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stood in the aisle at the art store for like ten minutes holding it. the guy working there asked if i needed help and i said no, which was a lie, because what i needed was for someone to tell me if i actually use red or if i just think i should. got it home. squeezed out a blob. it's a beautiful red. i have no idea what to do with it. been mixing my reds out of quinacridone and a burnt orange for two years and apparently that's just my red now. the cadmium one feels like a guest at the party who's better dressed than everyone. anyway it's sitting on the palette looking expensive while i paint flat greens all afternoon. i'll keep it there. maybe that's the whole point of it.

I opened a tube of cadmium red light from a batch I bought in 1998, half dried, and the pigment still knocks the new tube sideways. The old one is deeper, it greases out under the brush instead of feeling like cold butter. I have three tubes left and I ration them like a fool. I know why it changed, the regulations, the reformulation, all of it defensible. But nobody warns you that your palette is slowly being taken away from you in small increments and one day the red you built fifteen years of skin tones on is just a different red. I have been quietly reformulating my flesh mixtures this month and it annoys me more than it should. The old atelier taught me to know my materials like my own hands. Nobody taught me what to do when the materials change under me. Anyway. If anyone has a line on a decent cadmium that behaves like the old stuff, I am listening. Otherwise I will be here, hoarding.

Opened the old tube yesterday, the one that's been living in the tin at the back since I don't know when. 2009, probably. Cadmium red, and the oil has separated so badly the top is a rubbery disc I could have peeled off whole. I did peel it off, actually. Took a minute and felt oddly satisfying. Underneath it was still good. Perfectly good. Which is the thing nobody tells you when you buy your first tube and think it will go off like milk. Lead white, cadmiums, the earths, these things are practically immortal. The paint outlives the painter. Anyway I was painting a hand, one hand, all morning, and that red is exactly the note I needed at the knuckles. So the moral of the story is that I am a hoarder and it pays off roughly once a decade. Interested to know how old the oldest tube in your box is. I suspect I am not the record holder.

I've been using the same Schmincke Cadmium Yellow for nearly a decade. It's always been one of my most reliable, predictable colors, smooth, even washes, no surprises. And this week, painting a Ranunculus specimen, it started granulating. Settling into the paper texture in a way it simply never has. It's not the paper, same batch of Arches cold-pressed I've been working through for months. It's not the water, I haven't changed my setup. It's the paint. I'm trying to decide whether I got a bad tube, whether Schmincke quietly changed something in the formulation, or whether I'm finally losing my grip on a color I thought I understood completely. If anyone else has noticed a shift in their Schmincke yellows recently, I'd like to know. Because I feel like I've suddenly lost trust in an old friend and I'm not sure whether to replace the tube or just adjust my expectations.

Bought a tube of cadmium red light today. $60. Sixty dollars for something the size of my thumb. The guy at the counter said it and I said "sure" like I wasn't doing math on my electric bill in my head the whole walk home. And now it's on the shelf and I haven't opened it. Because the second I squeeze it out I have to make something WORTHY of it. That's the trap. Cheap paint I'll sling around and ruin a canvas and laugh. This thing I'm treating like it's got my dead grandmother's ashes in it. I know exactly what it's for. There's a figure I've been circling for weeks, this slumped shoulder, and the whole thing needs one hot red that burns. That's what I bought it for. But my hand won't cut the tip off the tube. Anyway it's been sitting there four hours. It watched me eat dinner. I think we're becoming friends.

I finished a portrait commission last week, a three-quarter figure, and I finally sat down to calculate the material costs. I knew it was going to be high, but seeing it laid out was something else. The pigments alone, mostly expensive earths and cadmiums, came to nearly 200 euros. That's not even counting the linen canvas, the mediums, the solvents, the varnish. And this is for a painting that I can sell for, what, 4000 euros? It feels absurd. The sheer amount of time and skill you pour into something, and then you look at the price of lapis lazuli and think, 'this is what I'm fighting against.' Bof.

Naja. There is a tube of genuine cadmium red on the shelf and I have not touched it in three weeks. Not because of the price, though at 74 euro it is not nothing. The problem is the last time I opened one. I had a big canvas, 190 by 160, three months of work under it, greys and ochres and a cold green I was happy with. And I put that red into the middle of it. One stroke, honestly. Not even a large one. It was like someone turned a light on in a room where I had been living quietly in the dark, and the whole painting was suddenly about that one spot. Everything I had built up went quiet behind it. I scraped it back the next morning and it took me a week to get the surface back to something I could look at. So now the new tube sits there. I know what it would do. I am just not sure I want the painting to be that loud yet. It is a strange thing, that a colour can have that much authority over a picture. I spent twenty years learning to make greys do the work. And one red still knows better than I do. Anyway. It stays closed a while longer.

I mixed a big batch of cadmium red deep with a little burnt umber and a touch of cold wax medium last Tuesday. Laid it down in a broad band across the bottom third of a 180 x 140. Looked right. Earthy but alive. Yesterday I walked in and it had gone brown. Flat and dead. Not dried differently, the mixture itself seems to have settled or separated or just decided to be something else overnight. This happens to me more than I'd like and I still don't fully understand the chemistry. The pigment particles are heavy, I know that. Maybe the cold wax lets them migrate in ways I'm not accounting for. Or maybe I'm just not mixing thoroughly enough. But I stir it for a good five minutes, scrape and fold. I'm wondering if other people have a colour they love that reliably betrays them after a day. And if you've found a fix that isn't just mixing fresh every session because at this scale that gets expensive fast.

opened a fresh tube of liquitex heavy body cadmium red this morning and the first squeeze was just... clear medium. had to massage it for a full minute before any pigment came out and even then it's grainy. never had this with them before. is this just a bad batch or has something changed over there? i know they got bought by that parent company a while back. genuinely pissed because this is the red i mix everything into and i'm supposed to be shipping these this week.

I've been rationing it. Squeezing the tiniest worm out onto the palette and then working it with a palette knife like I'm stretching a paycheck to Friday. Meanwhile the piece is SCREAMING for a big wet slab of it and I know it. I know it. And I still sat there for twenty minutes trying to mix the same red out of alizarin and a burnt sienna that's basically a rock at this point. The last piece I made I did it in like 4 hours because I stopped caring and just went at it with my hands, and it's the best thing in my studio right now. You'd think I'd learn. Apparently I only learn for two weeks at a time. also the tube is basically empty and I'm already dreading the drive to the art store where the guy will look at my hands and know exactly what I've been doing

did a studio cull because i couldn't close a drawer, and found three tubes of cadmium red that had gone solid. like rock solid. squeezed one and it just... cracked. cadmium is like 30 bucks a tube now. i remember paying 12. so i stood there doing math on the paint i've let die in a drawer over the years and had to sit down. the actual reason though is that somewhere in the back of my brain i filed those tubes under "for something important" and never used them. kept reaching for the cheap stuff for studies, saving the good red. saving it for what. i've been doing this for a decade and i still catch myself hoarding materials like i'm not gonna be allowed to buy more. anyway bought new ones the same day. used a fat blob of it on a 4ft canvas the second i got home. felt like throwing away money and also like the correct thing. probably both.

there's a specific green in my head that i've been chasing since like march. like a vinegar green, sort of sour, slightly dirty. cadmium yellow light + phthalo + a touch of raw umber got me close enough that i stopped noticing the difference, which honestly might be the goal and might also be cope. the thing that bugs me is that i know it's just sap green territory. i could've walked into the store and paid eleven dollars and had it in nine minutes. but every time i go to buy it my brain goes "no you need to earn it" and then i lose an afternoon. i think i've made peace with the fact that mixing IS the hobby and painting is what i do with the leftovers. also the leftover jar is now almost full of a green nobody asked for and i can't throw it out because that feels like admitting something.

Not a complaint exactly. I set out to paint a sky last night, ended up with the whole thing the color of dishwater, wiped half of it off with a rag and liked what was left better than anything I've done in months. I think the problem is I keep buying tubes because the color looks nice in the store. Cadmium orange looks amazing in the rack. It does not look amazing next to the greens I actually use. Eleven year old told me my paintings "all look like the same day" and I've been thinking about it for a week. Anyway. Working on a small one, 8x10, of the field behind the elementary school at pickup time, all that flat winter light. If it stays grey I'm going to call it done and stop fighting it.

For eleven years I charged 3,200 euros for a portrait, half-length, one figure, hands extra if they wanted hands. Eleven years, same number. It stopped being a price and became a fact of nature, like the weather in Lyon in February. Last autumn I did the calculation properly for the first time. Drying time with a slow-drying medium, the sittings, three of which the client cancels, the photographs, the drawings on paper before a brush touches the panel, the palette, the varnish, the six weeks of thinking about it while doing something else. At 3,200 I was making less per hour than the man who repairs my frames, and he does not have to be charming for two hours at a time. So I quoted 4,000 to a woman in Villeurbanne. Good project, an interior with her mother's armchair in it that I actually wanted to paint. She wrote back that it was above what she had in mind and thanked me politely. I felt sick for two days. Then I felt fine, and then better than fine. Because I realised the old number was not a price, it was a fear with a number attached to it, and I had been paying that fear in hours of my life. The next one, a man in the sixth arrondissement, did not blink at 4,000. I spent the extra 800 on a better panel and a lot of cadmium I did not strictly need. I am not telling anyone to double their prices. I am telling you that the number you are scared to say out loud is probably the correct one and the fear is just the fear.

I did the arithmetic properly last month for the first time in years. Not a guess, a real column of numbers. Three weeks on a half-length figure. Not three weeks of painting, three weeks of everything: the drawing, the underpainting, the scraping back, the four days where I sat in front of it and moved almost nothing. Divide the price by the hours and it came to 14 euros an hour. My daughter earns more than that at a café in the Croix-Rousse and she comes home smelling of coffee instead of lead white. The problem is I still quote by the canvas. A 50 figure is 1,800, a 30 is 900, and that grid was set in about 2011 by a version of me who could work faster and had no idea what her materials actually cost. A tube of good cadmium is 40 euros now. I am not going to sit down and reprice the whole grid, because then I have to tell people the new numbers and I already know what two of them will say. So I raised one thing instead. Half-length, 2,000. Told a new client on Tuesday, she said "d'accord" and asked about the frame. No drama at all. I have been slightly annoyed about this for two days, which is my own fault, not hers. The old clients still get the old price until they ask.

okay real question because i've been spiraling about this all week, what did you wear to your first in-person gallery meeting?? i have one coming up and i genuinely don't know if i should look like an artist (read: paint-stained overalls, which is just my actual life) or like a professional (read: me pretending i don't have cadmium red under my nails no matter how much i scrub). for mine i'm probably going to land somewhere in the middle because i physically cannot do business casual without feeling like i'm going to a job interview for a job i don't want. but i'm so curious what other people did. did anyone go in full paint-apocalypse and it was fine? did anyone overdress and immediately regret it? give me your stories so i stop googling "what do gallery owners expect you to wear" at 2am.

I've been working on this canvas for about six weeks now. 190 x 160. Oil and cold wax. And for the first three or four weeks I was still pushing it, you know, making decisions, applying pressure. Then at some point last week, I don't remember exactly when, the thing started pushing back. It started having its own requirements. I'm not talking about the paint itself leading you, that's something else. I mean the painting developing a kind of internal logic that you either follow or you ruin it. I had a patch of cadmium red deep in the lower left quadrant, maybe the size of my hand, and I kept wanting to extend it, pull it further into the composition. But every time I tried, the whole thing went wrong. The painting didn't want it. Two days ago I finally stopped and just left it where it was, isolated, and the whole canvas breathed again. My gallerist would hate me saying this because it sounds like mysticism. But I've been doing this long enough to trust it. The painting knows what it is before I do. My job is mostly to get out of its way in time. Anyone else have this? The moment where you stop being the author and become more of an editor?

There is a knife in my box, a cheap thing I bought in 2009 at a shop near the Saône that no longer exists, and the blade has gone soft at the tip from too many years of scraping. I use it for mixing only. It drags, it leaves ridges in the pile, and that is the point. I had a beautiful knife once, a real one, balanced, flexible, and it lied to me constantly. Every mixture came off it looking harmonious. Then on the canvas the whole thing separated into mud by the afternoon. The ugly knife makes me work the color longer, and by the time it is smooth on the palette it is actually smooth. Voilà. The good knife lives in a drawer now. I am not proud of this, it is not a philosophy, it is just what happened after too many ruined greys. Right now the pile I am fighting is a warm shadow for a woman's neck, and it keeps going pink on me. Cadmium red is a tyrant.

Okay so the tape. Not a fresh roll, the same four strips I've been reusing since like March, stuck to the edge of my glass palette so they don't lose their tack. My partner watched me peel one off this morning, press it back down, and just said "we have a whole drawer of that." We do. I know we do. The thing is these four strips have the exact right amount of stick left. New tape rips the paper when I lift it, old tape gives up halfway through a big wet wash and the whole sheet buckles and I have to sit there watching it curl like it's personally disappointed in me. So I keep them. They've got paint on them now, a reddish smear from that cadmium I use way too much of, and one corner is folded over from the day I was rushing to get the light on the window before it moved. I don't think this is a cute habit, I think it's probably a small problem and I'm telling on myself. But every time I go to grab a fresh strip I do the little satisfaction check first, tap the paper, and the used ones always win. Anyone else hoarding a supply that's technically garbage because the replacement behaves wrong? I need to know I'm not the only one with a tape problem, or honestly, I need someone to tell me to just use the new roll.

the tube's got maybe a fifth left and i still can't throw it out. something happened to it about a year ago, it went chalky, and now every mix i make with it comes out looking like a laundromat wall. but here's the thing, i know where it goes. i can mix with it blind. so i keep squeezing it and pretending. new one arrived tuesday. cadmium, same brand, and it's loud in a way that's honestly kind of upsetting. i did two hours of studies with it and hated every square inch, which i'm choosing to read as a sign it's working. anyway the dead tube is still on the table. it's not sentimental, it's that throwing it away means admitting i spent a year painting around a color instead of fixing it. which, now that i type that out, is probably also a thing i do with other stuff lol