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It's sitting on the shelf above the palette, unopened, and I've been walking past it for two weeks. Flake white, the real one, with lead. My old teacher in the atelier used nothing else for the flesh, said the titanium was for people who wanted their highlights to look like plastic. He was a difficult man and mostly right. Twenty years later I finally ordered a tube, 40ml, which cost more than my lunch for a week, and now I can't bring myself to break the seal. Part of it is the safety business, of course. I live with a teenager, I have a small studio with one window, and I think about the dust. Part of it is that a tube that expensive makes every mark feel like an exam. And part of it is worse: I'm not sure my hand is good enough anymore to justify it. That's the real reason it's still closed. Bof. It will get opened on the next figure study, probably on a bad day, which is the correct day for it. Does anyone else do this? Buy the good thing and then leave it on the shelf like a hostage?

There is a particular kind of stupid I only do in oil. This morning I had a half-figure drying on the easel, the shadow side of the neck needed to go cooler and softer, and instead of just taking the gray already sitting there I mixed a fresh one. Lead white, a touch of raw umber, viridian. Beautiful. Put it down. It was the same gray. I'd spent fifty minutes arriving at the thing I could have reached across the palette for. My old teacher in the atelier would have caught it in three seconds and made me scrape it off as punishment. He used to say the palette is a conversation you're already having, stop shouting over it. I thought that was just cruelty at the time. It's not. It's the whole job. Anyway the neck is better now. I kept the second gray, used it on the ear. Waste not. The other thing, and this is less charming: I've started noticing I do this more when I'm avoiding the actual problem in the painting, which is that the whole pose is a little too polite. The figure is sitting too nicely. I keep fixing the neck because I don't want to admit the composition needs to be broken open, and it's going to cost me a week. Voilà.

Found an unopened tube of Naples yellow in the back of my paint box today. Must be from my atelier days, so over twenty years old. The label is faded but the crimp is still sealed. I opened it and the pigment came out like butter. Better than anything I buy now. I used to be so careful with paint. That whole first decade I treated every tube like it cost gold, because it did. Now I squeeze out more than I need without thinking and leave it to skin over on the palette. My student saw me scrape a mound of perfectly good ultramarine into the bin today and made a face. She didn't say anything but I felt it. Maybe the discipline is still there somewhere, it just moved. These days I spend more on a good brush than I'd have spent on a month of paint back then. I'm keeping the empty tube on my shelf. Reminds me that I used to know the price of things.

I did a half-length of a woman in a green armchair last spring. Fourteen sessions, two hours each, plus the drying and the varnishing. Quoted 2 200 euros for the painting. The client wanted it framed and I said yes, I'll take care of it. Went to my man in the 7e, solid oak, hand-finished, 310 euros. Handed her the painting, she was delighted, she paid, everyone shook hands. Then I did the arithmetic on a Sunday, which is always a mistake. Fourteen sessions plus prep plus varnish, call it thirty-five hours, minus the frame, minus the canvas and the lead white I burned through, that's not 63 euros an hour, it's closer to 54. Before I pay myself anything at all. For work that took me eleven years of atelier training to be able to do. I know that 54 is not nothing. But my dentist doesn't frame things for free. Voilà. The real problem is I never asked myself whether the price should have included the frame before I opened my mouth. I just said yes, because she was standing in front of me being nice about the painting. I am very good at being nice about the painting. I've since put framing on a separate line on the quote. It feels awkward, like I'm nickel-and-diming a client who is already spending two thousand euros with me. But the alternative is me eating 310 every time and calling it part of the job.

I'll go first and I'm a little ashamed. I was 26, atelier still in my legs, and a small gallery in a neighbouring city offered me a show. I signed the contract the same afternoon. Didn't read the exclusivity clause. Turned out I'd given them 18 months on all sales, including anything I sold privately, in any region in France. My first dealer taught me exactly one useful thing: that mistake. Who here signed something on the way up they'd never sign now? And what did it cost you, or what did you learn?