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Myself Ramesh. I want to say something that has been on my mind. In the old way, we make our own colours. Rice paste for white. Lampblack from the diya. The red from kusum flower or from geru, the earth. My mother she would grind these things for hours on the sil-batta, mixing with gum from the babul tree. The colour sits on the paper differently. It breathes. Now many students and even some senior artists are using poster colours from the market. It is faster. Also cheaper sometimes. But I look at those paintings and the line has no life. The colour is flat like plastic. You can feel no hand in it. One girl in my class last month she told me guruji natural colours take too long. I said beta that is not a problem. That is the art itself. The grinding, the mixing, the waiting, this is not wasted time. This is the painting. But I also understand. The buyers they want bright. They want quick. And we must eat. So I am conflicted ji. I use both now. Some natural for my own work, some synthetic when I must. But I feel a little shame mixing the two in one painting. Like I am cheating my grandmother. Anyone else feel this way about old materials vs new ones? Or is it only me.🙂

A foreign buyer came to my village last year. A German lady, very polite, through a cooperative. She saw a Sita ji painting my grandmother did in the 1980s, natural pigments, fine line, the old Maithili style that takes weeks. She wanted to buy it. I told her price, 8,000 rupees. She smiled and said "for local art, that seems high." Then she offered 500 rupees. I could not speak for a moment. 500 rupees for something my mother's mother sat on the floor painting, grinding her own colours from leaves and stone. I told her no, sorry, this painting is not for sale now. She looked confused. I think she thought I would bargain. But some things you do not bargain over. This is the problem we have with folk art. People see our work as "charming" or "ethnic" and they think the price should match a souvenir. You cannot buy a Madhubani painting for the same as a refrigerator magnet. My daughter worked three days on a single fish motif last month. Three days. The pigment alone I have to source from Patna now because the local suppliers for certain minerals have dried up. I am not angry at the lady. She did not know. But I am tired of explaining that this art has a price. My time, my mother's time, my grandmother's recipes for colour. It is not decorative. It is our history.

Okay so I've been blaming myself all week for these muddy skies. Like genuinely sitting here going "what is wrong with you Dani, you know how to do a wet on wet by now." Changing my water, my brush angle, my breathing (??) trying to fix it. Then this morning I switched brands of paper because the art store was out of my usual and it was flawless on the first try. The paper. It was the paper the whole time. I almost laughed out loud alone in my studio. I think the humbling part is how quick I am to assume the failure is in me and not in the materials. Which honestly tracks with a lot of other things about me haha. But also. It means I wasted an entire week of good painting time being mad at my own hands. Anyone else ever fought a problem for days and it turned out to be something dumb like the tooth of the paper or the humidity or whatever?

A woman bought one of the small ones in November, 24x30, six pieces of torn paper and a lot of nothing. I asked 3,200 kronor. She paid without blinking. That is the part that stays with me. Not that she paid it. That it took her four seconds. I priced it by counting hours, which is the wrong way to price anything I make, because the hours are mostly me standing at the window deciding not to glue something down. Comes to maybe 700 an hour if I only count the cutting. If I count the thinking it is a joke. So now I have a number that works and I am afraid of it. Not afraid to say it again, afraid that it was luck, that the next person will look at the same size and hear the number and go quiet. And I have already caught myself, twice, drafting a lower figure for a piece that is actually harder. A 40x50 with hand-torn edges from a 1940s Swedish reader. I sat with the email open for an hour. The conservation work pays by the hour and nobody argues about it. Paper is paper. The art is the only thing I do where the price has to come out of me. Anyway. I raised the small ones to 3,600 this month. Nothing has sold since. I am not sorry yet but it has only been three weeks.

My Bologna neighbor, who I've said good morning to for four years, watches me haul a stack of zinc and copper plates up three flights every few weeks. Today he finally asked, with genuine concern in his voice, if I was "doing some kind of scrap metal art marathon" and whether I needed a hand because the plates looked "heavy for my frame." I thanked him and said no, it's printmaking, it's etching. He nodded slowly and said, "Ah, like the recycling." Not the worst interpretation. Honestly some days that's exactly what it is. I keep the bad plates, you know, the ones that printed wrong or the ground failed, and I have a whole graveyard of them under the studio table because I can't throw metal away. It's a hoarding problem disguised as ecological conscience. So maybe he's not wrong. The marathon part I can't defend. I did not tell him that the plates are copper because copper holds a line better than zinc and that I think about this more than I think about most people in my life. Some conversations stay at the door.

Last spring I sent a quote to a small Kunsthalle for a room installation. Fourteen thousand euros. Materials, three weeks of my time, the two students who help me weld and haul, transport from the depot in Holešovice, and the part nobody budgets for, which is the week at the end where you walk through the thing alone and move eleven objects until it stops feeling wrong. The reply came back the next morning. She asked whether the fourteen thousand was per square metre. I sat with that for a while. Not because she was being rude. Because she genuinely did not know what she was looking at. In her head a room of art is a quantity, like gravel or plasterboard, and it must have a unit price. Somewhere in her institution there is a spreadsheet column for that. I wrote back and said no, it is for the whole room, and then I halved it, because I wanted the show and because I am fifty-eight and still doing that. Seven thousand. She said it was a lot for a temporary project. I said nothing for two days. Then I signed. The thing I keep chewing on is that the number was never the problem. I could have held fourteen and she would have found it, institutions find money when they want the work. The problem is I have no vocabulary for defending the figure. I can talk about assemblage for an hour. Ask me why a room costs what it costs and I go quiet and discount myself like a man haggling over his own coat. I am told younger artists have this figured out. I hope so. It took me thirty years to learn to weld properly and I still cannot say a price out loud without apologizing in the same sentence.

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.

Small thing, but it has been sitting on me since Tuesday. A woman who organises a small art fair in Matosinhos wrote to me in January and asked if I wanted a table in March. I said I would think about it, which is what I always say. Then I forgot, or made myself forget. She wrote again on Tuesday. Eleven exhibitors, a room above the fish market, three days. I typed the reply and deleted it four times before I sent it. The yes is nine words long. It took me most of the afternoon. I have been making work the whole time, that was never the problem. The problem is the part where it goes out into a room with strangers and a price on it, and I have become very good at avoiding that part. Two years of it. Enough prints to fill a wall and nobody has seen them. What convinced me in the end was stupid and small. I was rinsing a sheet in the sea at Foz on Sunday, the water was 13 degrees, and I thought, the paper has already survived worse than a fair in Matosinhos. So. Nine weeks. I need to build frames, which I hate, and work out how to price things, which I hate more. If anyone has done one of these small local fairs, I would take advice. But mostly I just wanted to say it out loud, because now I cannot quietly not do it.

There's a canvas on my wall right now with a jawline I've gone over so many times it's gone grey. Charcoal on top of charcoal on top of charcoal until the paper's got that slick shine where it stops taking anything at all. And I kept going. Kept saying "one more pass, the angle's just a little off" like the angle was ever the problem. It wasn't. I know it wasn't. The whole piece came out of the gut in twenty minutes last week and it was RIGHT, and then I got scared of it and started fixing. Now it's safe and dead and I've spent 45 minutes I'll never get back sanding the life off it with an eraser. I do this every time I get close to something real. Get scared, reach for the pencil, tidy it up. My old art teacher would say work the whole thing not the eye. I never had an old art teacher. I taught myself and I taught myself this habit apparently, sitting alone in a room deciding a thing I made is too much and dialing it down till it's polite. Anyway. It's 11pm. I'm either going to repaint the whole face over in one go and ruin it properly, or leave it til morning and hate it either way. Leaning toward ruining it properly. That's the only one that ever turns into anything.

when i dropped out of art school nobody told me the real curriculum was "learn to stand in one spot for four hours." i've been standing at the easel since 2021 and my right knee now clicks like a metronome when i walk down stairs. still not getting a stool. reason is dumb and real: sitting makes me think too much. standing, i'm physically in the thing, arm's already moving before the little committee in my head votes. i can see the whole 4x5 canvas without leaning back. the actual problem is my floor. it's cheap laminate and after three years of shifting weight in the same square i've worn a bald patch in the finish, right where my feet live. looks like a horse stood there. landlord is gonna love that. anyway i'm painting a big flat square of that cheap red-orange they use on soup cans, and the only way to feel if the density is right is to back up across the room and squint, which means i'm basically doing lunges all day. my legs are gonna be incredible by the time this show is done. the painting might not be.