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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 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.

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.

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.