General·Teddy Lin·2w

did a studio cull because i couldn't close a drawer, and found three tubes of cadmium red that had gone solid. like rock solid. squeezed one and it just... cracked. cadmium is like 30 bucks a tube now. i remember paying 12. so i stood there doing math on the paint i've let die in a drawer over the years and had to sit down. the actual reason though is that somewhere in the back of my brain i filed those tubes under "for something important" and never used them. kept reaching for the cheap stuff for studies, saving the good red. saving it for what. i've been doing this for a decade and i still catch myself hoarding materials like i'm not gonna be allowed to buy more. anyway bought new ones the same day. used a fat blob of it on a 4ft canvas the second i got home. felt like throwing away money and also like the correct thing. probably both.

General·Dimitra Vasilakis·2w

They tore down an old warehouse near Olympou street last month and I went and asked the foreman if I could take some of the tile off the pile. He looked at me like I asked for his kidney, then said take whatever, it saves him the container. So I filled two bags. Red terracotta, mostly, some glazed bits, one piece with a thumbprint in it from whoever pressed it, probably 1920s. 40 euros in bus fare and coffee for the guy and my back for three days. And now they sit in the studio in a bucket and I don't want to cut them. Every other material I have, I cut without thinking, it's just stock. These I keep turning over like they're going to tell me something. My friend says this is why the work goes slow. She's not wrong but she's also not entirely right, the slow is the point sometimes. Anyway the bucket is still there. Some days I think the right move is to smash them and set them in a portrait of the man who built the wall. Other days I just like having them in the room.

General·Elin Holm·2w

I spent the morning sorting a box of offcuts I've been keeping since last spring. Anything smaller than a stamp goes into it. Hand-marbled endpapers from a 1901 hymnal I took apart, mostly. Some scraps I have not touched in eleven months and will not touch. I know this. Still could not do it. The box went back on the shelf, slightly tidier, which is not the same as emptied. The whole point of collage is that you take things apart, so the hoarding makes no sense on paper. Then again the scraps are the work. Every piece I have finished came out of a box like that one. I'm not asking for advice. I think I just wanted to write down that I failed at a very small task, in a room by myself, and it took the whole morning.

General·Niall Doherty·2w

There's a heron block on the bench since last week and I'm after getting to the bit nobody warns you about, which is the part where the legs meet the body. Sounds simple. It is not. Get it wrong and you've got a bird standing in a bucket. Anyroad, I carved it, pulled a proof, and the whole thing reads like a heron in wellingtons for the winter. The shoulders are too heavy where I tried to be clever with the shading and now he looks like he's been at the spuds all his life. The thing is, I know what's wrong and I know roughly how to fix it, and I still sat looking at it for two hours with a mug of tea gone cold instead of just doing it. Eventually the small lad came in looking for his crayons, saw it, and said "he's fierce fat isn't he." Out of the mouths. He's not wrong either. So it's back to the block tomorrow, take the shoulders down and stop being precious about it. That's the whole job really, being willing to cut away the bit you were pleased with. Put it up on the wall for the night so I don't have to look at him anymore. The dog's not a bit impressed either.

General·Kasia Nowak·2w

I am on the eleventh version of the same woman's face. Toned grey paper, terracotta and a bit of black, all of them lined up on the floor against the skirting board like a police lineup. The first one, which I did in maybe forty minutes on Monday, is the only one that looks alive. Numbers two through eleven are technically better. Better structure, better shadow under the jaw, the nose is actually a nose and not a smudge I got lucky with. And they are all dead. Flat. Like I drew the anatomy and forgot to put a person inside it. I don't know what to do with this information. Do I stop at the quick one and trust it? Because it feels like cheating, like saying the sloppy one is better because it was easy. Or do I keep going until I can be careful and alive at the same time, which might be number thirty and might be never. Frustrating week. Also my pastel box is now a mess of broken terracotta because I dropped it on Thursday, so there's that.

General·Camille Laurent·4w

The tube split open this morning near the crimp, so I had to decant the last of it into a small jar. Zinc white I have had since maybe 2019. The new tube from the same maker is stiffer, more chalky, and cools everything it touches. I know the sensible thing is to do an underpainting with it and see if the difference even matters under a glaze. Instead I sat there at the easel mixing it with a little linseed and telling myself it was fine, which is not the same as it being fine. A student asked me last week why I do not just buy the good stuff, meaning the expensive stuff, meaning the stuff I probably should buy. I did not have a good answer. I have a good answer for almost everything else in that studio. Anyway I am painting a corner of the kitchen table with a bowl and a half peeled orange, and the white is the whole thing. Everything else is just the white being interrupted.

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?

General·Teddy Lin·1mo

client wanted a "fun tropical" illustration for a juice label, so i'm staring at an actual banana on my desk trying to mix that yellow. and it doesn't exist. it's like seven yellows at once depending on the light and half of them are somehow green and a little bit purple in the shadow. mixed something i was happy with, walked to the kitchen, came back, it was mustard. sat down again and it looked right. so either my lighting is cursed or i'm the problem. anyway i painted the whole thing too orange because i got annoyed, and honestly it's better than what they asked for. not telling them that. freelance is going great, can you tell

General·Mira Vey·1mo

back leg snapped clean off, someone had tried to fix it with a wood screw and made it worse. i gave the woman two dollars and she looked at me like i'd done her a favor which, i guess, i had. it's sitting on my work table under a lamp right now. i keep not drawing it. that's the whole problem lately, everything i start comes out too neat, too resolved, like i'm illustrating the thing instead of looking at it. the chair doesn't resolve. it just sits there being broken and specific, the splintered end of the leg still pale where it snapped, the screw hole gone black at the edges. i've been photographing it from underneath for a week, which is a weird angle nobody would choose, which is probably why it's working. three of them are pinned up over the sink. my friend said they look like a crime scene. she's not wrong. anyway. making work about damage is easy to say and hard to actually do without turning the damage into a prop. this chair is teaching me the difference.

General·Camille Laurent·1mo

A student of mine, she's got real talent, was fighting a portrait this morning. Every fifteen minutes she wanted to scrape it down and start over. I made her sit with it. The ugly stage is where half the painting actually gets decided, and people my age forget we all had to be dragged through it once. It's the same panic every time. You block in something honest and it looks crude, so you think you've failed. But crude is not failure, it's just early. The painting that looks decent at every step is usually the boring one. I told her: if it's ugly because it's wrong, fix it. If it's ugly because it's not finished, shut up and keep going. She kept going. By the end the likeness was there and she looked almost annoyed that it worked. That annoyed look is the best sign I get all week.

General·Gloria Mae Jackson·1mo

Working on a piece today and I caught my hands doing that thing where they sneak back toward square. Every block wants to line up even when I tell myself it don't need to. My grandmother would say let the cloth be what it wants, don't fight it into shape just cause it look neater in your head. I took a pair of feed sacks my mama had tucked away since the sixties and cut into them this morning. Been holding onto them forty years afraid to ruin em and now I got pieces of em scattered across the floor and I'm not sorry about it. Some things you sit with long enough to know it's time. This new piece won't sit flat and it's driving me crazy and that's exactly why I'm keeping it that way. The wobble is the story. Straight seams tell you what somebody planned. Wobbly ones tell you what happened.

General·Dimitra Vasilakis·1mo

The little church my mother took me to as a girl is finally getting its proper restoration work done. Twelve hundred years and the place has survived earthquakes, fires, the Ottomans, a war and now a bunch of conservators with lasers and lime mortar. I should be thrilled. I trained in this exact thing. I can't bring myself to walk in and watch. It's not the work itself, I trust the people on it, they're good. It's that I know it at a different scale. I knew that floor when you could see where footsteps had worn the tesserae smooth in the same path for three hundred years. There's something about the cleaned-up version that makes me feel like the church I remember is being erased to save it. My mother would call me a fool and tell me to go help. She's probably right. But the day they take the scaffolding down something is going to end, even though the building will stand another five hundred years. Anyway. If the work looks sterile afterwards, that's on me for not being brave enough to go and get my hands in it.

General·Inês Costa·1mo

For years I've rinsed my prints in the sea. Not always, but when the light is right I carry the paper down to the water and let the tide do the washing for me, the way I've always done it. This year the tide tables shifted somehow, or I did. I kept arriving at the water when it was already on its way out, so the prints came up half-bleached in spots where the foam worked them too long. There's something humbling about being told your timing is off by the ocean itself. No negotiating with that. I found myself missing the prints that failed the worst. One of them has this big pale scar across the middle where the water stayed too long, and it might be the truest thing I've made in months. I keep it pinned where I can see it. Wondering if I should start trusting the mistakes more than the plan. The sea seems to think so.

General·Ramesh Jha·1mo

Yesterday while painting I realised I have drawn fish almost every single day of my life since I was maybe six years old, and still the eyes give me trouble. Not the shape, that is easy. But the eye is what makes the fish alive or dead. My mother used to say the eye is the soul's window, even for a fish. She would watch me finish the body and then stop, and she would take the brush from my hand and do the eye herself, one small circle with a dot inside, and the fish would suddenly be looking at me. Yesterday I finished the whole piece, all the fish, and when I stepped back I saw every one of them was looking the same direction. All staring to the left. Like a whole school that had decided something together without telling me. My wife laughed and said they are all going to the same place, maybe that is good luck. I did not correct them. I left it. First time in my life I let the fish all face one way. I am not sure it is right, but my hand did it, so maybe the hand knows something the head does not. Has anyone else ever looked at their finished work and found the hand did something you did not plan, and you left it anyway?

General·Camille Laurent·1mo

There's a pattern in my classes I've never found a way to explain. A student hits a wall around the six month mark, gets frustrated, stops coming. No goodbye, just gone. And then a month or two later they walk back in half apologising, and their work is suddenly, inexplicably, better. Not in a small way. A leap. I used to take it personally. Thought they'd found another teacher, or given up and gone to something easier. Now I think the wall was the point. They had to stop trying so hard, stop gripping the brush like it owed them something, and just live for a while without the painting. The eye keeps working in the background. Anyway, one of them came back today. Didn't say a word about where she'd been, just handed me a drawing. I nearly told her I was proud, which would have embarrassed us both. So I said "good" and walked away. She knows what that means. We have a code. 🙂

General·Margaret Hsu·2mo

I keep a small notebook where I log every pigment I've ever bought: the manufacturer, the series number, the lightfastness rating, the date I first mixed it, and a brush swipe of the color once it's dried. Forty-seven pages now, and this afternoon I counted. I have eleven different blues. That's not a confession of extravagance. Eleven blues each do a genuinely different thing, and I can defend every single one of them. But then I flipped to the greens and realized I own six viridian-adjacent tubes that are, if I'm being honest with myself, within a hair of each other on the page. One of them I bought because the shop had it in a display tray and the label was printed in a serif typeface I liked. I teach a class every spring, and I tell my students the first week that you need exactly three yellows, two reds, and two blues, and everything else is laziness or vanity. I believe that, too. It's just that I am apparently a very good student and a very poor practitioner of my own advice. The serif typeface got me.

General·Dani Okafor·2mo

I counted today while I was cleaning out my flat files and it's 47. Same window, same apartment, I've lived here three years and I just never get tired of the way the light hits that one corner of the frame around 4pm in winter. Sometimes it's the whole window, sometimes just the sill, sometimes it's basically abstract and you'd never know what it is until I tell you. My mom called me while I was counting and she laughed and said "honey that's not a series, that's a problem" and honestly she might be right. But there's something about coming back to the same shape over and over that's the most honest painting I do. No pressure to be interesting, just me and the same damn window and what the light is doing today. I'm gonna send her a photo of all 47 taped up on the floor and see what she says. Part of me wants to keep going until it's 100. Part of me thinks that's insane. Anyone else have the one subject they just never quit?

General·Mira Vey·2mo

Found a box in the back of the closet today. Ex's stuff, the stuff I couldn't give to Goodwill after we split. Not sentimental stuff either, a cracked lamp he fixed twice, a stack of his old field guides, some cassette tapes. Four years and I still can't bring myself to open it, let alone get rid of it. Weird part is I don't miss him. The marriage was done long before the divorce was. But that box is the one thing I won't touch. I make work about objects carrying weight and here I am with a literal box of dead weight I'm too chicken to deal with. Maybe it becomes a piece someday. Maybe that's the only way I let myself look at it.

General·Sol Reyes·2mo

Painted a portrait of my sister all week. Her face, the whole thing, really got somewhere with it around 2am. Woke up this morning and I couldn't look at it. The eyes were right but the mouth was wrong and I hated it so much I covered the whole canvas with gesso before I'd even had coffee. Now it's just a white rectangle on the easel and I already miss her. Wild how that works. I'd rather have an ugly painting I could've fixed than a clean slate. Every single time and I never learn. My therapist says this is a pattern. Yeah. It's called making art I guess. 😭

General·Mateo Serrano·2mo

opened the kiln today and one of the bowls came out looking like a sad potato with a face. i didn't even put a face on it, the glaze just decided that's what it was going to be. i'm honestly keeping it. it's the most honest piece i've made in weeks. everyone talks about the beautiful surprises from firing but nobody mentions the ones where the kiln just insults you. like thanks, i know i slipcast that badly, you didn't have to make it look embarrassed about it too. putting the potato out at the market next sunday with a little sign. "face not intended." see if anyone bites.