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Got a commission a few months ago to repair and restore this old family photo that was basically falling apart. Water damage, creases, the edges gone gray. I almost said no because I don't do restoration work, I make things. But the woman who brought it in had this look. Her grandmother in the photo. Only copy. So I did it. Carefully, slow, like the whole thing was made of ash. And somewhere in the middle of it I realized the line between repairing and making is fake. You're still just deciding what stays and what goes and what gets to be seen. She picked it up yesterday and cried in my studio. Hugged me. I'm not a hugger but I let it happen. Anyway I've been thinking about that all week. The whole time I've been collecting broken things to make art from, and the one piece I actually fixed mattered more than any of it.

Third wash this morning and the mug just gets thicker. Rust-colored ring around the inside, old pigment that never fully came off, a hairline crack in the handle I keep meaning to fix and never do. Every other mug in the house is fine. I keep reaching for the broken one. I don't know when it turned into a rule. Maybe when I realized I'd rather lose an hour coaxing a brush clean than buy a new one. Same with the palette I never scrub down fully, just layer over. There's something under there I don't want to dig up. Today I'm wrecking a piece that's been too tidy for three weeks. Ripping it up, gluing it down wrong on purpose. Feels better already. Anyone else got a broken thing they won't replace? Not a sentimental object, an actual tool. One you could swap for ten bucks and won't.

six months of stuff was stacked in the corner of the studio. not art, just things. a broken fan, two crates of a friend's old slides, a lamp with the cord cut. i kept meaning to deal with it. dropped the whole lot at the reuse place on saturday. told myself i was done. got home and someone had already taken the lamp. 20 minutes. i don't know why that landed so hard. some stranger wanted the ugly thing i couldn't fix. i keep thinking about who they are and what room it's in now. i've been circling a piece about repair for a year and can't get the obvious version of it to mean anything. turns out you can't fake that from the studio.

i did the thing where you make an edition because a friend said "prints are passive income." 40 giclee prints of a piece i actually like, cost me $180 plus shipping tubes, and i've sold three. two of those were to people i know. here's the part that bugs me. the original sold fast, $450, to a woman who wanted it for a hallway she's repainting. the print, same image, $45, sat. i think it's because a print is honest about being a copy and nobody wants to hang a copy of a painting, even a good one. or maybe my print is just bad, that's also possible. anyway there's a stack of 37 in my closet and one of them is under the lamp with the cracked base to stop it wobbling. i'm not mad about it exactly. it's more that i can't tell if i failed at marketing or failed at having the right product. those feel like different failures and i don't know which one i'm looking at. curious if anyone here has made an edition that actually moved, and what was different about it.

I don't fully understand this and I've stopped pretending I do. The piece was a panel, 24x30, layers of wash and charcoal over a page from my brother's address book. Gallerist shot it clean, whole, good light, hung on white. 41 likes. Nothing else. Then I snapped the back of the panel where the hanging wire had torn through the paper and I'd patched it with a strip of masking tape and a grocery receipt. Posted it sideways, no caption, bad light from the kitchen window. Two days later a woman in Portland emails asking if it's still available. She bought it. She said the tape was the part. So now I'm sitting here wondering if I should be shooting the damage instead of the work, and I hate that, because it feels like turning the thing I care about into content. But also it's the first real sale in five months. Has anyone else had this, where the piece of the piece outsells the piece. Side note, my phone camera will not focus on anything smaller than a thumbnail and I've given up trying to fix it. Whatever the Portland photo was, it was an accident.

back leg snapped clean off, someone had tried to fix it with a wood screw and made it worse. i gave the woman two dollars and she looked at me like i'd done her a favor which, i guess, i had. it's sitting on my work table under a lamp right now. i keep not drawing it. that's the whole problem lately, everything i start comes out too neat, too resolved, like i'm illustrating the thing instead of looking at it. the chair doesn't resolve. it just sits there being broken and specific, the splintered end of the leg still pale where it snapped, the screw hole gone black at the edges. i've been photographing it from underneath for a week, which is a weird angle nobody would choose, which is probably why it's working. three of them are pinned up over the sink. my friend said they look like a crime scene. she's not wrong. anyway. making work about damage is easy to say and hard to actually do without turning the damage into a prop. this chair is teaching me the difference.

Kept it in the bottom of my toolbox like I was going to fix it. You don't fix a chisel that splits at the tang. I knew that. But I'd had it since my apprenticeship -- a Pferd 20mm, had the right weight in the hand. Used it on a chunk of Vermont marble back in 2022 and felt it go wrong before I saw it. Put it in the drawer anyway. Tossed it this morning. Felt stupid about it. But the toolbox is lighter and I'm not going to grab the wrong tool out of habit anymore. That's the thing about holding onto broken tools -- you reach for them without thinking and then you're standing there with something that doesn't work and you've lost the rhythm.

There's an old radio in the studio, a Grundig my abuelo had in the kitchen, and it only picks up anything if the antenna is wrapped in a bit of foil and propped at exactly the angle I found by accident two years ago. If I move it, silence. If I bump the shelf, silence. So I don't move it. I've built the whole morning around it. It has to be on before I open the clay bag, always the same station, some talk program where a man argues with callers about football and then they play boleros. I don't even like the program. But if it's quiet in there I start hearing my own head too much and then I sit looking at the piece for twenty minutes doing nothing. I tried to replace it once, bought a cheap bluetooth speaker, and I used it for three days and then went back to the foil. The speaker works perfect. Maybe that's the problem. Anyway it died this morning mid-sentence, no reason, and I spent an hour with my hands wet and no sound at all. Got more done than usual and I hated it. Anyone else got a thing in the studio that's broken in a useful way?

Took me forty-five years and a divorce to say it out loud but here we are: if someone hands me a theme and a deadline, my brain turns off like a switch. I stare at the wall. I cut and reset the same piece of stone six times. I produce something technically fine that I don't care about. Meanwhile the thing I do for myself, last month it was a portrait of my neighbor's cat made entirely from broken roofing tile I found in a skip, I finished it in a week and a half and it's probably the best thing I've made all year. I keep saying yes to calls and group shows because that's what you're supposed to do, right? Get your work out there. Network. But I think I'm done pretending I function that way. I'll take the solo slow route even if nobody sees it for a while.

I need to say this somewhere. Two years back, a friend's sister asked me to do a sketch of their old house in Basavanagudi, the one with the red oxide floor and the wooden pillars, before the builder came in. I said 6,000. Family-adjacent rate, I told myself. She was thrilled, paid half upfront without a word. It took nine days. Ink on cold press, 12x16, and I redrew the facade three times because the perspective on those pillars kept going soft on me. Fine. That's my problem, not hers. But then came the framing. I wanted it to look good for them, so I got it mounted and framed properly. 2,800. And the drive to and fro, two trips with samples, another 600 in autos. So 6,000 minus 2,800 minus 600. Plus paint, paper, my own time. I did the arithmetic that night and just sat there. The thing is, I have not raised my rate since. Same 6,000 for a similar size, and I know two other people who were quoted it too. It has become THE number. I'm scared to touch it because they all know each other. The house is gone now, by the way. Demolished last March. So the drawing is the only record of it, which makes it worse somehow, like I should have charged more for that. If you've broken out of a friends-and-family number without it turning into a whole thing, tell me how. I genuinely want to know. 🙏

Installed a piece in a former tram depot in Brno last autumn. The fee was 900 euros and the rent for the hall was 900 euros. I signed before I did that arithmetic properly, which is a habit of thirty years I have not broken. What I got for it: three weeks of walking through the thing alone in the morning before anyone came, and a man from the technical museum who came back four times and finally brought his wife. He told me his father drove trams out of that building. That is not money but it is also not nothing, and I have stopped pretending I know which one of those is worth more. The problem is my roof. The problem is also that I said yes without asking, again, because saying no feels like the end of something when you are my age. Curious how many of you have a number below which you will not go, and whether you actually found it or just keep telling yourself you have one.

Small thing, but it took me two months to work up to it. She came over on Sunday for lunch and I'd stacked everything I've done this year on the dining table, all of it facing down, which is a terrible way to show anyone anything, I know. Twelve sheets. Most of them are the old houses around Basavanagudi and Malleswaram before the builders get there, ink first, then a wash over it. There's one of a house on 4th Cross with that lovely peeling turquoise on the gate that I'm actually quite happy with. She went through the whole stack properly, which I didn't expect. Then she said, very gently, "these are all so old and broken. Can you also do nice ones? Some flowers? Something bright for the wall." And the thing is, she was being kind. She wasn't being dismissive. She genuinely thinks I've spent a year drawing ruins and that it must be a little sad to live in that all the time. I've been turning it over since. Because half of me wants to explain that the house is going to be gone by next monsoon, that's the whole point, if I paint it pretty and new then it never existed at all. And the other half thinks, she's not wrong, why am I so drawn to the ones that are leaving. Anyway. She took the turquoise gate one home with her. No explanation available for that.

She told me my photos were too dark. That the lighting was "giving dungeon." She wanted me to show my face more, film myself working, add trending audio. I sat there in the meeting and I thought, I'm 58 years old. I build environments from scrap metal and broken furniture. I am not a content creator. I am not a brand. I am a person who makes things in a studio that looks like a bomb went off in a scrapyard. But the thing is she wasn't wrong about the engagement numbers. They're flat. They've been flat. And I don't know what to do with that information because I refuse to make the kind of content that would fix it. So I'm stuck in this weird space where I understand the game and I also refuse to play it. Anyone else just quietly accepting obscurity because the alternative looks unbearable?

Sold a little vase at the market on Saturday that I thought was one of my worst pieces. The glaze came out cloudy and the lip slumped to one side when I was being lazy with the wire. I almost didn't even put it out. Some woman picked it up, turned it around for like five minutes, and said it was her favorite thing on the table. Paid full price without asking for a discount, which never happens here. And look. I took the money. I smiled and wrapped it up. But I've been thinking about it all week. Either my taste is completely broken or people genuinely see something in the wonk that I write off as failure. Maybe both. Because the pieces I actually love, the ones I photograph and post and get excited about, those sit. It's the accidents that sell. My grandma always said the kiln knows better than the maker. Maybe she's right and I'm just too close to see it. Anyway, tonight I pulled the one I was convince was ruined and I'm leaving it out on the shelf. Not hiding it in the back. We'll see who's wrong.

The tuning knob on my shop radio is broken off at the shaft. It has been like that since about 2004. So the station is whatever it was when it broke, and it stays there. Tinny little thing, sits on the shelf over the vise, dust in the speaker grille so everything comes out slightly muffled. People come in to look at the work and they hear it and get this look. Somebody's cousin's kid came by last spring, asked if I wanted him to set up a speaker and a phone. I said no. Here is the thing. I do not listen to it. It is not music to me anymore, it is a clock. Same block of songs, same ads for the same car dealership out in the valley, and I know from the ads where I am in the day. When the obituary segment comes on at 8:40 I know I should have the compressor off and be sweeping up. It is more reliable than my watch. I do not need to be entertained while I work. I need to know what time it is without stopping to look.

My studio floor is permanently dusty with stone grit and tiny bits of broken tile. I sweep it three times a week and it looks like I haven't touched it in a year within an hour. I've given up pretending otherwise. There's this thing people don't talk about with mosaic, you work on the floor. Not at a table, not at an easel, on the floor. On your knees, leaning over, getting up stiff. I've got a piece of old carpet I sit on and a cushion my yiayia made that's basically flat now. The floor is where the andamento happens, where you see the whole thing at once and your back starts complaining. I had a younger artist visit last week, works in digital, and she looked at my setup and said "you actually sit on the ground?" like I was doing something exotic. No, I said, I'm just a mosaicist, this is just how it's been done since before we had chairs. Anyway. I'm about to sweep again. It'll be dusty by tomorrow.

Six weeks ago I started posting the failures. Not the poetic ones, the actual duds: a smalti panel where I got the andamento wrong on a face and the nose reads like a shelf, a batch of tile I cut too thin that shattered the moment I pressed it in. Numbers, since this channel likes numbers. Reach went up maybe 40%. Comments dropped by half. And the DMs changed completely. Before, I got "how much for this" from people who never once converted. Now I get "I have my grandmother's broken marble table, could it become something" and three of those turned into paid commissions in six weeks. One from a woman in Kalamaria whose table is now a hallway panel and she cried when she picked it up. The "how much" crowd was never going to buy. They liked the finished photo, that is all. The people who write to you about the wreckage are the ones who understand you actually make the thing with your hands and want a piece of that. Also, small confession, I sleep better. Nobody claps for a shattered tile. Feels closer to the work.

They said no, of course. You cannot put a photograph of rotten floorboards on the front of a poster, people will think the building is falling down. Which it is, a little. That is the piece. So the poster has a nice wide shot of the whole room, everything lit evenly, you can see the arc of it, very impressive, and nobody walks in ready for the smell. The smell is half the work. Wet plaster and old wool and something I have never identified, from a mattress I took out of a skip in Žižkov in 2019. Visitors come in, they get the smell, and then they stand there for a while doing the arithmetic of what they are standing in. My point is not that marketing people are philistines. Half of them are better at reading a room than the curators. My point is that the thing that actually pulls someone off the street is almost never the thing that fits on the poster. It is the detail that sounds like a mistake. I have started keeping a folder. Every time someone photographs something small in one of my rooms and ignores the big obvious sculpture, I keep that photo. The rotted floor gets more phone time than the commissioned bronze. I do not know what to do with this information yet. I suspect it means the poster should be a close-up of something broken and the room should be discovered. The gallery will fight me. We will compromise, and the compromise will be worse than either idea, as usual.

after six straight firings where something cracked, blew up, or decided to become a puddle at the bottom, i finally opened the kiln this morning and everything came out in one piece. like actually recognisable as the things i put in there. i stood there holding a little face jug like it was a newborn or something. dumb smile on my face. my studio mate was like "are you okay" and i was like no i'm not okay actually this has never happened before. the little victories. the bar is on the floor and i'm still celebrating.

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.