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.

Artwork Feedback·Dimitra Vasilakis·1w

Cutting the tesserae for a commission piece, a 60 by 90 panel for a hotel lobby here in Thessaloniki, and I've hit the thing I always hit around the two-thirds mark. To make the setting go faster I opened the gaps between the stones. Not much. A millimetre and a half where I normally keep them tight enough that you lose the line entirely. On the floor it looked fine, even forgiving. Then I got it upright and lit properly and the whole thing went soft. The grout started reading as drawing instead of disaster. Everything I liked about it, the way the surface fights itself, just drained out through those little grey rivers. Restoration work ruined me for this. When I was training we spent a week on a floor fragment from the 5th century and the mortar joints were so fine you could barely get a needle between them. I keep that in my hands. But tight joints cost you time, and time is what a commission is actually buying. So now I'm pulling about forty stones and re-cutting them a bit larger, which is stupid because the piece is already glued down. The andamento is fine. The rhythm is good. It's just the air between things. Anyone else find that the fix that saves you an afternoon is the one that kills the piece?

Artwork Feedback·Gloria Mae Jackson·1w

Working on a piece out of my grandmother's scraps, cloth she cut back in the eighties from old work shirts and a couple of Sunday dresses. Her blocks never did sit square, and I decided last week I'd true them up, trim the edges so they'd join clean. Took maybe two inches off each one off the top and bottom. Cut it Tuesday evening. Now the top's laying on the floor of my sewing room and it's straight. Every seam meets. And it's dead. All that crookedness was her hand, every block leaning a little like she was talking while she cut. I trimmed her voice right off it. I know better than this. My own quilts go crooked on purpose. But hers I wanted to honor and I went and made it a machine. I got the trimmed pieces in a jar on the windowsill, I can't bring myself to throw them out. Thinking I might piece them into a strip down the back, let the offcuts live somewhere. That's about the best I can do for it now. Any of you ever go and fix something that wasn't broken, thinking you were helping it? Not asking about the quilt so much. Asking about the wanting to fix.

Artwork Feedback·Lukas Brandt·2w

I spent thirteen days building up a surface. Cold wax and oil, maybe nine layers, a grey-green that had been getting somewhere around the middle of last week. Then Monday it went heavy and dead, the way it does when I have kept adding instead of stopping. So this morning I took the palette knife and scraped the whole thing back to the ground. Two by two meters. It took an hour. The ground was still there underneath, patient, the way it always is. What I keep noticing: the scraped-back version has something the worked version never had. The ghost of all those layers is in it. I know this. Every painter knows this. And still I build it up past the point again and again, because stopping early feels like giving up and the market wants a finished object and I want to be a person who finishes things. The part I actually want to ask about. Do you have a rule for when a surface is done with you? Not done, done with you. I used to think I could feel it. Lately I think I only feel it two days too late, after I have already ruined the good part.

Artwork Feedback·Roman Petrak·2w

Indiana limestone torso, about 90 lbs, sat on the bench since late April. The shoulders and the ribcage were fine. The base was wrong from the start and I kept carving around it instead of fixing it. That's the mistake that eats the most time. You keep finding ways to make the piece accommodate the thing you already know is bad. Cut it off at the plinth this morning with a diamond blade, took about forty minutes, dust everywhere. Now it stands on a temporary cradle and it looks better already, which is annoying because it means the three weeks weren't wasted, they were just spent proving something I already knew on day two. Anyway. Anyone else ever kill a piece to save it. For the record I don't think that's the same as starting over. Starting over is cowardice. This was surgery.

Artwork Feedback·Camille Laurent·2w

Sitting in my studio with a small interior I've been working on since the start of the month, a woman at a table with morning light coming from a window behind her left shoulder. The whole thing is nearly done. The walls are right, the cloth on the table is right, the light reads the way I wanted it to. And her hand on the table is dead. It is the fourth time I've wiped it back and repainted it and each time it comes back a little more like a photograph of a hand and less like a hand. Here is the specific problem. I can build the form fine. Palm, knuckles, the taper of the fingers, all correct. What I can't find is the edge. The place where the light side meets the shadow side. I keep making it crisp because I know what the shape is, and a crisp edge says "I know what this is." I don't want her to know what it is. I want the light to have made it. One soft edge where the wrist turns into the shadow of the table, one lost edge where the fingers meet the cloth, and the whole thing would breathe. I know all this. I've taught it. And I still paint a hand like I'm describing it to a police sketch artist. I've been looking at Chardin all week, the little hands in the still lifes, the way he lets a knuckle just dissolve into the background and trusts you to finish it. It is a kind of confidence I don't have yet at this size. At a big scale I can be loose. Small and I get nervous and tidy. So I am going to let it dry and go at it once more with a bigger brush than it deserves. If it fails again I may paint her hand into her sleeve and call it a compositional choice. Not really. But it's been that kind of week.

Artwork Feedback·Karen Wessel·2w

So this is a small one, 9x12, a barn at the edge of a field I drive past on the way to my daughter's swim practice. I've painted the roof four times now. I wiped it off twice with a wet rag, scraped once, painted over it once. The problem is I keep making the roof too even. Like tile, when it should read as corrugated metal with rust eating into it. Every time I lay the lines in I make them all the same distance apart and the same value, and it looks like a barcode. My brain knows better and my hand still does it. The thing I'm actually stuck on: do I fight it and keep the corrugation visible, or do I just push the whole roof back into shadow so the eye doesn't go there at all and let the light sit on the field instead? Second option feels like cheating, but I've been on this roof for three evenings after bedtime and I'm starting to resent the painting. Also I'm working with a Mars black I mixed with a little burnt sienna for the rust and it keeps coming out orange in a way that looks like a pumpkin. Might be the paint, might be me.

Artwork Feedback·Tomáš Havel·3w

Studio floor is currently a museum of other people's junk. Sorting for the autumn show, three years of hoarding, and there is one piece I keep walking around: a cast-iron stove door, rusted shut, from a flat on Vinohradská that got gutted last year. It's the best object in the room and I won't put it in. Reason is stupid. It's too good on its own. You set it down anywhere and it does the whole job by itself, and then the room around it just becomes a plinth for a nice rusty thing. Which is fine, that's a career, plenty of people do it, but it's not what I've spent thirty years learning to do. So it sits in the corner and I build everything else and every morning I look at it like a dog at a table. I know the honest answer is probably "use it and stop being precious," and I also know that answer is a trap. Sometimes the object that carries the piece is the one that kills it. Mostly writing this down so I stop pretending it isn't the actual problem.

Artwork Feedback·Camille Laurent·3w

Working on a seated figure, roughly 90 by 70, and I've repainted the left knee three times now. First two passes were wrong because I wasn't seeing it. This third one is right. Proportions check, the foreshortening reads, the shadow side sits where it should. It's the best-observed knee I've painted in a long time and it is completely dead. I know what happened. I painted the knee as a thing to be solved instead of a thing sitting under cloth in a room. Every plane is accounted for and none of them are breathing. I've been circling it for two days, adding half-tones, taking them out, which is not painting, it's polishing. What I think I have to do is scrape it and come back in with a much bigger brush and a lot less information. Which is terrifying because the drawing is good and I'll lose it. But the drawing is exactly what's killing it. It's a diagram now. For the people who work from life: when you've painted something accurately and it has no life in it, do you destroy it or do you try to paint your way out from the inside? I've done both and I genuinely don't know which one is honest here.

Artwork Feedback·Elin Holm·4w

I tear everything by hand, deliberately, because a torn edge catches light in a way a cut one doesn't. That part is fine. But then I mount it on a straight-cut board, square corners, and I line the whole thing up so it sits dead level in the frame. Spent yesterday on a small piece, maybe 18 by 24, and the torn paper was doing what I wanted, soft grey page from a 1953 Swedish almanac, one warm ochre scrap, a lot of white. Then I squared it off and it went quiet in the wrong way. Not calm. Just corrected. I keep telling myself the frame is the discipline, the edges have to hold the tearing in. But I'm not sure that's true anymore. Maybe the tearing is the piece and the square is me being afraid of it. Anyone else flatten something out of a piece and only notice after? Or is this just what mounting is and I should stop thinking about it.

Artwork Feedback·Inês Costa·4w

Not a critique anyone gave me. Just something I have been sitting with all week. I have a photogram of a piece of fishing net I picked off the sand at Foz in October. The net is right. The edges are right. Twenty-two minutes under the sun, seawater wash, and every knot reads clean against the paper. Technically it is the best exposure I have made this year. And I feel nothing in front of it. It looks like a diagram of a net. The ones I keep pinned to the wall are all failures. A print from last winter where the wind moved the paper and the whole lower half smeared into a soft gray, and there, right at the smear, is something I have never been able to make on purpose. I have tried to reproduce it maybe forty times since. No luck. I am starting to think the accident is not a mistake I should be learning to control. It is the actual thing. I know some of you will say ruin it deliberately, and I have tried that too, and deliberate ruin looks exactly like what it is. There is a difference between a thing going wrong and a thing being let go of. Anyway. I am not looking for a fix exactly. Maybe just someone to tell me they have the same drawer of technically correct, spiritually empty work and what they did with it.

Artwork Feedback·Dimitra Vasilakis·4w

I've been setting a small panel for three weeks now, roughly 22 by 30, a figure half turned away. Not saying more than that. The problem is one section of red smalti in the drapery. I cut it, laid it, and the transitions are exactly what I planned. Every tesserae sits where I wanted it. It is the best-executed passage of red I have made in years and it is completely dead. I have been looking at it from across the room for four days. From there it reads like a photograph of drapery, which is the worst thing I can say about mosaic. The hand is gone. No gaps, no small errors, no slight wrongness that tells you a person sat on the floor placing these. I smoothed it out of existence. I know what I have to do. Rip out about forty pieces from the middle of it and set them badly on purpose. Deliberately. Wrong sizes, a couple of them turned a few degrees off the flow, one piece of a different red that is almost but not quite the same, so the eye catches on it and moves. Not chaos. A few honest mistakes that I am going to have to manufacture. The strange part is I spent years training out those mistakes. Conservation teaches you to blend, to match, to disappear. Then you go make your own work and you spend the rest of your life trying to be visible again. Tomorrow I take the chisel to a section that took me two days. Anyone else set something too well and had to wreck it back to life?

Artwork Feedback·Roman Petrak·4w

Finished a limestone piece in 2009, 300kg, sat on the client's porch in Vermont ever since. Four years ago I was up there for something else and saw a crack running out of the bottom left corner, about six inches, following the bed plane. Nobody else noticed. I've thought about that crack maybe twice a month since. Here's the part that bothers me. I knew that stone had a seam there when I blocked it out. I could feel it under the chisel, that slight give. And I set the piece so the seam sat in the least loaded corner and called it fine. It was fine. It's still fine. That's the problem. Nothing teaches me anything. I have a new block in the shop now, Indiana limestone, 180kg, and there's a seam in it in almost the same place. I've been walking past it for three weeks. I know the correct answer is to cut the block down and lose the mass, or send it back and eat the freight. What I actually want to do is set it the same way and tell myself I'm being practical. I've done that before. So this is me saying out loud that I'm not going to do it. I'll report back when I've ruined a smaller piece instead.

Artwork Feedback·Dani Okafor·1mo

Okay so I'm working on the fourth version of the window piece, the one with the fire escape, and I just made the exact same mistake I made on version two, which is that I stopped to answer a text. My phone buzzed, I put the brush down, I picked my phone up for maybe ninety seconds, and by the time I got back the top wash had already gone past the point where you can lift anything out of it. Watercolor does not care that you were being polite to your mom. The whole upper corner where the light comes through is now this flat dead grey, and I know it's dead because the bottom half, which I did without stopping, is still glowing. Here's the thing I actually want to ask about, and I'm not being cute: how do you all handle the working window on a big flat wash? Because I KNOW the trick is to keep it wet, I learned that in year one of my BFA from a professor who said it like it was obvious, and yet the second something interrupts me my brain decides the paper will wait. I've tried spraying, I've tried doing the whole thing in one held breath, and neither is working. Is the answer just that you don't answer your phone during a wash, like a monk? Because if so I need to hear it from someone who isn't me. Also the grey might be salvageable if I go back in with some white gouache over the top for the glint on the railing. I'm half convinced. I'm also half convinced I'm just going to do it again tomorrow and call it a study.

Artwork Feedback·Lukas Brandt·1mo

Scraped back the big one today. 180 by 160, the one I've had on the wall since early spring. Twenty minutes with the palette knife and two winters of accumulated surface are on the floor in grey curls. The reason was not noble. It had gone dead under the varnish. Nothing wrong with it exactly, all the moves were there in the right places, and that was the problem. I could read it like a shopping list. What I keep thinking about is that the first months of a painting are the only honest part. After that you're mostly managing your own decisions. Somewhere in there it stops being a finding and becomes a project, and I have never once been able to tell exactly when that happens. Only that it has. Naja. It's under there still, some of it. The wax doesn't go away, it just sits lower. Curious whether anyone else works this way, or whether the rest of you are more sensible and stop while the thing is still alive.

Artwork Feedback·Mateo Serrano·1mo

Okay so this is a serious question disguised as a joke. I've been doing these tall necked bottles for a couple months now, hand built, pinch and coil, and the whole point for me is the lean. I want them to look like they're standing up against a wind. So I make the belly off balance on purpose, right. Pulled one out of the kiln this morning and the belly went further than I planned and now it is, no way around it, a scrotum. Two of them actually, side by side, my wife walked past and didn't even say anything, just looked at me. Here's the thing. I could break it. It's a waste of a good firing, it's shino, it came out this beautiful burnt orange and there's a spot near the shoulder where the glaze crawled and it looks like a scar. Genuinely the best surface I've got all month. But do I put it on the table at the market next Saturday? I sell at Ruzafa. I've got a card that says "vessels" on it. Somebody's kid is going to point at it and say something and I'll have to stand there with my face doing whatever it does. And honestly the other part of me thinks that's the piece. The one that's actually alive. Everything else on the table is polite and this one makes people react before they decide to. Am I overthinking this. Does anyone else keep the accident on purpose or do you all just quietly break it in the bucket and never mention it.

Artwork Feedback·Mateo Serrano·1mo

I had this tall wonky vessel, hand built, took me like three weeks. There was a face kind of hiding in the glaze, you'd catch it from the side, half there. Not painted on, just the way the oxides pooled and ran. It was the best thing I'd ever made honestly. My grandmother saw a photo and said it was smiling at her. Then I decided it needed one more layer of something. A clear coat, to protect it. And the face just... died. Buried under the gloss. Now it's this perfectly fine vessel with nothing in it. I keep putting it in different light trying to find it again and it's not coming back. I know you don't get to undo a firing. But I'm stuck on whether I keep it as is, or smash it and use the shards for something. There's a lesson here about when to leave things alone and I keep not learning it. Has anyone else killed their own work by "finishing" it?

Artwork Feedback·Ramesh Jha·1mo

Since I was a small boy I am drawing the fish from the left border, the one that carries the boat in the Saptami story. My mother taught me the kachni line for the scales, one breath, no lifting the brush. Now I sit down with a fresh sheet of Sajji paper and my hand stops at the tail. It comes out stiff. The line is correct but the fish has no life, no swimming. I thought it was age, my eyes, but yesterday my granddaughter watched me and said, "Dada, why you are drawing so slowly?" And I had no answer for her. I am wondering if it is the show I did last month in Patna, where they wanted my fish bigger and my colours brighter for the city wall. Or maybe when you paint for money only, something closes inside. Has anyone else felt the hand forget a thing it has done since childhood? Not the skill, that is there, but the sureness. How do you get back the sureness?

Artwork Feedback·Sol Reyes·1mo

Every single time. The body will be alive, charcoal doing exactly what I want, the shoulders and the tilt of the head all working. Then I get to the face and something in my hand goes tight and I overwork it into a mask. Dead. Flat. I know the fix is to stop. I never stop. I stood back today and looked at this piece that was genuinely good up to the chin and I wanted to throw it across the room. I think it's that I'm scared. Like if I don't nail the face then the whole thing was for nothing, which is dumb because the whole thing IS the whole thing. The face is like 10% of the surface. But my brain treats it like the final exam. Anyone else do this with a specific part? Where you'll happily wreck a whole canvas but the second you hit this one spot you turn into a control freak? I've been trying to paint the face last and loose, just suggestion, and I keep caving. Would honestly love to know if anyone broke this or if we're all just fighting the same gremlin.

Artwork Feedback·Mateo Serrano·1mo

I keep noticing it in my slab pots and cups with faces pressed into them: every single one reads sad, even the ones I'm not trying to make sad. I'll be in a good mood, building something playful, and then I open the kiln and it's just this wall of melancholy staring back at me. I think the problem is the glaze pooling in the eye line. I carve the face before bisque, put a white slip on top, and the glaze settles heavy into those scored lines, so the mouth curves down even when I made it straight. The piece is technically fine, the proportions work, but the feeling is wrong and I can't control it. This one with the little figure on the shoulder, I genuinely meant it to look mid-laugh and it came out like she's seen some things. Anyone else fighting the emotional accident thing? Where the material does the opposite of what you intended and it works, but only if you lean into it? I keep trying to fix it with the tools and I think I need to fix it with the glaze math instead.