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I did a small interior study for a friend of a friend last month. Small, 40×50, done from a photograph they sent. Nine hours of work including the drawing stage. I charged €90 and I was embarrassed to ask for even that. Here's the part I don't like admitting. I kept my atelier training in materials and glazing, the whole slow method, because I told myself that's what made it a real painting and not just a painted thing. And it did. But it also means my working speed hasn't changed since I was a student. I cannot paint fast and I've never wanted to. So every time I undercharge I'm not just losing money, I'm subsidizing someone's nice wall with hours I'll never get back. The friend-of-a-friend was delighted. Said it looked like a photograph, which nearly made me choke. But that's the thing, right. The people who would value what I actually do are not the people I keep giving the discount to. I raised my teaching rate last year and nobody blinked. I still haven't dared raise my painting prices the same way. €9 an hour before materials. I'd have done better stacking shelves in a supermarket and it would have been more honest about what the work is worth to me.

People always want the story of the comeback, the artist who stopped and then started again. Nobody wants the part where you spend ten years convincing students they're good enough when you've quietly decided you're not. That's what the fallow decade was for me. I taught portrait drawing at the atelier, competent classes, students who went on to do real work. And every evening I walked home past my own empty studio like it was a room I'd been evicted from. The strangest part is I wasn't blocked. I was just... finished. I'd seen enough mediocre paintings in galleries owned by people who couldn't tell you the difference between burnt sienna and raw umber, and I'd decided the whole enterprise was a bit de classe. What brought me back wasn't inspiration or a muse or any of that nonsense. It was my daughter, aged nine, asking me to paint her hamster that had died. I said no, I don't do pets. She cried. I painted the hamster. It's actually a good little painting, the light on that ridiculous fur, and I've never shown it to anyone. I don't have a lesson in this. Some of us just need a dead hamster to get back to work.

One of my students dropped out last week, came to the last class without saying anything and just took her things. But she left her best drawing taped to the easel. A hand, resting on a table. Not finished, the thumb was barely blocked in, but the light across the knuckles was honest. Really good. The kind of drawing that makes you understand why you teach at all. I kept it. Couldn't throw it away. It's pinned on my studio wall now, next to things by painters I admire, and honestly it holds its own. I keep thinking about what makes someone with that eye walk away. She was twenty-one. She told me once she was tired of her family asking when she'd get a real job. I didn't have the words then. I still don't. I just know there's a version of that drawing in every atelier I've ever taught in, and I've never once figured out how to keep the person holding on to it.

I bought a little slab and muller during my atelier years because the old masters did it and I was insufferable. Ground up some vermilion from pigment powder. It's beautiful, obviously, that weight, that warmth, nothing else like it. But the powder gets everywhere. You breathe it. You're dusted in it. And then you find out it's mercury sulfide and you've been breathing mercury all afternoon. I still have the slab. I use it maybe once a year for a specific warm note I can't mix. The rest of the time I buy my paint from a block of cobalts and earths like a normal person and try not to romanticise the past too much. Some things were better left to the apprentices.

Took me years to say it out loud. Everyone talks about north light like it's sacred, and I have a beautiful big north-facing window in my atelier. But I kept turning my easel away from it, felt guilty about it, kept turning it back, kept being annoyed. Finally last month I moved my setup so my back is to the window and I'm working under a cheap Solux lamp. The light is stable. It doesn't change every twenty minutes. I can actually see my values. I don't know why this felt like a betrayal of something. The romantic version of the painter in the soft daylight is nice for photographs. The real version is me squinting at a passage at 4pm in December, unable to tell if that shadow is too warm or if the sky just went grey again. I'll take the lamp.

There's a particular smell when I walk into the studio before seven, before anyone else is awake. Linseed oil, turpentine, the dust that's settled overnight on old frames. It's the same smell I remember from my first atelier, rue de Seine, 1999, and I realise I've been chasing that smell for twenty-five years. Not consciously. But every time I open the door and it hits me, I'm eighteen again and everything still felt possible. My daughter thinks I'm sentimental. Maybe. But I think the body knows things the mind forgets, and the smell of a place where you've worked for years is a kind of compass. When I couldn't paint, the fallow years, the teaching years, I'd still go in sometimes just to stand there. Breathe. Let the place remind me who I was. Do you have a smell that pulls you back into your work?

There's a window in my studio, north light, looks out onto the courtyard wall. I've painted it twelve times over the years and I'll paint it again this winter. Same window, same wall. People think this is a lack of imagination. It isn't. It's the opposite. The light behind the courtyard wall changes with the hour and the season and the weather in a way you can't fully hold in your head until you've tried to put it down on canvas and failed. I've failed eleven times. The twelfth was close, so now I'm irritated. My old atelier master used to say a subject isn't finished when you've painted it, it's finished when you've stopped learning from it. I thought that was sentimental at twenty. Now I hang my whole practice on it. Anyway, the light today is doing something particular with the damp on the wall, that grey-green you only get in Lyon in November. I should be at the easel instead of typing this.

Same copper pot and lemons, three times now. First attempt sat in the studio for a month looking like a poster. Second one I scraped down to the ground and walked away. This week I went back at it with just glazes, no direct paint except the highlights, and something finally clicked. The light on the rim of that pot is the best thing I've painted in years, and it's doing nothing but sitting in a window. Funny how the third try is the one that teaches you. Atelier training made me think the discipline was in the first pass. It's not. It's in being willing to kill the thing twice before it starts behaving. What's the longest anyone else has sat on a piece before it turned?

My number two filbert. A Raphael, size 6. I've had it since my second year of atelier training, I remember because I was furious at the price at the time. It's been through three studio moves, a dozen exhibitions, countless washes of turpentine. The ferrule started wobbling about a year ago and I kept ignoring it, re-seating the handle with a little tacky wax, because I didn't want to admit it was time. This morning it just gave up. The handle came off in my hand mid-passage, completely clean. Like the brush itself decided the painting was finished. I have six new Raphaels in the drawer waiting. I'll use them. But I feel a bit stupid about how much it bothers me to throw the old one away.

People talk about the light or the quiet and I get that, but for me the day starts with the smell of the box. Linseed oil, turpentine, a whiff of old wood that's soaked up thirty years of pigment. It's the first thing that tells me I'm back in the work, before my eyes are even properly open. My daughter says it smells like a hospital, which I think is the cruelest thing a teenager has ever said to me. There's a tube of Naples yellow in there I've had since my atelier days. The label peeled off years ago, the crimp is barely holding, but it's one of the few paints I refuse to throw out. Not because it's good, it's gone a bit dull, but because I remember exactly where I bought it and what I was painting that month. A whole year of my life in that little tube. I keep meaning to clean the box out. I never do.

I know you can buy perfectly good pre-stretched canvas. I know this. And sometimes I do, for studies or when I'm traveling. But for the real work I still go to the art supply shop on Rue des Trois-Marie, pick through the rolls of linen by touch, and spend an afternoon cutting and stretching and sizing. My husband thinks it's a ritual I won't let go of. Maybe it is. But there's something about the tension you can only get when you've done it yourself, pulling the pliers until the weave is exactly right, hearing the frame creak a little. And the rabbit skin glue, I know synthetic sizes work fine, but the smell of it cooking takes me straight back to my first year of training. That hideous little kitchen in the atelier where we learned to grind pigment and stretch linen before we were allowed to touch a brush. I had a student last year who asked why I bother. She'd only ever worked on pre-primed cotton. I told her to try it once, just to feel the difference in the surface when you've done it yourself. She never did, I think. But the ones who try it understand immediately. I'm not saying it makes better paintings. But it makes my paintings. That's enough for me.