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i brought in a 30x40 acrylic for a commission frame job and the guy behind the counter goes "oh nice, decorative" with this little smirk. like yeah dude that's one of the functions of art. i hang it on walls. it's visually pleasing. do you want me to be miserable every time i look at it or what. i should've said something but i just did the customer service grimace smile and said "yep that's me" and now i'm mad about it in retrospect which is worse. if you're gonna be a framing shop art critic at least have the spine for me to argue back while we're both standing there.

Had a woman at a dinner party last week, lovely enough, tells me she's "really getting into painting" and wants my advice. So I ask what she's working on. She tells me she's copying a photo of her dog, in acrylic, and she's almost done but the nose looks wrong. I say, okay, bring it to my studio sometime, or send a photo, I'll look at the values. She says: "Oh, I don't want criticism, I just do it for fun." Then why ask the painter? I don't tell her to quit. I don't care that she's not serious. But don't ask a professional for advice and then preemptively refuse the thing that advice actually is. You want encouragement, say that. But don't call it asking for advice. I blame the whole "there's no wrong way to make art" line. It's true for her, fine, it's true. It's also a way of never getting better at anything. And then they wonder why their dog's nose is wrong. I ended up just saying, bring it anyway, I won't be brutal. But I thought about it for two days after. There's something about being treated as either a therapist or a cheerleader that gets under my skin.

Opened the studio this weekend for the open studios thing. Nothing special, just a chance for people to wander through. Middle of the afternoon a woman maybe my age comes in with her daughter, maybe twenty. Walks straight to a piece I made three years ago from an old boiler door and some broken factory gearing. Stands there. Then she says to her daughter, very quietly, I wasn't meant to hear, "Look. Someone saved this." That's it. Thats the win. Someone saved it. Not someone made art from it. Someone saved it. I've been thinking about that sentence for three days. She understood the whole thing in four words better than any critic ever has.