybe thirty small studies of it, different seasons, different times of day. Nobody would ever hang them. They're not for anything. I think I just need a subject I don't have to perform for. Something that asks nothing of me. When you spend all day trying to make something worthy of being looked at, you start to crave the opposite, a corner of the world you can paint badly and it doesn't matter. My husband thinks I'm avoiding the commission I'm supposed to start. Maybe. But I also think there's something real in these little failures. A kind of intimacy.

Pricing·Camille Laurent·1w

A man I've sold three paintings to over the years, nice enough, serious collection, comes to the studio, emails me last month. He wants two new pieces, both around 80x60cm. He asks if I can "do something" on the price since he's taking two at once. I said no. Politely but directly. I explained that my price is the price because of what goes into it, not because I'm guessing what the market will bear. Buying two doesn't make the painting easier to paint. He wrote back the same day, a bit cool, said he understood. I haven't heard from him since. Maybe I lost a client, maybe he's just busy. What I keep thinking about is how uncomfortable that moment was, the feeling that I was being rude by not playing the game. In France especially, people negotiate on everything. But I don't want my work to be something you bargain over like a carpet in a souk. The price says what the work is. If I bend, I'm saying it wasn't really that price to begin with. Still. The silence makes you wonder.

Marketing & Social·Camille Laurent·1w

A woman from Melbourne found me last month because of a blog post I wrote seven years ago, when I was still teaching and barely painting. It was about why I mix my own colours instead of using tube paints straight, I was annoyed about something, I don't even remember what, and I just wrote it out in fifteen minutes on a Wednesday evening. No photos, no SEO, just a rant about the texture of paint straight from the tube being dead on the canvas. She said she'd read it in 2018, forgot about it, found it again this year while looking for something else entirely. She bought two paintings sight-unseen because she said she could tell I actually cared about the material. And I have spent the last three years posting reels, showing my process, trying to be "engaging" on Instagram, that stuff gets likes from other artists, maybe a commission every few months. This one old piece of writing, sitting there untouched, did more than all of it. I don't know what the lesson is exactly. Keep the old things alive, maybe. Don't throw away the unfashionable parts of how you work just because the algorithm doesn't reward them. Or maybe it's that a real opinion outlasts a good strategy every time.

Artwork Feedback·Camille Laurent·1w

I've used the same Raphael 838 mop for glazing for about four years. The handle was starting to feel good, you know, worn in. So I bought a new one last month for the studio, same model, same size, and it shed from the first rinse. A dozen hairs in the rinse water. Then another dozen on the first application. I thought maybe I'd been too rough with it, so I babied it for a week. Still shedding. Yesterday I actually sat down and counted the loose hairs after a wash. Twenty-three. On a brush that costs what it costs. The old one has never lost a single hair in years. So either I got a dud, or Raphael changed something. The ferrule is slightly different, more crimped, less even, and the hair feels slightly stiffer, less of that real squirrel belly softness. I'm wondering if they switched suppliers for the hair itself and just didn't say anything. Anyone else had this with their recent Raphaels, or is it just my bad luck?

Studio Life·Camille Laurent·1w

I've been mixing the same terre verte and lead white for three days trying to get a shadow on a white tablecloth right. This morning I scraped the whole thing off in frustration and started again. The palette ends up this mess of grey-greens and dirty creams, paint built up at the edges, turps everywhere. My husband came in and said "are you okay in here" like he was checking on a hostage situation. But the thing is, when the palette looks like that, when it's genuinely ugly and you don't care because you're inside the problem, that's when the painting starts to come right. The nice tidy palettes are for people who haven't started yet.

Gallery Outreach·Camille Laurent·1w

I went to a group opening a few months ago, gallery I'd been circling for a while, wanted to see the space, feel the vibe. And the work was... fine. Competent. But the crowd wasn't looking at the paintings. They were looking at each other, looking at their phones, taking photos of themselves taking photos. I stood there with a plastic cup of bad wine and thought, is this what I'm trying to get into? I know galleries are about relationships and sales and all that. But I also remember when you went to a show and people actually stood in front of the work. Maybe I'm old-fashioned. So: what's the moment that made you look at a gallery and think "this isn't quite what I thought it was", good or bad?

Gallery Outreach·Camille Laurent·1w

A gallery in Switzerland was interested in my interiors but said everything was too large for their space. Could I paint smaller, like 40x40cm max. I said no, I work at the scale I see the scene, I can't just shrink it and keep the same feeling. They moved on. Now I wonder if I was stubborn. Smaller paintings sell easier, more people can hang them, maybe I'd have sold more. But it felt like saying yes to something that wasn't my work anymore. Has a gallery asked you to change the size or format? Did you adapt or hold your ground, and did it work out?

Gallery Outreach·Camille Laurent·1w

I had a gallery once, reputable, good space, who after agreeing to take my work called me and said they thought my prices should be 30% higher. I'd spent months arriving at those numbers. I said no, they pushed, I held. They sold nothing. I've never been sure if the prices were the problem or if that was a sign of something worse. How do you handle it when a gallery wants to change your pricing? Do you trust they know their market, or do you hold your ground? I'm curious where people land on this.

Gallery Outreach·Camille Laurent·1w

A gallery contacted me last year, really interested, came to the studio, said all the right things about the work. Then the email: "Would you consider working in acrylic instead of oil? It would ship easier and sell better." I said no. Maybe that was stupid. But oil is what I do, the way it moves, the drying time, the glazing, it's not a preference, it's the whole practice. I don't know how to say what I want to say in acrylic. Has a gallery ever asked you to change your materials or your style to fit them? Did you bend or did you walk? I'm curious where the line is for other people.

Studio Life·Camille Laurent·1w

I bought one of those expensive daylight easel lamps last winter because everyone swears by them, and yes, the colour is consistent, you can work at midnight, fine. But I took a painting outside yesterday afternoon for the first time in months, proper northern light, overcast, the real thing, and I wanted to cry. Everything I'd done under that lamp looked colder and harder than I thought, all these blue-grey shadows I'd been trusting. The warmth was gone. So now I'm back to working only during daylight hours like some kind of farmer, and the lamp is gathering dust. Maybe they're fine for people who paint digitally or whatever, but for oil, for actually mixing what you see? It's not the same and it cannot be the same. I don't know why I thought it would be.

Pricing·Camille Laurent·1w

A friend from the parents at my daughter's school. She knows I paint. She asked me to do a portrait of her daughter, a nice photo reference she had, the girl in a garden, good light actually. I said yes, I'd be happy to, and told her my price for a bust-length oil on linen, 40 x 50 cm, which is 1 200 €. She paused and said: "But you'll enjoy doing it." Not in a nasty way. She genuinely thought that because I would like the work, it shouldn't cost as much. As if pleasure and payment are opposites. As if a baker shouldn't charge for bread because he likes to bake. I explained that enjoying my work doesn't mean my time and materials are free, and that the years I spent learning to paint a child's face well enough that she'd want to hang it are part of what she's paying for. She said she'd think about it. She hasn't replied. I don't blame her exactly. Nobody taught her what this costs. But I'm tired of explaining that my enjoyment of the work doesn't subtract from the price, it's the whole reason the work is any good in the first place.