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Spent three hours this morning stretching a canvas and the frame was out of square by maybe four millimetres. I knew it in my hands the minute I picked the thing up. Set it aside, stretched the canvas anyway, because I'd already mixed the ground and I didn't want to waste the afternoon. Now it's sitting in the studio leaning against the wall and I can't stop looking at the corner. Four millimetres. Nobody will ever see it. I will absolutely see it every day until I take the canvas off and do it again, which I will do tomorrow morning instead of just getting on with it, because I've never once in thirty years left a bad frame under a good painting. The thing is I knew. That's what galls me. I had the information, I made the choice, and now I get to pay for it twice. There's a whole philosophy in there about small dishonesties compounding, but right now it's mostly just a Tuesday and I'm out a morning.

Sold a 150×180 oil and cold wax earlier this year for €1,800. Gallery took their 50 percent, shipping was on me, the stretcher and canvas and pigment alone came to close to €500. So the studio net was roughly €400 for maybe six weeks of work, most days in there. What I can't get past is that €1,800 felt like a lot to ask. It isn't. I know painters charging three times that for smaller canvas who sell out before the opening. And I sat with the invoice for a week before I sent it, adjusting the words so it wouldn't sound rude. The buyer wanted the work. They never blinked. I was the only one ashamed of the number, and I don't fully understand where that comes from. Maybe from the old academy idea that you don't talk money in the studio, from growing up in a system where the whole thing was meant to be beyond price. But the rent is not beyond price. I raised the next one to €2,200. Felt like I was committing a fraud. Genau, that's where I am.

my actual warm-up ritual now is standing in front of a blank canvas going "okay" out loud like 15 times until something clicks or i give up and go make tea. the tea is usually the real warm-up. i've decided this is normal and good. today it took three teas and then i painted over a whole canvas i'd been staring at for a week. which i think means the ritual works? or means i should've started with tea. hard to say. anyway the thing is orange now and it's better. what's everyone's actual first ten minutes look like, i need to know i'm not alone in the standing-around-talking-to-myself phase.

Ripped a canvas in half at midnight last night because the face I'd been fighting for three days looked like a mannequin. Dead eyes, nothing behind them. I mixed that pigment for hours, I knew every mark on there, and it still felt like furniture. Slept four hours, woke up at 6am, grabbed the first scrap of paper I found, a receipt from the corner store, and drew the same face in charcoal in about nine minutes. It was alive. It had a pulse. All that "control" and technique I'd been so proud of was the thing killing it. I have a box of ruined canvases under my bed. Twelve of them. Some of them are genuinely good and I still can't look at them without wanting the person in them to look back at me. Anyone else keep your failures around like that or do you burn them?

Three months on one canvas. Not the kind of three months where you're building, more the kind where you're moving the same five shapes around and every version is worse than the one before. I knew it was dead, everyone in the studio could smell it on me, but I kept going because I refuse to give up on a surface until I've really earned the right to. Then yesterday I took the scraper to the whole thing. Pulled it all the way back to the weave. There's something almost shameful in it, that moment, like admitting three months of your life was just practice. And of course it fell into place in four days. The piece I was actually trying to paint this whole time. The best part is I have to throw the whole episode in the bin now, the good version plus the bad months, because you can't separate them, and I'm annoyed at myself that it only worked when I stopped being stubborn. The irony of this job is you do the work precisely to learn that the work has to be undone. I keep having to learn it, too. Apparently I need a reminder every few years.

Took a piece in to get framed this week. Older guy, been doing it forty years, probably knows his stuff. He looks at the work for a long minute and goes "this is interesting, but why not just commit to canvas? you'd probably sell more." And I stood there going... what does that even mean. Commit. Like torn paper and acrylic washes and a few layers of charcoal is me chickening out. Like there's a correct material and everything else is me being indecisive. Didn't say much. Paid for the frame. It's a nice frame, he did good work. But I've been chewing on it for three days. There's this whole school of thought that if a thing isn't easily categorizable it's not finished. That mixed media is a phase before you find your real medium. Nobody says that to someone who only paints. They say "strong palette" or whatever. But the minute you're not pure, you're just... hedging. Ma'am I'm 45. I'm not hedging. I've been at this long enough to know exactly what I'm doing and it is not a compromise.

i gesso'd over a piece three weeks ago because one corner was wrong and it was faster to just start fresh, and then yesterday i left a whole canvas with a muddled background because i was too tired to care and walked away. that one's actually going somewhere. there's no logic to it, the one i let slide is worse than the ones i killed. i think i've built the whole habit of "fixing" mistakes by erasing them and it's made me bad at sitting with an ugly pass. everything has to be clean by the end of the day or i feel like i failed. but the best stuff i've made the last year all had a rough couple of days in the middle where i genuinely hated it. anyway the muddled one is dry now and the corner is fine. i just had to not look at it for 48 hours. the work is so much better when i'm not standing over it breathing down its neck.

A gallery in Munich took a big 180 by 140 oil and cold wax piece in June. Sold it last week for €9,800, which is a good number for me, I'm not complaining. But I got curious last night and added up the actual studio hours. Not the staring at the wall hours, the hands-on hours, plus prep and varnishing and the two days I spent just getting the surface right. It came out to about €41 an hour. And that's not counting the years behind it, the materials, the studio rent, the gallery's cut which was already off the top. €41 an hour is what a plumber charges in this country and he doesn't have to paint over the work and start again. I don't know what the point is exactly. I think it's that nobody prices the thinking hours. You can't invoice for the Tuesday you just sat with it and didn't touch it, but that Tuesday is in the painting. The gallery would laugh at me if I tried to build that into the price. So we all quietly eat it and pretend the canvas took two weeks. Not going to raise the prices. The market here holds what it holds. Just wanted the number on the table once.

two years it's been leaning against the wall in my studio, face turned away like I couldn't stand to look at it. this landscape I started right after my brother died, trying to paint the place we scattered his ashes, and it was just... bad. muddy. overworked. I couldn't touch it. today I finally pulled the staples out. ripped the canvas off the frame. just let it crumple on the floor. and then I cut out the only part of it that worked, maybe six square inches of sky, and glued it into my sketchbook. like a little window. the rest went in the trash. felt like I could breathe again.

there's a canvas on my wall right now that has like four different paintings under the top layer. you can see ghosts of them in the edges where the paint got thick. i keep telling myself i'll stop doing this and just use a new one but there's something about fighting with the same surface until it finally works that feels right. or maybe i'm just cheap idk. the one before this finally gave up and started cracking so i had to retire it. buried a perfectly bad painting of a dog under there somewhere.

picked up a piece from the framer today, $475 for one stretched canvas with a simple walnut frame. that alone hurt. then the guy behind the counter, who watched me sign the card, says "you know, you could probably make these yourself if you wanted to save a few bucks." i stared at him. sir. i am holding the thing i made. the painting on the canvas is mine. the canvas itself i stretched and primed in my kitchen. apparently none of that counts unless i'm also milling the wood and cutting the glass. i just said "yeah, i'll get right on learning carpentry" and walked out. but it's been nagging me all day. the way people assume the invisible labor isn't labor. the hours, the mess, the trial and error, none of it registers unless there's a saw involved. anyway the piece looks good. that's the thing. it's the best one i've done in months and now i keep thinking about the $475 instead of the work.

My studio is an old factory space and the heating is a joke, so there is a radiator in the corner that clicks and knocks in a rhythm I have come to know exactly. When it starts up around nine it means the custodian has switched the boiler on. When it goes quiet mid-afternoon, he has switched it off again. I never look at the clock anymore. I know where I am in the day by the radiator. Today it went quiet at fourteen-thirty and I thought, fine, I will keep working in the cold because I was at a place in a canvas I did not want to leave. Two hours later my hands were stiff and the paint was dragging wrong and I finally admitted the heating was not coming back. The custodian is on holiday, probably. Somebody told me this and I did not listen. I keep a thick wool jumper in the studio for exactly this. It has oil on the left sleeve from maybe three years ago, a smear of burnt sienna that will not wash out. I put it on and the canvas and I agreed on a different temperature. It is a strange thing how cold changes how oil behaves, the resistance of it, the drag. There is a kind of honesty to working like that. Then my wife called and asked why I sounded like I was talking through a scarf. The light went out of the day at four. I scraped the canvas down and left it to wait for tomorrow. Some days are like that, you build a layer and you take it off again and the day is not wasted because you learned the colour needed to come from somewhere else.

Sold a large piece last month, 140cm square, oil and cold wax, three weeks of solid days in the studio. €1,400. I did the math after because I couldn't not. Between the good linen, the cold wax, the pigment, the turpentine, and what I'd have paid anyone doing the carpentry on the stretcher frame, materials alone ran close to €380. That's before a single hour of my time. Stack the hours on top and I'm somewhere around €7 an hour for the year of this trade I've been inside since 1992. Then yesterday a woman from the opening asks, very bright, what I'd charge for one of my "quicker, smaller ones." As if the speed is the variable. As if the three weeks is where the cost went. I said the same price per square metre and she laughed like I'd made a joke. She hadn't understood it was the price. I don't know if I'm undercharging or the whole enterprise is just bad math by design. Probably both. I've been afraid to raise prices for four years because the gallery says the market here is what it is, and the market is what it is partly because we all keep saying that to each other.

A 180 x 140, stretched it myself in early March, and then it just sat there on the easel like an accusation every time I crossed the studio. Not blocked, exactly. Not afraid, either. Just nothing rising. Some canvases wait for a feeling and I kept trying to force one in. Today I stopped trying. Mixed a cold wax ground with a little raw umber until it was the colour of wet pavement and just pushed it on with a drywall knife, no plan, no sketch, no idea what happens next. Took maybe twenty minutes and the whole weight of the month went out of the room. I don't know what will come after. That's the honest part. But the white is gone and I can work again. Sometimes the first layer is just permission. People overestimate inspiration and underestimate how much of painting is lowering your own bar far enough to start.

i've been on this orange and blue thing for a week now, like a full painting where those two are basically the whole conversation. and every single time i mix them they turn to straight mud before i even get the brush down. i know it's literally just color theory, they're opposites, obviously they gray out. but i keep doing it anyway like i think this time physics will let it slide. the annoying part is the reference photo is right there and the sky has that orange-pink going and the water is this electric blue and they somehow exist next to each other without turning into a brown puddle. so it's not the combo, it's me. i'm not layering it right or i'm over-mixing on the palette or i just don't trust the paint enough to let it sit. spent the whole afternoon on one small study and threw the cloth over it out of spite. i'll pick it back up tomorrow probably and hate it again. twenty dollars in paint to learn i should've just scumbled. anyway. anyone else ever win this fight or do i just paint brown forever

killed a painting today. full murder. had been staring at it for two weeks hating every inch and finally just took the big brush and went over the whole thing in grey to start fresh. and somehow as soon as the old one was gone i knew exactly what the new one was supposed to be. did the whole thing in one sitting, didn't even eat lunch. i think half my process is just waiting until i'm annoyed enough to actually fix things. the terrible painting was doing more work than it got credit for.

I stretched a canvas last week with the bars not quite square. Just a few millimetres off on one corner. Didn't notice until I'd already primed it. And then I thought, leave it. Let the whole damn thing be slightly off so the tension pulls uneven and the surface does something I didn't plan. It's working, actually. The cold wax sits heavier on one side, pools where I didn't ask it to. There's a kind of stubbornness in the canvas that wasn't there when I was controlling everything. My wife thinks I'm rationalising a mistake. Maybe I am. But I've been making the same rectangle for twenty-five years, and the one time the rectangle fought back, the painting got interesting. Probably not a method. Probably just Tuesday.

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?

Okay so I finally got my first "real" gallery interest a few months ago (still riding that high honestly) and the owner loved my watercolors but asked if I could do them on canvas instead of paper because "that's what sells." And I was like... watercolor on canvas is a nightmare?? I tried a few samples to be polite and they looked so sad and muddy compared to what I do on paper. I ended up saying no and I still wonder if that was stupid. Has anyone else had a gallery try to change their medium or materials? Did you bend or did you walk? I keep going back and forth on whether I was too precious about it lol.

I did it this morning. Third time I've repainted this interior, same corner of my studio, same grey November light through the window, and it just would not settle. The drawing was off, the values were muddy, I kept overmixing and killing the colour. So I took the palette knife and scraped the whole thing back to a thin brown smear on the canvas. There's this moment after you scrape. The painting's gone, but the canvas has a history now, ghosts of all the wrong decisions. The surface is smoother, there's a stain to work into instead of a white void. And suddenly I can see what was wrong the whole time. The floor plane was tilted. Of course. I don't know if other painters feel this, but scraping down is almost better than a good day of painting. It's a reset without being a blank slate. You keep the mistakes as a foundation. Very few things in life work like that.