Search

Third wash this morning and the mug just gets thicker. Rust-colored ring around the inside, old pigment that never fully came off, a hairline crack in the handle I keep meaning to fix and never do. Every other mug in the house is fine. I keep reaching for the broken one. I don't know when it turned into a rule. Maybe when I realized I'd rather lose an hour coaxing a brush clean than buy a new one. Same with the palette I never scrub down fully, just layer over. There's something under there I don't want to dig up. Today I'm wrecking a piece that's been too tidy for three weeks. Ripping it up, gluing it down wrong on purpose. Feels better already. Anyone else got a broken thing they won't replace? Not a sentimental object, an actual tool. One you could swap for ten bucks and won't.

Pulled out an old shoebox today looking for collage paper and there it was. A photo of my brother's hands. He's holding up a fish he caught, grinning off-frame. I don't remember taking it. Must be twenty-five years old. I've been trying to figure out how to tear it without wrecking it. Which is stupid because I tear paper every day. But his knuckles, you know. The way his thumb bent. I ended up taping it to the studio wall instead. Just staring at it while my coffee went cold. Did a lot of crying in my early twenties about how nothing lasts. Now I'm in my forties making art out of the pieces of things that didn't. Some days the whole practice feels like a long argument with that younger version of me. She thought you had to hold on tight. Turns out you just have to pay attention.

i was digging through old work last night, stuff from like 2017, 2018, before i had any clue what i was doing technically. and it's so raw. like genuinely uncomfortable to look at. there's this one charcoal portrait i did on newsprint of all things, the paper is practically disintegrating, and the face is just WRONG, proportions all off, but god it has something in it. it's looking at you. it's hurting. and i look at what i'm making now with my better materials and my figured-out process and it's more refined but it doesn't hit the same way. i feel like i've gotten safer without meaning to. like i learned how to make things that don't embarrass me and lost whatever made people stop and stare. i don't want to romanticize being in a bad place just to make good art. i've worked too hard to get somewhere steadier. but i can't pretend i don't see the difference. anyone else feel like their messiest work has a pulse the polished stuff doesn't?

I'm asking because I nearly died of shame at this. First gallery I approached, they said send your artist CV, and mine was a blank page with one group show from 2019 and my day job on it. I panicked and wrote two paragraphs about "my practice" instead, which I'm fairly sure nobody read. Now I have a bit more and honestly the blank-CV years are still the thing I dread talking about. So: what did you actually do? Did you send the empty one, pad it out, leave the art out and just talk about yourself, or say nothing and hope they didn't ask? Tell me I'm not the only one who googled "artist CV no exhibitions" at 2am 🙂

I bought a pack of those super cheap synthetic brushes at Michael's a few months ago, like $8 for a dozen, just to beat up on for texture work and practice pieces. And now I reach for them almost every time over the nice ones my husband got me for Christmas. They're not even good brushes. The ferrule is wobbly and one of them is already shedding. But they're the exact right stiffness for how I actually paint, and I'm not scared to mess them up. That's the thing. The nice ones sit in the jar and I keep talking myself out of using them because what if I ruin them. Meanwhile the $8 ones are doing all the real work. I think I need to just give the good ones to a purpose. Use them on a piece I actually care about and stop treating them like they're museum pieces. Anyone else have brushes they are weirdly protective of and never use? Or am I just hoarding nice art supplies like everybody does.

People ask me which brush company and I have to laugh. For the fine black line in Mithila work we do not buy brushes at all. We take a small twig, neem or sometimes bamboo, and we chew the end of it, or press and roll it on a stone until the tip becomes soft and pointed like a needle. Then it is a brush. Nothing else. I keep a small bundle of them tied with thread and when one goes blunt I simply cut the tip and make it again. My mother used to do this sitting outside in the morning light and I do the same now. It is the first work of the day, before any painting. The twig has to be fresh, if it dries it splits and you cannot get the line. So there is a little tree behind the house and my grandson is always the one sent to break the branches, which he does very happily and very badly. Somebody from Delhi once saw my bundle and asked if I could not simply use a 0.1 mm brush from the art shop. I said I could. I did not say I would. The line from a chewed twig is not like the line from a brush. It drinks colour and gives it slowly. If your hand is not steady it will show, there is no help from the bristles. So the twig keeps me honest. When I have not painted for many days I feel it in the first twig, the line comes out shivering. That is my measure of practice. Only difficulty is the colour. My twigs are good for black and for fine work, but for filling large areas the squirrel hair brush from my mother's time is still doing duty, and it is now more thread than hair. I have not found anybody here who makes them. If any of you know a person, kindly tell me.

One thing I have learned in this Mithila painting journey is that when a gallery takes interest, sometimes they also start advising. "Make it smaller. Less detail. More modern. This border is too much." They think they are helping. Myself, I have refused more than once. Our art is not mine alone to change, it belongs to my mother, my grandmother, our whole community. The fine lines and the natural colours, that is the story. When I hold firm, sometimes they respect it. Sometimes they walk away. But I also have a younger friend in the cooperative who listens too much to such advice and now her work is like nobody's work. She is stuck in the middle. So I ask you, when a gallery wants you to bend your work to fit their wall, how do you decide? Where is the line between being practical and losing yourself? I am curious what others do.

Small thing I don't quite know how to hold. There was a little art fair on ul. Józefa yesterday, mostly ceramics and prints, one table with my pastels because a friend pushed me into it and I said yes mostly to stop talking about it. I priced them low. I was sure nobody buys a pastel in a plastic sleeve anyway. A woman in her sixties stood at my table for a long time and kept coming back to one head study, an old man on grey toned paper that took me three tries because the first two had no life in them. She asked who he was. I told her nobody, just someone I invented to practice the jaw on. She laughed and said that's the one, and paid me in cash and wanted the receipt signed, which I've never done before and my hand was not steady. It's the money, sure, but it's more that a stranger walked around for ten minutes and chose the face. My partner came home and I told him and then I cried in the kitchen, over a pastel. Ridiculous. I keep going between feeling proud and feeling like she made a mistake and will figure it out. Anyway. Does it get less strange, the first time someone you don't know takes a piece home?

I welded a staircase railing for the art building at a community college in 2004. Not a sculpture technically, but they wanted something that looked like one. Paid fifteen thousand, which felt fine at the time for six weeks work. Twenty years later I still get five hundred dollars a year from that college. They call it a maintenance and consultation fee. Theyve never called me once. Its in the contract my old self signed and I keep meaning to tell them to stop. But I dont. That five hundred is the only passive income Ive ever had in this trade. Everything else was show up, get dirty, get paid, do it again. And I know people online talk about recurring revenue like its something you design into your practice from day one. I never did. It just happened because I wrote a stupid clause into a bid for a staircase.

My own mother's brother. At lunch yesterday. Looking at a painting I'd just finished of a house on Wheeler Road that's about to be demolished, I was actually pretty happy with how the light came through the portico. And he goes, "All this is nice, but when are you going back to proper architecture? Enough timepass na?" Timepass. I spent seven years in practice before I switched. I know what a structural load calculation looks like. I know what it is to sit through a client meeting where they want to change everything at the 11th month. I haven't forgotten any of it. I just chose something else. And the thing is, he's not even being mean. He genuinely thinks he's looking out for me. That's the part that gets me. The concern. The well-meaning. The absolute certainty that art is what you do until you find something serious. I didn't say much. Just smiled and said maybe next year. But I've been thinking about it all evening and I'm still irritated.