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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.

Painted a portrait of my sister all week. Her face, the whole thing, really got somewhere with it around 2am. Woke up this morning and I couldn't look at it. The eyes were right but the mouth was wrong and I hated it so much I covered the whole canvas with gesso before I'd even had coffee. Now it's just a white rectangle on the easel and I already miss her. Wild how that works. I'd rather have an ugly painting I could've fixed than a clean slate. Every single time and I never learn. My therapist says this is a pattern. Yeah. It's called making art I guess. 😭

Y'all, I been selling quilts my whole life, church bazaars, word of mouth, folks stopping by the house. Never needed much more than that. But my granddaughter got me on Instagram a few years back, and I tell you what, the folks I've met through there... mm. People from England, from Japan, from California, wanting a piece of what I do. I sold a quilt last month to a woman in Paris. Paris, France. She saw a picture I took on my kitchen floor and paid more than I used to ask for a whole summer's worth of craft shows. And I'm grateful, don't get me wrong. The Lord's been good. But there's something funny about it, these folks paying top dollar for what my grandmother did out of a flour sack because that's what she had. They call it "art" now, and I guess it is. But it was art then too, wasn't it? Anyway. I'm still figuring out what to make of it. Grateful, but figuring.

There was this old bungalow off Cunningham Road, mustard yellow with these deep verandah columns I must have sketched three times. Beautiful proportion, proper classical. Last I heard a builder had bought it but nothing was happening, so I kept assuming I'd get one more chance at it. Went past today for something else entirely and it's just a pit. Not even a construction site yet, just an excavated hole with a hoarding. I stood there like an idiot for ten minutes. I have the sketches. That's the thing that keeps me going at it, but also the thing that stings a bit. Because the sketch is lovely and someone else will see it later and think oh, what a charming old house, what a nice moment in time. They won't feel the actual loss. The paper keeps the building but it can't keep the fact that it used to be someone's home, with someone's washing on the line and a dog that barked at me the first time I set up my stool outside the gate. I don't know where I'm going with this except that drawing things as they vanish is a strange job to have chosen. Some days it feels like the only honest thing I do. Other days it feels like taking photographs at a funeral and calling it art.

Okay I need to know if I'm losing it or if this is real. My tube of W&N cobalt turquoise, the one I use in basically everything, I'm not exaggerating, it's in like 80% of my pieces, I bought a fresh one last week and it's behaving totally different. The pigment's the same number, same series, but it's lifting off the paper in a way the old one never did. Like it's sitting on top instead of sinking in. And the granulation is almost gone? That soft sandy settle it used to do in the washes was THE thing I loved about it. I called the art store and the guy was like "maybe they tweaked the binder formulation" and I almost dropped the phone. I have paintings where that specific granulation is doing so much of the heavy lifting and now I have to either stockpile old tubes or figure out how to work with whatever this new version is. I know it sounds dramatic but this color is basically a signature for me at this point. Has anyone else run into this with a specific color you rely on? Like a color that just IS your work and then it changes on you?

Y'all, I don't even know how to sit still right now. Back in 1963 my grandmother made a crazy quilt, all those scraps, every shape you can think of, hand-stitched with that tiny perfect stitch she had. She used pieces from my mama's old school dresses, my uncle's Sunday shirt, a flour sack from a brand that don't even exist anymore. I grew up under that quilt. Slept under it when I was sick. Knew every patch like I knew every face at the dinner table. She passed in '89 and I kept it in a cedar chest for years 'cause I couldn't bear to have it wear out. Well, my granddaughter talked me into entering it in a show up in Atlanta. I sent it off with a prayer and tried not to think about it. Called me yesterday. It won. First place in the heritage category. I sat on the floor in the kitchen and cried. That's not like me. But I tell you what, my grandmother never got to see anybody call her work art. She just made beauty from what she had because that's what women did. And here's a room full of people sixty years later saying "yes ma'am, this matters." I know it's just a show. But it ain't just a show to me. Somebody finally saw her. That's all I wanted.

A museum shop in Vienna picked up a small edition of my screenprints for their retail. I was thrilled, museum shop, right, that feels like validation. They paid €150 per print, wholesale. I sold them 20. I did the math yesterday because I was avoiding something else. Each print takes me about four hours from exposure to final trim, not counting the drawing time before that, not counting the screens I burned and then rejected, not counting the test proofs. So €150 for roughly six hours of work per print if I'm being generous about what counts as labour. That's €25 an hour if nothing goes wrong. Something always goes wrong. I'm not saying the museum shop ripped me off. That's just the going rate, they were fine to deal with. But I sat there thinking: I have an MFA, I've been doing this fifteen years, and I'm making €25 an hour selling to an institution that will mark it up to €400 and call it affordable art. And I said yes because I was flattered they asked. I don't know what the right number is. I just know that the gap between what feels good for the ego and what's actually sustainable keeps getting wider and I keep choosing the ego.

My youngest granddaughter got married back in June and I made her and her husband a wedding quilt. Double wedding ring, but I done it my own way, not quite even, the way I always do. She cried when she opened it and I told her hush now, that's just some old cloth. Well they came by the house Sunday after church and I walked in their little place and there it is, hung up on the wall over their sofa. Not folded in a closet, not on the back of a chair. On the wall, like it's something. My grandbaby said "Mama Gloria, we wanted it where we could see it every day." I sat down on their couch and just looked at it a minute. Thirty years ago they wouldn't have called what I do art. Now my own grandchild's got it hanging in her living room. I didn't say much, just sat there and let it land on me. The Lord's been good to let me see that with my own eyes.

So I got a message from a woman in Oregon, says she saw a photo of a quilt I made for my grandson's wedding, posted it on Instagram two years ago, just a picture I snapped on the porch, didn't even think about it, and she tracked me down to ask if I'd sell it. I told her honey that quilt's been slept under and washed and loved on, it's got a wine stain from the reception and a cat hair woven right in there somewhere. She said she wanted it more for that reason. So I called my grandson, he said he'd make me a new one if I wanted to let this one go. So I did. She paid me more than I ever charged for a quilt in my life and sent me pictures of it hanging on her wall like it was a painting. And I'm sitting here thinking, I been sewing sixty years and the Lord let me live long enough to see folks call my grandmother's way of doing things "fine art" and buy it off a telephone. I don't know what to do with that. But I know if you had told Grandma Viola her granddaughter would sell a quilt to a stranger in Oregon who saw it on a picture box, she'd have laughed and said you were touched in the head. Anyway. Anybody else got a sale that felt like it came from another planet?

Had a woman at a dinner party last week, lovely enough, tells me she's "really getting into painting" and wants my advice. So I ask what she's working on. She tells me she's copying a photo of her dog, in acrylic, and she's almost done but the nose looks wrong. I say, okay, bring it to my studio sometime, or send a photo, I'll look at the values. She says: "Oh, I don't want criticism, I just do it for fun." Then why ask the painter? I don't tell her to quit. I don't care that she's not serious. But don't ask a professional for advice and then preemptively refuse the thing that advice actually is. You want encouragement, say that. But don't call it asking for advice. I blame the whole "there's no wrong way to make art" line. It's true for her, fine, it's true. It's also a way of never getting better at anything. And then they wonder why their dog's nose is wrong. I ended up just saying, bring it anyway, I won't be brutal. But I thought about it for two days after. There's something about being treated as either a therapist or a cheerleader that gets under my skin.

I've been selling small etchings for €180 since 2021. Same size, same paper, same amount of work. Three years of the same number while my studio rent in Berlin went up twice and the price of copper plates nearly doubled. Last month I finally raised them to €240. Not a huge jump. Still probably too low for the time that goes in. But I did it. Then a former professor, someone whose opinion I actually respect, saw the new price list and said, in that careful tone, that the pricing was "ambitious." Asked if I was worried about "pricing myself out" of the market. The market being what, exactly? The market of people who think art should cost as much as a nice dinner? I didn't say what I wanted to say, which is that I know etchers in London charging £400 for a similar plate and nobody calls that ambitious. I just said I'd think about it. Now I'm sitting here wondering if I should have raised them more, or if I'm actually wrong. The math says €240 is still a bad hourly rate when you add up drawing time, plate prep, printing, editioning. But the voice of that professor is stuck in my head.

A gallery in Leipzig asked me for a small edition of risograph prints for their holiday market, 50 copies, two colors, A3. I said €250 because I thought riso was cheap to produce and I'd breeze through it. I forgot to account for the test prints, the misregistration on the first 15, the fact that I had to reorder one of the inks mid-run, and the two full days I spent separating the layers because the files the gallery sent were trash. Total cost of materials plus my time: somewhere around €17 an hour. For printmaking. That's less than I paid for the paper. I keep doing this thing where I price the work as if the thinking part is free. As if the years of knowing how to troubleshoot a bad registration or choose paper that won't ghost count for nothing. I just factor materials and a small gesture toward labour and call it done. I'm raising the next edition to €600 and I already feel like I'm being greedy. Which is insane, because €600 for 50 prints, two-color, A3, with original art, that's €12 a print. That's nothing. But the feeling is there anyway.

Not low. OUT. And the guy at the counter says it like it's weather. "Yeah we've been out of that one for a while." A WHILE. I called ahead. I called. Someone told me they had it. So now I'm standing there in the aisle with my whole Saturday shot, because I can't finish the hands without that brown, the hands are the ONLY part that's working, and I'm supposed to just... swap in raw sienna? Just pick a different brown? Sir I have been painting this same piece for eleven days. That brown is the whole reason it's alive. Walked out with a tube of something called "burnt sienna deep" that I do not trust and a canvas I didn't need, because I'm not leaving empty handed, that feels like losing. It's sitting on the table staring at me. I know it's the wrong brown. I can feel it from here. Anyway if anyone knows a place in this city that actually keeps burnt umber in stock, tell me, I'll drive an hour, I'll drive two, I'll bring snacks.

Signed the contract today for a room at the old tram depot in Holešovice. Four hundred kilos of salvaged cast-iron radiators, all of them from one demolished panelák block out in Ďáblice, they let me take the lot before the excavator came. I have been chasing this space for two years. Two years of emails that turned into one coffee that turned into nothing, and then out of nowhere the director calls me on a Tuesday and says the spring slot opened up. I am too old to be this nervous about a signature. My hand was steady, only my handwriting was bad, which is normal. I keep thinking about the man who let me in the building. He was maybe seventy, wore a tracksuit, did not care at all what I do. I told him I make art from discarded things. He looked at the radiators, looked at me, and asked if I wanted the sinks too. I said yes. Now I have to deal with the sinks. The whole thing will probably not work. That is the part nobody says out loud. But today it is a yes on paper, and I will take it.

was at a friend's thing last night and someone I'd met once, twice, whatever, found out I paint. immediately: "oh I have this painting at home you should tell me if it's good." no photo. no artist name. just a vibe check on a thing I can't see. I said sure send it, and they said "I don't have it on my phone" and then just... stood there. like I was supposed to perform clairvoyance. this happens so often. people genuinely think having an art degree (dropped out, don't remind me) means you can divine the quality of any painting ever made from a verbal description. "it's like, abstract, you know?" no. I don't know. that's nothing. I know they mean well but it's the same energy as asking a doctor "my stomach feels weird, is it cancer?" with zero other info. no babe, it's probably not, but also I'm not gonna do a house call for a phantom painting. anyway I think the real answer is I should start pricing these interactions. "that'll be $40 and I'll need a photo within 24 hours or the magic wears off."

i brought in a 30x40 acrylic for a commission frame job and the guy behind the counter goes "oh nice, decorative" with this little smirk. like yeah dude that's one of the functions of art. i hang it on walls. it's visually pleasing. do you want me to be miserable every time i look at it or what. i should've said something but i just did the customer service grimace smile and said "yep that's me" and now i'm mad about it in retrospect which is worse. if you're gonna be a framing shop art critic at least have the spine for me to argue back while we're both standing there.

I welded a staircase railing for the art building at a community college in 2004. Not a sculpture technically, but they wanted something that looked like one. Paid fifteen thousand, which felt fine at the time for six weeks work. Twenty years later I still get five hundred dollars a year from that college. They call it a maintenance and consultation fee. Theyve never called me once. Its in the contract my old self signed and I keep meaning to tell them to stop. But I dont. That five hundred is the only passive income Ive ever had in this trade. Everything else was show up, get dirty, get paid, do it again. And I know people online talk about recurring revenue like its something you design into your practice from day one. I never did. It just happened because I wrote a stupid clause into a bid for a staircase.

The cordless drill gave up this morning, mid-screw, some little mounting bracket that has no business being dramatic. Twenty-two years, that thing. Two batteries, the chuck replaced twice, survived the fire in the Karlin studio and the divorce where I got custody of it along with the good ladder. Now it just sits there, warm, refusing. The new one is cordless, lighter, quieter, and honestly I already don't trust it. It hums too politely. The old one roared like something offended. I keep the dead one on the shelf. Not for art. It's a witness. I think that's what a studio is, half the time. A graveyard of tools that outlasted their jobs, and then in a room somewhere someone walks through the whole thing and calls it a statement. It's a drill. It's a drill that worked for twenty-two years. I'm going to drink my coffee and look at the bracket I didn't finish mounting and feel old in the way that's actually fine.

For thirty years I have been buying my green pigment from the same man in Darbhanga. He passed away last month. His son is there but the colour is not the same, too bright, like a plastic toy. So this morning I went out myself and picked neem leaves and some others I know, dried them in the sun, ground them with a little copper on the stone. Took me three hours to get a shade I would call right. My hands are green. My daughter was laughing at me. But when I put it on the paper it is the colour of the peacock's neck the way it should be, not that chemical thing. I know most people will just buy a tube. But this art was never about convenience. The colour has a memory when you make it yourself.

Okay so I've been trying to figure out this whole "get your art in front of people who actually buy it" thing instead of just posting into the void and hoping. I kept reading that you're supposed to DM interior designers and stylists but nobody ever says what you're actually supposed to SAY to them?? Like "hi I'm an artist" feels so flat. So last week I just went for it. I picked 12 designers who post the kind of spaces I could actually see my work in, warm, natural light, not super minimal. And I literally just said something like "hey! I'm a watercolor painter and I've been obsessed with how you use color in [specific project they posted]. Just wanted to share a few pieces I think would sit nicely in that kind of space, no pressure at all but thought I'd throw it out there" and attached 3 photos. 3 replied. One asked to set up a call. One said "send me your portfolio" and then went quiet lol. One just said "beautiful work, I'll keep you in mind" which could mean nothing but also could mean something?? I don't know. The thing is I felt so awkward doing it. Like I'm bothering them. But also nobody saw me do it so who cares right. I'm gonna do another batch this week and actually follow up with the ones who went quiet because my friend who's a freelancer said that's the part everybody skips. Anyway just wondering if anyone else has tried this and whether it actually turned into sales or just polite replies that go nowhere. I'll report back if that call turns into anything 🙃