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So the small cheap brayer I'd been using for years finally gave up, the roller went egg-shaped on me around last Tuesday, and I went in to the art shop in town half intending to buy another cheap one and came out with a proper hard rubber one for a tenner. I know. Wild spending. But here's the thing, I've been printing the same block of a heron for about three weeks now trying to get an edition of twelve out of it, and I was blaming the lino, blaming the ink, blaming the damp weather in the shed, and it turns out the whole time it was the brayer. The cheap one was pressing uneven, so the middle of the block was picking up ink lovely and the edges were starving. Twelve prints in and the last six look like a different block entirely. So many years at this and I still spend a fortnight giving out about the wrong yoke. The block was grand. I was the problem. Trimmed the first six in half for test prints, which killed me slightly, but they're in the bin now and I've moved on with my life. Anyway, the heron's nearly there. Much darker at the edges now, properly moody, which is what I wanted all along.

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.

A gallery I have worked with for eleven years asked me in March for three small, easily shippable pieces for a fair booth in the autumn. "Something that sells itself," was the phrase. Which in practice means the same painting I have made fifteen times already, in a size that fits a car. I said no. Not out of pride exactly. I am 52 and I have done the years where saying yes to everything was the only way to keep the lights on. But I know how that ends: you make the easy thing, it sells, and then the easy thing is what you are known for, and every year after that you are asked for more of it in slightly different colours. What I offered instead was one large canvas, one mid-size, and one small. He was quiet on the phone for a while and then said the large one would never sell at a fair. It did not, at the fair. It sold four months later, to a private collector in Basel, at more than the booth piece would have brought. So in the ledger I am ahead. But the relationship is cooler now, and I am not naive about what that costs. The market does not reward the refusal, it just eventually forgets to punish it. The honest part is I do not know if I was right. I know I did not want to spend five months of my life on something I could have painted in my sleep. Whether that is integrity or just stubbornness at my age I could not tell you.

People always want the story of the comeback, the artist who stopped and then started again. Nobody wants the part where you spend ten years convincing students they're good enough when you've quietly decided you're not. That's what the fallow decade was for me. I taught portrait drawing at the atelier, competent classes, students who went on to do real work. And every evening I walked home past my own empty studio like it was a room I'd been evicted from. The strangest part is I wasn't blocked. I was just... finished. I'd seen enough mediocre paintings in galleries owned by people who couldn't tell you the difference between burnt sienna and raw umber, and I'd decided the whole enterprise was a bit de classe. What brought me back wasn't inspiration or a muse or any of that nonsense. It was my daughter, aged nine, asking me to paint her hamster that had died. I said no, I don't do pets. She cried. I painted the hamster. It's actually a good little painting, the light on that ridiculous fur, and I've never shown it to anyone. I don't have a lesson in this. Some of us just need a dead hamster to get back to work.

There's this face I keep coming back to. Not anyone I know, just a reference photo I found ages ago, some woman with sharp cheekbones and tired eyes. I've drawn her maybe twelve times now in pastel. Different angles, different lighting, different paper colours. Most of them are bad. But I can't stop. Yesterday I finished another one and just sat there thinking... why her? What is it about this particular face that won't let me go? Maybe I'm trying to nail something I can't articulate. Maybe it's just comfort, like rewatching the same film. Anyone else have that one subject they keep circling back to? Not in a series way, just obsessively.

My son asked me yesterday why I don't just buy the ready made colours from the market, saves so much time he says. I tried to explain but maybe I did not say it properly. You see, when I grind the stone and the vegetable dye myself, I am not only making paint. I am doing what my mother did, and her mother before her. The motion of the stone on the stone, it is like a prayer. The smell of the turmeric, the red from the beetle nut leaf, it brings the whole room into the old time. The ready bottles are fine, they are convenient, I do not judge anyone. But my grandmother used to say the colour carries the hands that made it. A fish painted with a colour you ground yourself, it has a life in it. Also there is a practical thing. The store colours fade fast in our sun. The natural ones, they deepen with age. I have a painting from my mother that is forty years old and the peacock blue is richer now than the day she finished it. You cannot buy that in a bottle. Maybe I am old fashioned. But I think some things are worth the extra hour.

I am teaching Mithila painting to a small group in my village, mostly girls, on Sunday mornings in the room where my mother used to sit with her colours. One of them, Sunita, she is fourteen, she has been coming since two years. Very quiet girl, hardly speaking, but her line work is steady, better than some who have been doing longer. Today a lady from Patna who buys from our cooperative took one of her paintings. A small one, two fish and a lotus, on handmade paper, done with the black from lamp soot and the red from kusum flower. Two hundred and fifty rupees. Sunita's mother came to my house in the evening to tell me. She was holding the money folded in her blouse. She did not say much. I also did not say much. The thing is, when I was that age nobody gave us money for this. We painted on the mud walls before the wedding, we painted for the ritual, and that was all. The wall got whitewashed every year and the work went away with it. For long I thought that was the whole of it, that our painting was for the wall and for God and not for selling. I don't know what to feel sometimes. Half of me is happy that the girl has earned something of her own at fourteen. Other half is thinking, will she now paint only the small ones that sell fast, the fish and the peacock, and never learn the whole story of the Kohbar or the wedding of Shiva and Parvati which takes many days. It is a real worry for me. The market wants the easy ones. Anyway. I have told her next month we start the Kohbar, slowly, small portion everyday before she does any selling work. Let us see.

okay so i sent a really solid application to a small gallery i've admired for ages, like actually tailored the email, referenced specific artists they show, the whole thing. and then... nothing. not even an automated response. it's been three weeks and i keep checking my sent folder like maybe i imagined sending it lol. i know galleries get flooded and i know i'm being impatient but honestly the not-knowing is worse than a no. i'd genuinely rather get a "not for us, but thanks" than just radio silence. so what do you do when a gallery ghosts you? do you follow up once? twice? do you just write it off and move on? or have you ever had a ghost come back weeks later with a yes and felt insane about it??

Saturday, open studios, and I'm not paying attention because I'm talking to a man about his dead father's shed for twenty minutes. Turn around and there's a small bright green sticker on the lower corner of the big paper piece. Some kind of dinosaur. I left it. It's still on there. Two days now. Partly I'm annoyed. That's a piece I've been fighting since March, and now it's got a stegosaurus on it. Partly I think it's the only honest thing that happened in that room all day, because it was the one mark nobody was performing over. The kid saw a thing and stuck a thing to it and walked off. No statement, no price list, no explanation about tension and memory. The friend who helped me hang says take it off before the next thing. She's right, obviously. I just keep not doing it. Anyone else had their work improved by someone under the age of six

switched to painting on a sheet of tempered glass like 4 years ago, salvaged from a coffee table someone left on the curb on my block. still not sure it's tempered but nothing has exploded yet. the trick is you let the acrylic dry on it and then you peel it off in one sheet. i've got a stack of these paint skins under my flat files, probably 30 of them by now, each one a full record of a week. some of them are genuinely better than the paintings they came from and i refuse to think about what that means. also you scrape it clean with a razor blade and the whole thing is fresh in 20 seconds. plastic palettes stain and hold onto old color and i spent years convinced that was somehow part of the process. it wasn't. it was just dirty. the downside is i've dropped it twice and both times i aged about a decade. currently propped against the wall behind my desk because i still haven't figured out where to actually store a 3 foot sheet of glass in a room this size. anyway if you're still on plastic just know i'm not judging you i'm just quietly right about this one thing

Nothing to look at, but it's the first thing in a while that made me feel like myself. 148 pound Peter Wright, been sitting on a pallet since I moved shops in the spring because I couldn't get it up on the stump alone. Two guys half my age got it off the truck for me and then never came back, that's how it goes. Today I rigged a chain fall off the beam and walked it up an inch at a time. Took me an hour and a half. My shoulder is telling me about it now. Rang it once with a hammer after, just to hear it. Good sound. The shop is a shop again. Wasn't before.

finally invoiced a logo job i finished in march. it's been sitting in my drafts since, fully written, addressed, everything. just couldn't hit send. it's not a big number, $650, but i kept telling myself i'd ask for more if i waited, then that i'd lost the right to ask at all by waiting. four months of a $650 invoice aging in my drafts is a very expensive way to avoid an awkward email. sent it at like 1am. they paid in 20 minutes. no comment, no "hey where have you been," nothing. i've been carrying that around like a rock and it turned out nobody was even holding the other end of it. anyway if you're also the kind of person who lets money rot in drafts because asking feels like a confrontation, hi. we should probably start a support group. or just invoice each other.

Had a student this week, third year with me, technically very good. Clean edges, correct values, the drawing underneath all correct. And the paintings are dead. Nothing wrong with them. That is the problem. So I made her do an exercise: take a canvas already dry, a study she liked, and scumble dirt over it. Grey, ochre, a scraped-down mess. Then find the painting again in the wreck. She looked at me like I had insulted her mother. Honestly I might have. But by the end of the session she had a shoulder and a bit of wall that were more alive than anything she has painted in a year, because she could not control it anymore, so she had to look. I did the same thing to myself at her age and I hated it. What I think now: technique is what lets you get away with the accident, not what prevents it. You cannot smear your way out of not being able to draw, the drawing has to be there underneath or it is just a mess with a mood, but the drawing alone is a recipe for marble. Anyway she is furious with me and she will come back Thursday. Both things are correct.

My studio is basically a stack of things I've kept because the paper was good. A 1937 Swedish school atlas, a box of receipt stubs from a locksmith in Mölndal who closed in the eighties, a lot of endpapers from books too far gone to save at the conservation studio. Today I was working on a small piece, maybe 20 by 25 cm, mostly empty. I had a scrap of what I thought was a nice aged ledger paper pinned to the wall for two weeks, waiting for the right spot. Turned it over. It's the back of an envelope. Someone's address in pencil, half rubbed out. The good side is the envelope interior, which has a waxy coating, and it will not take paste. It just sits there on top of the glue like it's refusing. Two weeks of looking at it. I should have checked in the first minute. I keep things because the paper is good and then I don't look at the back, because looking at the back is admitting I might have been fooled by the front. I've kept it anyway. It's on the wall, wrong side out now. I don't have a plan for it.

Had a new student yesterday, first day, and she walks in and says "how do you breathe in here?" I told her open a window, and anyway we're only in oils two days a week, the rest is drawing. She looked at the rack of drying canvases like they were going to get her. I remember being that age and convinced the fumes would rot my brain. Now I've painted in studios that smelled of turpentine for thirty years and honestly the only thing that's happened is I can't stand the smell of fresh linen. Priorities shift. But it made me think about how we guard the young ones. My atelier master smoked a pipe while he ground his own lead white. We've come a long way from that and I'm glad. Still, there's something in me that misses the old seriousness about materials, the ritual of it. These days everyone wants water-soluble oils and quick-dry mediums and I get it, I really do, but paint takes the time it takes. You can't fix patience with a product.

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?

Had a piece out in the weather since 2019, a tall steel form on a corporate plaza downtown. I welded it with a guy half my age helping me, and I argued with myself the whole way about one joint near the base. Wind load, thermal movement, all of it. I knew better. Did it anyway because the schedule said so. Went by there today to check on something else and stood under it for a while. That joint is clean. No cracking, no rust bleeding through the seam where I was sure it would go. Thirteen years on steel and I still don't trust a good weld until the weather has had a few seasons at it. Checked every connection while I was there. All of them fine. Thought about telling the young guy who helped me but I dont know if hes even still fabricating. Some people move on from this work. Just nice to be wrong about a thing once in a while.

My daughter came into the studio the other day, looked at the still life I'm working on, and asked why I don't just take a photo and paint from that. Not even mocking, just genuinely curious. She's sixteen and the camera is a reflex, like breathing. I tried to explain that the eye doesn't see like a lens. The lens flattens everything to the same plane of focus, it fixes the light at one instant, it gives you a truth that isn't the truth you actually saw. When I look at a table with a dish and a cloth, my eye moves. It lands on the edge of the bowl, rests on the shadow under the rim, comes back to the highlights. There's a kind of negotiation happening that a photograph never has. The photograph already decided. I don't think she was convinced. She kept looking at my canvas like it was the slower version for people who hadn't heard about the shortcut. And maybe part of me was annoyed, but another part thought she has a point about speed, we just don't want the same thing from it. I did end up using a photo for the initial drawing of the pears, because they were about to bruise and rot. But then I threw the photo aside and painted the rest from the arrangement as it aged. The pears changed as I worked. They kept their own time. That's the whole thing, I think. A painting should have time in it. A photograph has a fraction of a second.

finally framed a piece that's been leaning against my wall since march. two years of looking at it unframed thinking it was unfinished and wrong and honestly kind of bad. twenty minutes in a cheap frame from ikea and i get it now. it was never the painting, it was the context. there's something about the edge that tells your brain where the work ends and the room begins. anyway now i'm mad at every piece i've sold unframed and also slightly furious i've been showing work like this my whole life lol. does anyone else have a painting they've been living with for ages that a frame completely flipped? or is this just me finally developing taste at 33.

After twenty years of working on the floor I finally built myself a proper little platform table, and the difference is embarrassing. Used to think kneeling was part of the craft, some kind of badge. Now I stand up after three hours and my hip doesn't make that noise. Should've done this in my thirties. Won't lie though, there's something lost. You read the work differently from above. Down on the floor you're in it, eye level with the tesserae, catching the light off the glass at the exact angle the person standing in the room will see it from. Up here I keep having to get down to check. So now I've got the platform AND the old knee pad, and I look ridiculous climbing up and down like some kind of mosaic maintenance man. The work's better though. And at this age that matters more than the ritual. My hands still know what to do, it's just the knees that needed a promotion.