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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.

so i did a group show at this bar two neighborhoods over, the kind where they hang stuff above the booths and hope nobody spills a $9 beer on it, and i sold one. $280. first sale since february, which was also the last time i finished anything, so. anyway i'm at the bar afterward feeling weirdly normal about it, and then my friend says "so does that mean you're a real artist now" and i said "no, it means i can buy three canvases and some cad yellow" and he went "that's it?" and yeah. that's literally it. $280 is 2/3 of a rent payment or one canvas and some paint and a sandwich. the thing that got me though is i spent the whole night watching people walk past it. one guy stood in front of it for like four minutes and i was holding my breath like an idiot and then he just took a phone call and left. the person who bought it barely looked at it. just asked if it was "the orange one" and pulled out a card. which is fine! it's fine lol. i don't need them to have a moment about it. still. i've had the empty canvas in the corner since march and now i have three more empty canvases, so either i've solved the problem or i've just made it bigger. going to go with solved. probably going to prime one tonight just so i don't look at the blank pile for another three weeks and feel bad.

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?

so i finally finished this 30x40, big flat color thing, took me about 11 days of actual work. quoted 1100. felt fine about it until i started adding up materials tonight. canvas was 68, the good one. paint, and i use a lot of it because flat color means no cheating with glazes, easily 70 bucks of paint. brushes i destroy, say 20. varnish, whatever. so like 160 in materials, which means 940 for 11 days. that's 85 a day. i could go work at a coffee shop for 85 a day and not have hand cramps. and the worst part is 1100 already felt like a lot to ask, like i had to justify it. i said it out loud to someone and immediately went "well, for me it's a good price" like i was apologizing for existing. ngl the gallery thing is what gets me. if it sells through them that 1100 becomes 550, minus my 160, and now i'm at 35 a day. cool. cool cool cool. i'm not raising it this time because it's basically sold, but the next one of this size is 1600 and i'm already dreading saying that number out loud.

I ordered cold wax in the big tin this time, two liters, because the small ones kept running out in the middle of a session and I got tired of rationing. That was three weeks ago. The tin is still nearly full. The problem: the 180 by 140 canvas in the studio has been the same grey since March. Not a bad grey. A perfectly reasonable grey. That is exactly the trouble with it. I put down a layer, scrape it back, and the thing underneath is still the thing underneath. Every morning I stand in front of it with the palette knife and think, today I ruin it, and every afternoon it is still reasonable. When I was thirty I would have thrown turpentine at it by now, just to have something happen. Now I know that a painting that resists for four months is usually one that has not decided what it wants to be, and force makes it decide wrong. So I wait. And the wax tin sits there. Naja. I know a few of you will say just paint over it. I have heard that. It is correct and useless advice at the same time, which is the most German kind.

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.

Had a student this week, third year with me, technically very good. Clean edges, correct values, the drawing underneath all correct. And the paintings are dead. Nothing wrong with them. That is the problem. So I made her do an exercise: take a canvas already dry, a study she liked, and scumble dirt over it. Grey, ochre, a scraped-down mess. Then find the painting again in the wreck. She looked at me like I had insulted her mother. Honestly I might have. But by the end of the session she had a shoulder and a bit of wall that were more alive than anything she has painted in a year, because she could not control it anymore, so she had to look. I did the same thing to myself at her age and I hated it. What I think now: technique is what lets you get away with the accident, not what prevents it. You cannot smear your way out of not being able to draw, the drawing has to be there underneath or it is just a mess with a mood, but the drawing alone is a recipe for marble. Anyway she is furious with me and she will come back Thursday. Both things are correct.

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.

so a friend that owns a coffee place here asked if i'd hang a couple small pieces on the wall by the till. not a show, no hanging fee, no commission beyond whatever i bought in flat whites. i said sure, mostly to get them out of my apartment. one 20x20cm acrylic, one slightly bigger. little handwritten tag next to each, price and my IG handle. that's it. sold three in nine days. not the two on the wall, three, because people asked if i had more in the back and my friend texted me and i drove over with two more. here's the part that bugs me. last year i did an actual group show, framed stuff, printed cards, the whole thing, sold one. this is a wall by a pastry case next to a sign about oat milk. i don't fully know what it means and i'm trying not to build a whole theory about it. maybe framed art in a white room reads as expensive and scary and a small unframed panel next to your coffee reads as a thing a person could own. maybe it's just that people are already in a buying mood when they're buying a croissant. maybe i got lucky. ngl though i'm now walking around town looking at every counter and shelf like a weirdo thinking about where else i could leave a painting. the guy at the hardware store is going to think i'm unwell. anyone else done the non-gallery thing and had it go weirdly better than the gallery thing

Not the collectors, not the buyers. The gallerist. Two weeks after I sent the new list, an email that had begun "Lukas, I have something exciting for you" became "let me think about the timing." I had expected pushback from the buyers. There was none. The three works that sold this spring went at the new numbers without a single negotiation, and one of them was to someone who had asked about the price in 2019 and gone quiet. So it was not the market that flinched. It was the person whose cut got smaller in relative terms, because a 30% raise on my side does not lift his commission in the same proportion he was used to. I am not sure what to do with this. I spent fifteen years being told the price is a signal, that cheap work reads as unserious, and mostly I believed it and still could not bring myself to charge it. Now I did, and the consequence is not more buyers or fewer buyers. It is a quieter phone. The studio does not care either way. I am working on three panels, 180 by 140, cold wax over a red ground, and the scraping back is going badly.

printed 50 copies of a small zine back in february. 12 pages, mostly the torn paper series, one page of scribbled notes I almost cut because they made no sense out of context. cost me about $180 at the local copy shop, which felt stupid at the time. sold 41 of them at $14 each. meanwhile two of the actual paintings from the same series are still leaning against my studio wall, unsold since november. I think people wanted the story cheap enough to take home without having to commit to a wall. or maybe the notes page did it, still not sure. either way I'm now the person who sells zines, apparently, and my gallery contact thinks it's a gimmick. he's wrong but he's also the one who'd know I guess

I spent thirteen days building up a surface. Cold wax and oil, maybe nine layers, a grey-green that had been getting somewhere around the middle of last week. Then Monday it went heavy and dead, the way it does when I have kept adding instead of stopping. So this morning I took the palette knife and scraped the whole thing back to the ground. Two by two meters. It took an hour. The ground was still there underneath, patient, the way it always is. What I keep noticing: the scraped-back version has something the worked version never had. The ghost of all those layers is in it. I know this. Every painter knows this. And still I build it up past the point again and again, because stopping early feels like giving up and the market wants a finished object and I want to be a person who finishes things. The part I actually want to ask about. Do you have a rule for when a surface is done with you? Not done, done with you. I used to think I could feel it. Lately I think I only feel it two days too late, after I have already ruined the good part.