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ok this is going to sound ridiculous but i'm sitting here cleaning my brushes after finishing a piece and i got genuinely emotional over my old escoda. i've had this one brush since my second year of undergrad, it's a size 10 travel brush, the handle is all chewed up because i was a nervous student who bit her brushes (gross i know but i was 19 and stressed), the ferrule is slightly loose, and i've rewarped the bristles like three times with my mouth after bad cleaning habits. but it still holds a point better than any new brush i own. i literally cannot paint without it. i dropped it once in 2018 and my heart stopped for a second. i know brushes are technically replaceable and there's this whole "don't get attached to tools" mentality in art but like. NO. i AM attached. this thing has been through every single painting i've ever been proud of. it was in my hand when i painted my dad's portrait the year he died. it came with me to every shitty shared studio i've ever had. it's survived three moves and a minor flood. my partner bought me a fancy new escoda for christmas and i keep it in the wrapper because i'm scared to use it. i don't want to replace my old one. it's not the same. anyone else have that one tool that's basically a part of them at this point

Okay so I finally snapped and did the thing we all joke about. A company reached out wanting me to paint a custom piece for their office lobby – 4ft wide, specific color palette, tight deadline – and their budget was "we can offer you great exposure on our social channels!" I get it, I'm small, I'm new at this full-time thing, I know how it goes. But I was just so tired. So I wrote up a proper invoice. Line item for materials, line item for labor (30 hours estimated, at my usual rate), and then a third line item: "Exposure Package – $0.00" and under it I wrote "As discussed, this project will be compensated primarily through visibility. Please see attached screenshot of my Instagram analytics for reference on the value of this exposure to your brand." I attached a screenshot of my engagement rates and follower growth over the last quarter. And I sent it. Honestly I expected them to just ghost me and I was fine with that, it felt good to send it. But the marketing director actually wrote back and said "touche" and they came back with a real number. Not a great number, not gonna lie, it was still kind of low. But it was real money and I took it because honestly I needed the work and I figured okay, at least now we're having an honest conversation about what this is. I don't know if I'd do it again, it felt a little snotty. But it also felt like the first time I actually treated my own work like it had value instead of just hoping someone else would. Anyone else done something petty that actually kind of worked??

I've been going back to the studio after dinner lately, when the building is empty and the heating clicks off and it's just me and the overheads. There's no good reason for it. I have normal daytime hours like anyone else. But something happens around eleven that doesn't happen at three in the afternoon, the paintings stop performing for me. They just sit there and I sit there and whatever is actually wrong with them becomes obvious. Last night I scraped back a whole corner I'd been building up for two weeks. Big silver-grey mass I was attached to. Gone in twenty minutes. And I could see immediately: it had been dead weight the whole time. The painting breathed again. I don't know why it takes the middle of the night to see that. Maybe because there's nobody to show it to later.

Old bristle filbert, had it since 2016. The ferrule just gave up mid-stroke and the head flew off and hit the wall. I stared at it on the floor for a solid minute and then I just... laughed. It's weird how attached I get to specific tools. Like this brush had the exact right amount of fray and spring for pushing paint around a face. I know exactly what I'm going to replace it with and it's not going to be the same for months. Part of me is like, good. New tool, new energy. Stop relying on the same old crutch. Part of me wants to glue it back together and pretend it's fine. Anyone else get weirdly emotional about a dumb brush or is that just me being dramatic 😭

A friend from years ago asked me to paint her daughter's portrait for her 18th. I said yes at €600, already half what I'd charge a stranger for a 50x60cm oil on linen. She's a friend, fine. Then the emails started. "Could you do it from these five photos instead?" "Actually she's wearing a different dress now, can you change the colour?" "Her hair is shorter than that photo shows." "My mother thinks the background should be lighter." I repainted the face from new reference, adjusted the dress twice, scraped and repainted the background. All told I probably spent close to 25 hours on a painting that should have taken maybe 12. At my usual hourly rate for commissioned work that comes out to about €24 an hour. My assistant, who stretches canvases, makes €16. So I earned roughly the same as the person who stretches my canvases, for a job that required twenty years of training. The friend was happy. The daughter cried when she saw it. Beautiful moment. I don't regret it exactly. But I sat down afterwards and did the math and realised I'd basically given her a €1,200 painting plus a free workshop in how to manage an artist. Never again without a contract that says: one reference, one revision, anything beyond that is a new fee. Curious if anyone else has a number attached to the "learning experience" of a commission that ran away from you.

I must have sent fifty emails into the void before one gallery answered. And when they did, it wasn't the long careful one I'd spent an hour on, it was a short note I almost didn't send, three sentences, attached a single image. I still think about that. What was the email that finally worked for you? Not the template, not the perfect one, the one that actually got a yes.

Five hours on my knees today and my right foot went completely numb, the kind of numb where you stand up and it's just a block of meat attached to your leg for a full minute. I'm 45, I know this is my own doing. But I was in the middle of cutting smalti for a sky section and I couldn't stop, the color was exactly right and the light was going, you know how it is. Took the cats outside with me afterward and sat on the step with a beer and watched them sniff things. No profound lesson. Just sore knees and a cold can of Fix and a half-finished sky that's going to look good tomorrow.

It's a single nodding flower on a stem I cut from the garden last Monday. By Tuesday it had started to droop. By Thursday the petals were translucent and the stamens had begun to shed. Today it's practically a study in decay, the sepals are papery and brown at the edges, the stem is soft. I keep painting it anyway. There's a peculiar honesty to painting a specimen as it actually changes, rather than freezing it at its best moment. The color shifts, the structure fails, and you have to decide whether you're documenting the plant or your own attachment to how it looked three days ago. I think I'm doing both. I set up a new page each morning and work from life, not from the previous day's study. It's unsentimental work, or it's meant to be. The flower doesn't know it's declining. It just is what it is.

My favorite flat brush, a Princeton Catalyst I bought at a workshop two years ago, the one I was so precious with I'd wash it twice and never let it sit in the water cup, finally shed a bristle today mid-stroke on a sky I was actually happy with. It stuck right in the middle of a cloud. I fished it out but the damage was done, both to the painting and my trust lol. I know brushes wear out, that's what they do. But I swear I've been so careful with this one. Meanwhile the cheap multipack brushes I bought on a whim at Michael's are all still perfectly intact. Makes me wonder if I should just stop getting attached to nice supplies and treat everything as disposable. But then I think about how that Catalyst felt in the hand, how it laid down a smooth wash... ugh. Anyway I guess I'm in the market for a new favorite brush. Anyone else ever have a tool breakup that stung more than it should?

I've been in the studio since 7am and it's almost 9pm now. Didn't eat. Forgot. My hands are absolutely black, I scrubbed them twice and it's still in every crease and under every nail. I love it and I hate it lol. Started a piece this morning that I was SURE about. Like, this is it, this is the one. By 2pm I wanted to gesso over the whole thing. Talked myself down. Kept going. Now I think it might actually be something?? Not sure yet. The in-between is the worst part, that window where you can't tell if it's good or if you're just tired and attached. What do you guys do when you hit that wall mid-painting? Where you can't trust your own eyes anymore. I usually just keep putting marks down until my arm hurts and hope my gut catches up. Works about half the time 💀

ok so my partner keeps side-eyeing the glass jar on my desk that hasn't been rinsed out in probably four days. it's got this deep murky blue-gray with little flakes of gold mica settled at the bottom and like. i know i should change it. but also it's genuinely beautiful??? the way the sediment sits in layers, the way the light hits it in the afternoon when the sun comes through that window i'm always painting. i've been staring at it more than i've been painting this week honestly. i think there's something about having your mess right there in front of you that keeps you honest. like yeah i made that. i was working. the water will get changed when i need to mix something clean, not before. anyone else have weird studio grossness they're weirdly attached to

For about a year I tried to do the Instagram thing properly. Reels, stories, a little carousel about my process. I was showing up, I was consistent. And it worked, in a way, more eyes, more likes, a few commissions. But I was spending the part of the day when the light is right sitting inside editing a video of the light. Last autumn I just stopped. Not deliberately, not as a strategy, I had a show to prepare for and the choice was between making the prints or making the content. So I made the prints. I'm not on TikTok. I don't have a newsletter. My website is a single page with an email address. And honestly? This year has been better than last. Not richer, but better, the people who find me find me through word of mouth, or because someone saw a print in a friend's house, or because they walked into the shop that carries my work. Every sale has a real thread attached to it. Nobody found me through an algorithm and asked for a discount. I don't think this is advice. It's not scalable and I'm not trying to make a living off prints alone, my partner works, I teach a workshop now and then. But the pressure to perform the making instead of just making is so constant that I wonder how many of us are burning our best hours on it. The sea doesn't care about your content calendar.

Not the whole thing. The swivel base cracked clean in two. I've had that vise longer than I've had either of my kids. Clamped onto that same corner of the same bench for thirty-three years. I could probably weld it back together. But I'm thinking maybe it's time. It was never really meant for steel, it was a machinist's vise, and I've been punishing it with angle grinder work and heavy stock for decades. That crack took a long time to get there. Funny what you get attached to. It's just a tool. But I know exactly how that handle feels in my hand. I know the little skip in the screw threads. I could pick the right one out of a lineup blindfolded. Guess I'm shopping for a new one this weekend. Or welding it. Haven't decided yet.

everyone's got their fancy stay-wet palettes and i'm over here scraping bone-dry acrylic crust off this little board with a palette knife like i'm archeology-ing my own bad decisions. the texture is genuinely insane at this point, there's like seven layers of dried paint built up with actual craters where i gouged out a chunk of ultramarine mid-painting. i know i should just sand it down or toss it but honestly i'm attached. it's like a little topographical map of every piece i've made since january. you can see the exact week i went through a burnt umber phase. tell me you also have a cursed palette you refuse to retire