Search

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.

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.

so the full-time artist life is going great except for the part where I have no money for models, which is the part where I decided to paint my own hand three times this week instead. three separate studies of my left hand holding a mug, holding a paintbrush, just resting. hands are SO hard. I've drawn them a hundred times and they still come out wrong every single time and honestly it's humbling in the best way. but here's the thing. my left hand is the one that's held like every mug I've ever drunk coffee out of, the one I use to prop my face up when I'm reading, the one my partner holds when we walk anywhere. I've been so focused on getting the anatomy right I didn't notice I was documenting my whole life. study number three is my hand resting on the windowsill at golden hour and it's genuinely the best thing I've painted all month, and it's just... my hand. my boring left hand that does nothing special. anyway I'm framing it. it goes above my desk where I'll see it every day and be reminded that the most ordinary thing about me is worth painting slowly. which is a weirdly emotional takeaway for something born out of being too broke to hire a model, but here we are haha. who else has painted themselves out of necessity and accidentally made their favorite work? I can't be the only one

I've been fighting the same portrait for two weeks now and specifically the nose. Eleven times. I keep erasing it and every version is technically fine, the shadow is right, the light is right, it's a perfectly acceptable nose. And it is not HER nose. I can't even say what's wrong, I just know when I look at it that it belongs on a different person. The funny thing is nobody else can see it. I showed a friend and she said it looks lovely. And I thought, good, so I'm just crazy. But then I looked again and it's still not her nose. I think this is the part of portraiture nobody warns you about. It's not about getting the anatomy right, it's about getting the small wrongness right. The exact degree of crooked that makes a face a face. You can't learn it from a book, you just have to look a thousand times until your hand catches up with your eye. Anyway I'm on attempt twelve tonight. Wish me luck. Or tell me you know this feeling so I feel less insane.

Found a self-portrait I did in 2019 while clearing out storage. Before I had any idea what I was doing, before I'd even touched oil. Just charcoal and sheer desperation. It's rough as hell, the anatomy is all wrong, but I keep staring at it because the eyes are honest in a way I can't fake now. I've gotten so much "better" and I'm not sure better is the same thing as truer. Been thinking about that all day. Do I still paint like the person who made that? I honestly don't know and it's kind of eating at me.

I delivered a small piece last week, 20x25cm, torn pages from a 1930s French anatomy book, just three elements on a pale ground. Charged €250. The gallery sells my work at €480 and takes 50%, so I got €240. It took me 14 hours because I kept scrapping it and starting again. That's about €17 an hour before materials. I know the math is bad. Objectively I know. But I also know I wouldn't have made it faster if I'd rushed. The quiet part is I'm not sure I want to work faster. I want to sit with a piece until it's right. That's the whole point of doing this. I don't know what to do with that. Raise the price and risk the gallery dropping me? Accept that collage is a loss leader for a life I'd be living anyway?

I have a half-figure on the easel, a woman turned slightly away, one hand resting on the back of a chair. Almost nothing else decided yet. The hand is the problem. First pass I painted it thin, straight into the wet ground, no drawing underneath worth keeping. It was loose and a little clumsy and it read. Then I decided to take it seriously. Redrew it properly, measured it against the head, corrected the knuckle, gave it a real structure. Dead. Third time I chased that structure and overworked it worse. Fourth I wiped back to the ground and did it again fast, and it came out almost exactly like the first. What I keep circling: I know the anatomy, I know why the first one worked (the edge of the forearm got lost in the shadow, so the eye finished the shape), and I still could not paint it that way on purpose. The knowledge gets in front of the seeing. So the question I have no answer for, and I'd like yours: when you finally see what the good version was, do you paint it again clean, or do you scrape the whole thing and let it happen once? Also, for the record, I am not wiping the hand a fifth time. That is what I told myself this morning and I have already caught myself looking at the rag.