Pricing·Margaret Hsu·17h

A gentleman from the local botanical trust commissioned a single watercolour plate of Magnolia grandiflora, flower and leaf and a sectioned bud, on Fabriano. I quoted £1,850 because that was roughly what the last plate of that size had taken me and I thought I had learned something. Eleven weeks. That is the honest figure, and it does not include the fortnight before I ever put paint down, which was spent at the herbarium and in a friend's garden with a torch at half past nine at night waiting for a flower to open properly. I have done the arithmetic twice now and it comes out somewhere near £14 an hour, which is less than I was paid as a postdoc in 1998. My husband, who is an economist and therefore has no mercy, pointed out that I am effectively subsidising the trust's publishing programme. The difficulty is that I do not know how to paint it faster without painting it worse, and painting it worse is not available to me. So the price has to move, not the method. I am going to quote £3,200 for the next plate of that complexity and I have not yet found the words to say it out loud to a client without apologising in the same breath. That is the part I am actually bad at.

Wins·Margaret Hsu·2d

It went off this morning, at 8:40, which is earlier than I have voluntarily done anything in some time. A small application, honestly. Modest money, one year, to make a proper voucher set of the county's native umbellifers, pressed and painted, with the field notes transcribed alongside. The sort of thing that gets done once and then lasts a century in a drawer. I have been drafting it for eleven weeks. Not because it is difficult. Because it is the first thing I have written with a committee at the other end since I left the lab, and I had convinced myself that a painter has no business asking for research funds. Ridiculous, when I write it down. My training is right there. The hand has only changed medium. The part that nearly stopped me was the references. I sat with the citation style open in front of me like a woman meeting an old acquaintance at a funeral and not knowing whether to embrace. Anyway. It is out of my hands now, which is the only dignified place for it. I am going to go and finish the second leaf of a birch that has been fighting me since Tuesday, and I am going to try very hard not to refresh my email.

Studio Life·Margaret Hsu·3d

I have a grey squirrel tail in a jam jar in the freezer, waiting for me to find the courage to paint it. It came off the road at the end of the lane, and my husband has been remarkably patient about the whole business, though he did ask whether it might live somewhere other than beside the peas. The difficulty is the fur. Fur is the one subject where botanical training lets me down, because a petal has an edge you can commit to and fur does not, or rather it does but the edge is made of a thousand separate decisions. I have done three drawings on tracing paper and none of them convince me. I keep treating it as a silhouette instead of a structure. I suspect the answer is to stop drawing the tail as a shape and start drawing the hairs as individual strokes, in order, from the tip backward, the way you would build a seed head. It will take an appalling length of time and I am not entirely sure it will work. There is a real possibility this squirrel ends up back in the hedge with nothing to show for it. Anyone here paint animal specimens as well as plants. I would like to be told I am overthinking the fur, or else told plainly that I am not.

Marketing & Social·Margaret Hsu·4d

Ten years of photographing finished paintings under whatever light was convenient, and I only got it right this spring. The problem, as I now understand it, is that I had been lighting the work rather than letting it be lit. Two daylight bulbs on adjustable arms, a grey card, the whole apparatus. The photographs were bright and clear and wrong. Payne's grey kept going slightly blue, and the yellows in a foxglove study flattened into something closer to mustard. I told myself it was a monitor issue and did not look into it further, which is how one avoids learning things. What changed was a small job for a neighbour, a simple study of a hellebore, that I photographed on the north-facing porch at about eleven in the morning because I was late and could not be bothered to set up the lights. Overcast, no direct sun, pale wall behind. The photograph looked like the painting. Not better than the painting. Like it. I have since done every piece that way, and I now keep a note of the weather in the file name so I can reproduce it for a reprint. It is slower and it depends entirely on the sky cooperating, which offends the part of me that likes a controlled setup. But there is no arrangement of lamps I have found that does not lie about a green. The thing I keep turning over is how long I defended the equipment. I had spent real money on it and I think I needed it to have been the right purchase. Somebody in this channel said something similar about a daylight lamp recently and I found myself nodding at the screen before I had quite admitted it to myself.

Wins·Margaret Hsu·5d

Four sheets of Fabriano. Three of them are in the bin, and I do not say that lightly, because paper is not cheap and I am not made of it. The subject was a Digitalis purpurea I collected on a walk in late June, and the difficulty was entirely in the bells. Get the interior of a foxglove bell right and the whole drawing breathes. Get it wrong and you have a row of purple thimbles. My trouble was the shadow under the lower lip, which is not really purple at all. It is a cool, almost grey-violet, and every attempt I made with a straight purple mix went muddy and dead the moment it dried. Third sheet I tried lifting it out with a damp brush, which is the sort of thing one knows better than to do and does anyway at eight in the evening. Yesterday I mixed it instead. Permanent rose with a touch of French ultramarine and rather more cobalt than I would have guessed, laid in one pass and left alone. Left alone is the hard part. I sat with my hands under the table so I would stop fiddling with it. It is dry now and the bells have depth. There is still one anther I am not happy with. I mention this because I nearly abandoned the whole study on Tuesday, and the only thing that kept me at it was a note in my old tutor's hand in the margin of a workbook: the fourth attempt is usually the first honest one. I have found that true more often than I would like.

General·Margaret Hsu·6d

Eleven days on one Quercus robur leaf, and I still don't have the underside right. The trouble is the pubescence along the midrib, that fine down that catches light in a way a wash simply refuses to imitate. I have tried lifting it out wet, tried a dry brush over a faint grey, tried scratching with a blade. All of it looks like a trick rather than a fact. My old tutor would have said that if the drawing is true the paint will forgive you, and so I have gone back to the drawing for the third time. It is humbling in the way I presumably need. Somewhere on the eleventh day you stop being clever and start looking properly.

Pricing·Margaret Hsu·1w

Some years ago I started keeping a second column in the studio ledger for unbilled hours, mostly so I could see the shape of my own dishonesty rather than guess at it. I log them at the end of each week: the colour tests nobody pays for, the second visit to the garden because the first material had gone over, the correspondence, the scanning, the trip to the framer. This year it stands at 61 hours. On a single plate of Helleborus niger, three of those hours were spent mixing and rejecting greens. Three hours on leaves that never went near the board. I am not sure whether the exercise has made me better at pricing or only more aware of how badly I do it. My inclination is that a rate quoted honestly would make the work look expensive, and I would rather be thought reasonable than be paid properly. That is not a flattering thing to write down. But it is the most useful number in the book.

Pricing·Margaret Hsu·1w

The plate itself is not the difficulty. It is a flowering stem of Pulmonaria officinalis, seven or eight blossoms in different stages, and the calyces are maddening because the hairs catch the light and you cannot fake them with a wash. Four weeks at the pace this needs is four weeks where not much else gets done. I said 2,400 euros. Then I heard myself explain, at some length, that this included the colour study and the vellum and that I do not charge extra for revisions within reason. As though the figure needed defending in court. She had not questioned it. She said yes before I had finished the sentence. I have been turning this over all evening. The apologising is the problem, not the number. If I am going to name a price I should name it and stop, the way one puts down a brush. I am not sure I know how to do that yet, but I know the flinching costs me something even when the client pays. What I cannot decide is whether 2,400 for four weeks is generous to her or to me. I have done the arithmetic on hours and it is respectable, but a plate like this one will still be on a wall in fifty years and my hourly rate will not be the thing anyone remembers.

Artwork Feedback·Margaret Hsu·1w

I spent the morning on a specimen of Daucus carota, the wild carrot, and I have made a rather basic error that I would flag to a student in a heartbeat. The root is a taproot, and the way it sits in the soil gives you a clear top and underside. I set the drawing up from a photograph I took in September, and photographs will lie to you about which surface is catching the light. So I have a root with the anatomy of the underside and the shading of the top. Every secondary rootlet is in the right place, the modelling is clean, and the whole thing reads as slightly wrong in a way that is hard to name and impossible to unsee now that I have named it. The frustrating part is that the drawing itself is probably the best line work I have done this month. I am going to have to take it off the paper and start again, which is three days of drawing I will not get back. I keep a rule that I do not begin colour on anything I have not drawn from life. I broke it for one photograph and here we are. I am writing this down mostly so that I do not do it again next week.

Wins·Margaret Hsu·1w

The deadline was Friday at noon and I sent the digital submission at 11:40, which for me is reckless. Twelve weeks on a single flowering branch of Magnolia grandiflora, the undersides of the leaves in that rusty felted brown that no one believes until they turn a leaf over. I repainted the terminal bud four times because the light on it was doing something I couldn't get honest, and on the fourth attempt I left one edge slightly unresolved, which I would not have allowed myself five years ago. The strange part is that the fear now isn't the painting. It's the verdict. My old supervisor used to say a paper only exists once it's been read by someone hostile, and I have carried that into this medium without meaning to. So this is the win, such as it is: the work left the studio, and I did not go back in and fiddle with the bud at the last minute. I also didn't send the usual apologetic covering note. Results in three weeks. The paper is Fabriano Artistico, hot pressed, and it took the glazes beautifully, which is its own quiet satisfaction and has nothing to do with the judges.

General·Margaret Hsu·1w

I've been painting the same rue stem for eleven days and I've only just got the underside of one leaf right. Rue is a difficult plant to love. The leaves are a blue-green that behaves nothing like a blue-green should, and the oil glands are translucent dots you can see straight through, which means every layer of wash underneath has to be correct before you even think about the top one. Get it wrong and the dots read as blemishes rather than glands. I have scraped and repainted that single leaf four times. The paper is beginning to show it. I keep a sheet of studies alongside the finished piece and the studies are, frankly, more interesting than anything I've produced this month. Eleven days of the same plant and the only thing I've learned for certain is that I was rushing the shadow under the midrib. Which I knew. I've taught it. I've said it out loud to students in that slightly smug way one does. There's a point somewhere past the tenth hour where accuracy stops being a technique and starts being a kind of attention, and I don't think it can be hurried into. I used to believe I could get there faster with better preparation. Better paper, better brushes, a stricter drawing. I have all of those now and it still takes eleven days. The stem itself is done, for what it's worth. It's the leaves that are the trouble.

Wins·Margaret Hsu·2w

I finished a specimen sheet this afternoon that has been in the drawer, unfinished, since 2013. A single Rosa gallica, and the delay was never the rose. It was the red. Alizarin crimson was the standard for that particular depth of petal and every serious painter knows what it does over time: it fades, browns, quietly betrays you in a frame twenty years on. I could not bring myself to send a sheet out into the world carrying a pigment I knew would fail. So I kept putting it off, then putting it off became a habit, and the habit became twelve years. The answer, when I finally sat down with it, was unglamorous. Permanent alizarin crimson, layered thinly over a quinacridone base, tested on scrap for a fortnight before a single mark went on the good paper. Two weeks of testing to solve what twelve years of avoidance had been circling. I am not proud of the arithmetic. It is dry, it is signed, and it is going to the framer on Monday. Small thing. It has been sitting on my conscience longer than most of my actual mistakes have.

General·Margaret Hsu·2w

I spent the morning on a Helleborus niger study and threw the whole sheet in the bin at around eleven. Not the flower. The stamen, or rather the anthers, of which there are far too many, and every one of them needed to sit at the correct angle to the filament. I had them leaning perhaps ten degrees too far forward. Nobody but me would ever have noticed. I noticed, and once I have noticed a thing it cannot be un-noticed, so out it went. Three hours of glazing, gone. My husband came in for tea and asked, quite reasonably, whether I might simply have corrected the one I had. I explained that correcting it would have meant lifting colour on a dry wash and leaving a halo, and that a halo is worse than a lie. He took his tea away. The irritating part is that I know exactly why it happened. I was working too fast because I had it in my head that the flower would close by noon, and I let the schedule dictate the brush. The plant was never going to wait for me and I should have respected that from the start. Hellebore is a punishing subject anyway. The white is not white, it is a greenish grey with a faint warmth in the centre, and if you paint it as white it reads as a paper cut-out. If you paint it as grey it goes dead. You have to thread it. Tomorrow I will start again on the same sheet of Fabriano and do the anthers last, when I am fresh, and count them properly before I begin.

Gallery Outreach·Margaret Hsu·2w

I want to ask something narrower than the usual "how do you approach galleries." I walked into one last month that had a beautiful roster, good light, and I knew within about ninety seconds I would never approach them. The woman at the desk never once looked up from her screen, and there was a framer's label on the back of a piece in the rack showing it had been re-framed in a way I would call cheap. Both of those told me plenty before anyone said a word to me. So: what is the first thing you actually notice when you walk into a gallery you're sizing up? Mine is whether anyone working there seems to know the work on their own walls. Tell me I am being too harsh about it, but I have found it a reliable signal.

Wins·Margaret Hsu·2w

I finished and delivered the Helleborus niger plate this morning, twelve days ahead of a deadline I had resigned myself to missing. Six weeks of work on a plant that genuinely resists being drawn: the nectaries are the size of pinheads and the white is never white, it is a dozen greys that all read as white until you put a wrong one beside them and the whole flower turns to cardboard. I had a small private celebration, which amounted to cleaning my palette properly and making a fresh pot of tea instead of drinking the cold one that had been sitting there since ten. What I want to say is that I handed it over, and then spent the drive home thinking about the third leaf from the left. The serration is correct. The shadow under it is not quite the temperature I intended, and nobody will ever notice, and I know it is there. Deadline met, and I am not actually finished with it. I have decided not to ask the client for it back. But I am going to paint that leaf again on a spare sheet, just to prove to myself I can. Curious whether other people here have a piece they consider done and also consider not done.

Studio Life·Margaret Hsu·2w

Not deliberately. I noticed it this morning about four minutes into a pass of cobalt over a section of leaf, and by then my chest was already tight and I was leaning in far closer than I ought to. I catch myself doing it perhaps three or four times in a working session. The hand is steady, the paper is still damp in the right way, and I have simply stopped breathing, as though the wash were a small animal that might startle. The piece on the board is a study of a single stem of Papaver somniferum, the bristly one, from the garden, which I have been on for nine days and which has already been ruined once and restarted on fresh paper. I am working on Fabriano Artistico, hot pressed, 300 gsm. I have gone back to hot pressed after several years of cold pressed and I am not entirely convinced I made the right decision. The pigment sits on top of the surface rather than sinking in, and every edge you leave is a little more naked for it. It is unforgiving and I am not sure I am a good enough painter this month to deserve it. I do not know whether the breath-holding is concentration or superstition. It is probably superstition. There is no reason a wash would behave differently because I exhaled, and yet I have never once tested it, which tells you something about how much I want to know the answer. Someone in a class last year told me she hums while she paints, one continuous low note, and that when the note stops she knows she has lost the thread and steps away from the board. I thought it was a clever trick. I have not managed to take it up, mostly because I would then have to hear myself.

Gallery Outreach·Margaret Hsu·3w

My first proper gallery came about through the horticultural society I'd been exhibiting with for years. Their annual show had a small sales room attached, and one of the volunteers there happened to be married to the man who ran the gallery. He came to look at the wall, asked who did the Trillium study, and that was that. No portfolio, no enquiry email. Just a plant show and a lucky marriage. It has since occurred to me that not one of my gallery relationships began in the conventional way, and I suspect the same is true for most people here. So I'd like to know: how did your first one actually happen? Not the advice version, the true version. Was it a friend of a friend, a stranger at a fair, a shop that sold your work quietly for a year first? I'll admit I'm partly asking to settle something. I've been telling my students for years that the cold approach rarely works and that you should be visible in the world that interests you instead. I'd be delighted to be told I'm wrong.

Marketing & Social·Margaret Hsu·3w

I run a small letter, once a month, and about a year ago I stopped sending it to the whole list. Now roughly half of it goes out in the post, printed on the same paper stock I use for my study sheets, folded, hand addressed. It costs me a fortune in postage and an afternoon I could spend painting. The reply rate is around thirty percent. The email version gets maybe two percent. What those replies actually contain: a woman in Devon asking what blue I use in the shadows of white flowers, a retired pharmacist who noticed I'd labelled a specimen with the wrong collection date, a teacher who wanted the whole letter in the classroom. None of that happens by email. Email replies are "lovely, thank you." The envelope gets a letter back. The part I did not expect is what it does to my teaching. Everyone tells you to grow the list, run the free download, build the funnel. I did the arithmetic and it says the opposite. Four hundred people who open an envelope are worth more than four thousand who open a tab, and I cannot explain that to anyone selling me a course on audience growth. I am not recommending this. It is expensive, it does not scale, and I am fairly sure it will never make me a name people recognise at a market stall. I just know which version of my work is actually reaching someone, and it is the one with a stamp on it.

Artwork Feedback·Margaret Hsu·3w

Four days on a single Cercis siliquastrum pod. Scarlet runner beans, actually the pod of the Judas tree, but that's the specimen. It's a decent piece technically. The drawing is right, the shadow side reads, the paper is behaving. And the green is dead. Not muddy, not too cool or too warm, just dead, the way a photograph of a leaf is dead. I've tried the obvious corrections. Cooled it with a touch of phthalo, warmed it back with transparent yellow, dropped the value a step. All it did was move the corpse around. My suspicion is that I've been matching the local colour too faithfully and left out the thing that made me want to paint it, which was the way the light came through the thinner edge of the pod this morning, almost yellow, and the way the surface picked up a grey bloom over the top of it. Two different greens fighting, essentially. What I've painted is one green averaged out. I've done this before and I know the answer is usually to choose. But I keep reaching for the brush to fix the colour rather than to state the light, and I'm four days in and reluctant to lift it back to the paper. For anyone who works wet-in-wet on a large single form: do you build the two temperatures in from the start, or lay a proper base and then come over it? I've always done the latter and I'm beginning to wonder whether that's the whole problem with this one.

General·Margaret Hsu·3w

I began a Magnolia grandiflora study in the second week of March. It is now the last week of June and it is not finished. I mention this because a student asked me on Saturday how long a botanical plate "should" take, and I gave her the honest answer, which is that it depends on whether you intend to be correct. The flower has opened, browned, and dropped since I started. I am working from a pressed specimen and thirty-one photographs taken over four days, because the bloom lasts roughly that long and I did not want to guess at the petal reflex. The tepals alone have four glazes. I have repainted the staminal column twice. Most of what I have done this month is not painting. It is looking, and waiting for the paper to be properly dry, and deciding I was wrong about the indumentum on the underside of the leaf. When I was still in the lab I once spent a fortnight on a single figure because the axis label was not quite true. Nobody noticed but me. I do not think that was wasted time either. I would rather have one plate that a botanist cannot fault in ten years than twelve that are merely pretty. I do not expect everyone to agree with that, and I have made my peace with the fact that it is a slow way to earn a living.

Gallery Outreach·Margaret Hsu·3w

I will start. A dealer once asked me to paint a specimen considerably larger than life, in a stronger red than the plant actually is, because "the wall needs heat." I declined and lost the show, and I would decline again, though I confess I thought about it for a week. So: what has a gallery or curator asked you to alter? Size, palette, framing, subject, a background that isn't there in nature. Did you hold your ground or give in, and how did it turn out either way? I'm genuinely interested in where people draw the line, and whether anyone has changed a piece and been glad they did.

Wins·Margaret Hsu·4w

The first one was ruined in the third week, and I have only myself to blame. I had rushed the sepals because I was pleased with how the leaves had gone, and a rushed sepal in a white flower is fatal. There is nowhere to hide. I peeled the paper off the board, put it in the drawer with the other failures, and started again the following Monday. Eight weeks on the second sheet. This morning I lifted the last wash on the third petal and sat back, and for the first time in the whole eight weeks I could not find the thing that was wrong. That moment almost never arrives. I did not celebrate. I washed the brush, covered the board, and went to make tea, and it was only in the kitchen that my hands started shaking a little. Sixteen weeks for one plant, and it will be a long time before I can look at it properly enough to price it. But it is on the board, and it is right, and nobody will ever know the first one existed.

Gallery Outreach·Margaret Hsu·4w

I'll go first, because I still wince at mine. Years ago I brought a set of watercolour studies to a small gallery. The director looked at them for a while and asked, quite reasonably, what the work was. Instead of saying plainly that they were botanical studies in the natural-history tradition, I launched into a lecture about the species, the collection locality, the paper. I watched his eyes glaze over. He was asking a simple question and I answered the wrong one. What I should have said was three sentences. What it is, why it matters, and who it's for. So I'm curious. When a gallerist or director asks you to describe your work out loud, what actually comes out of your mouth? Do you have something prepared, or do you improvise and regret it afterward? And has anyone here worked out a version of that sentence that genuinely opens doors rather than closing them? I'd especially like to hear from people whose work is quiet or technical and hard to make sound exciting in a single breath.

Studio Life·Margaret Hsu·4w

I keep a small notebook beside the board for every painting. Not the finished work, the process: pigment, brand, ratio, paper batch, the temperature of the room, and a one line verdict on whether the wash behaved. It is a habit left over from the laboratory and my students find it faintly ridiculous, but it has saved me more than once. This morning I was laying a first wash of French ultramarine over a hellebore leaf, thinned further than I usually dare, and it bloomed at the tip exactly where the veins tighten. I checked the log. The same thing happened in November, same paper, same paper batch stamp, same dilution, and I had written "too wet for this sheet, size it first" and then evidently forgotten. Two hundred and fourteen pages and I still repeat a mistake I had already identified and written down in my own hand. The log is honest. I am not always. I have started underlining anything that went wrong, so at least the failures are the things my eye catches first when I open to a new page. It feels a little like keeping a book of my own errors on purpose. Which, I suppose, is what it is.

Rants & Vents·Margaret Hsu·4w

I mix all my greens from primaries, which means a bad yellow poisons absolutely everything downstream. Opened the tube this morning, squeezed out a bead, and it's a pale, chalky, faintly pinkish ochre. Real Naples yellow is a dense, opaque, slightly warm cream, and it should sit in the leaf of a magnolia without a fight. This is the color of skimmed milk that's been left out. What bothers me is not the money. It is that the label is allowed to say Naples yellow, and it will go on saying it, and someone in a class will buy it and spend three weeks wondering why their whites look muddy. I've written to the manufacturer. I will not be sending a photograph, because I do not think this is a matter that requires one.

General·Margaret Hsu·4w

I have been painting the same Rosa canina sprig for four days, which is longer than it warrants, and this afternoon I discovered I had cut the sheet from the wrong side. The felt mark runs underneath and the sizing is subtly different. You would not see it in the finished painting, but I can feel it. The washes sit a fraction differently and I have been quietly blaming my own handling since Monday. I am going to finish it. Throwing away four days of work over a mis-cut sheet would be a poor sort of discipline, and the specimen itself is a good one. But I have written the correct side in pencil on the pad cover now, which I should have done years ago and did not because I was certain I would remember. Does anyone else keep making the same small, entirely avoidable mistake on the grounds that they are too experienced to need a note?

Wins·Margaret Hsu·4w

For years my habit when a wash went wrong in front of students was to stop, put the board face down, and start a fresh sheet. Clean, decisive, and I realise now it taught them absolutely nothing except that mistakes are terminal. This past Saturday I was demonstrating a leaf of Berberis, and the first wash of sap green went down too fast. It pooled along one edge and left a hard tide line where I lifted the brush a beat too soon. Nine people watched me do it. I left it there. Then I went back in with a barely damp brush and worked the tideline outward while the paper was still at that stage where it will forgive you, which is a window of perhaps forty seconds and no longer. It dried flat. Not invisible, but honest. The leaf still reads as a leaf. I told them what I was doing while I was doing it, which I have never done before, and one woman at the back said she had assumed that once a wash was down you simply lived with it. She has been painting for eleven years. The correction is now the part of the class people ask about. I have mixed feelings about that, since a demonstration of doing it right the first time would have been more useful, but it was the truer thing to show.

General·Margaret Hsu·1mo

I have a commission due the first week of October, a large Digitalis purpurea study for a client who wants the whole spike, bells and all. One would think the flowers are the work. They are not. The calyx and the pedicel are where the drawing either holds together or falls apart, because that is where the structure lives, and if the structure is wrong the bells are just decoration sitting on nothing. So this morning I sat with a 00 brush and a magnifier and did a single sepal. Ninety minutes. Quinacridone rose and a whisper of permanent alizarin, mostly dry, worked in three passes so the hairs on the margin could stay separate. My husband came in at some point and asked, quite reasonably, whether I was still on the same leaf. I was. People who do not paint assume the time goes into the showy parts. It goes into the parts nobody will ever look at directly but everyone will feel if they are wrong. I have made my peace with that, mostly. Occasionally I look at the clock and think about all the things I could have done in ninety minutes, and then I look at the sepal and I do not regret it.

Studio Life·Margaret Hsu·1mo

I have painted standing at the same tilted board for eighteen years and I am not about to change now, but I will admit the body is keeping score. Two hours into a Rosa 'Fantin-Latour' study this afternoon, everything from the shoulder blade down informed me, quietly, that it had opinions. The thing is, sitting changes the angle of the arm and I can feel it in the line. Standing, the wrist comes off the board at a shallower angle and the edge of a petal behaves. Sit down and the whole stroke goes stiff and a little nervous. I know this sounds like superstition. I have tested it. It is not superstition. What I have done instead of sitting is bought a proper anti-fatigue mat, the kind meant for people who stand at benches all day, and it has helped more than I expected. The other change is that I now stop every forty minutes whether the wash wants me to or not, and I go and look out of the back window at the actual plants, which is not rest so much as research. I would genuinely like to know whether anyone here has solved the standing problem in a way that does not involve simply getting a decade younger. I am not interested in a drafting chair recommendation unless you have used it for botanical work specifically and can tell me what it does to a fine line.

Pricing·Margaret Hsu·1mo

A former student's mother asked me to paint her Helleborus niger in flower for a birthday gift. She is a lovely woman, she has been generous with my classes, and I said two hundred and eighty pounds before I had thought about it at all. That is the whole trouble, of course. I said a number to be kind rather than a number to be paid. It arrived in October. I made three drawings before I was satisfied with the arrangement, painted it twice and discarded the first attempt because the greens had gone muddy at the edges, and then spent the better part of nine hours glazing the white petals so they would read as white on white rather than as flat paper. Twenty two hours in total by the time it was mounted and wrapped. I worked it out afterwards, as one does, and it came to less than thirteen pounds an hour, before paper, before paint, before the frame she asked me to recommend. The painting is good. That is the difficult part. She will hang it and it will be correct and quiet and it will not occur to her that it was ever anything other than a favour, because I priced it as one. I have told myself the lesson is simply not to quote in the moment. What I actually think is that I have never once worked out a friends and family price and had it come out fair, and I keep doing it anyway, which suggests the problem is not arithmetic.