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finally got my grandmother to sit still long enough to make a plaster mold of her hands. she's 82, her hands are doing that thing where the skin is thin and the veins show through and they just know so much, how to hold a spoon, how to pat your arm, how to roll a cigarette one-handed. she was so confused why I wanted to do it. "mateo, they're old hands, get a young model" but I kept telling her these are exactly the ones I want. she laughed the whole time the plaster was setting. said I looked more nervous than she was. pulled the mold off and it came out clean. no air bubbles, no cracks. I think she was a little proud even if she won't say it. now I have to figure out what to do with them, maybe cast in porcelain and let light come through thin. or maybe just leave them raw plaster for a while and look at them every day. felt like I caught something real today. not sure I've ever made anything that mattered this much.

Drove out to the scrapyard outside Kladno this morning, not looking for anything in particular. Came back with a cast-iron gate from a Cheb textile factory, stamped 1964. Somebody's entire institution of work, forty years of women standing at looms, reduced to scrap weight. The gate is beautiful in the way things built to last are beautiful before they get repurposed. I use these pieces in the big room installations and people always ask me what they mean. They don't mean anything. They meant something to the people who made them, and that's gone now. I'm just the guy who gives the bones a second life, like a taxidermist for a dead economy. It's leaning against the studio wall now and I keep looking at it. I'll weld it into something by spring or I'll sell it to a restaurant owner who wants "industrial charm" and I'll swallow the shame either way.

Raised my bronze prices 12% this spring. First real increase in about three years. The foundry raised their cut twice in that span, so I was already eating it. Two collectors who bought from me every couple of years for over a decade both passed. One said "maybe next year." The other just didn't answer. I know that's the math working the way it's supposed to. I still lay awake doing it over. Sixty-seven hours in a piece I sold for $4,800 last year. That's under seventy an hour before materials, before the foundry, before the crate and freight. Raising it to $5,400 should feel like nothing. It felt like I was the one being unreasonable. I keep a ledger from my apprenticeship days. First bronze I ever had cast, the foundry charged me $180. I sold it for $900 and thought I was rich. Same foundry, same size piece now runs me $3,100. Young sculptors ask me what to charge and I don't have an answer that doesn't sound like I'm complaining.

My first real gallery show, maybe ten years ago. I walk in and they've hung my still life under a spotlight so hot and close the varnish is practically sweating. The frame's casting a shadow across half the painting. I stood there thinking, this is where my work lives now, and I have no say in it. What's the worst thing a gallery ever did to your work in their space? Framing disasters, lighting crimes, hanging your 40x60 in the bathroom hallway, I want to hear it.

I paint by the window in the morning because the light is supposed to be better, that's what every tutorial says, right? But my window faces west. So the light I'm getting at 7am is this weak, flat thing that barely casts a shadow. By the time the light gets interesting, it's 2pm and I've already lost momentum. I keep telling myself I'll shift my table to the other room where the east window is. But that room has the dining table and my mother-in-law's plants and it just doesn't feel like my space. So instead I sit here at my west-facing window with my lukewarm morning light and make it work. I finally bought one of those little clip-on daylight lamps last week. It helps, but it's not the same. There's something about real morning light on watercolour, the way it hits the paper at an angle and you can actually see the sheen of the wet wash. Can't fake that with a lamp. Anyone else make do with a workspace that's technically wrong for what you do?

I have this cheap halogen work lamp from Obi, the kind on a tripod, the kind that makes the room unbearable after an hour. I bought it when I was sharing a studio in Wedding and it's followed me through three studios since. I don't turn it off. Even when I leave. Even for weeks when I'm in Bologna. I come back and it's still there, burning, casting that horrible orange light on nothing. I know this is wasteful and probably dangerous. But there's something about coming back to a space where the light was already on. Like the work never fully stopped waiting for me. Like the room was keeping time without me. The bulb has to be ten thousand hours past its rated life by now. I keep waiting for it to die so I can finally buy a normal LED and have a normal studio practice like an adult. But it won't. And I won't replace it until it does. Is this a superstition or just procrastination dressed up as ritual? I genuinely don't know anymore.

Hung the ladder installation this week after sitting on it for two years. Balustrade section, cast iron, from a staircase they tore down on Vodičkova, plus the usual family of small objects nested in the rungs: a rusted lock, a key that opens nothing I own, a child's sock in a color nobody makes anymore. I was sure it was done. Then the gallery put it up and suddenly I saw five things I'd do differently, and also I saw that it was maybe never about the ladder at all, which is either a discovery or the sign I should let the thing go the hell away from me. Sitting in the studio it was finished. On a wall it's an argument I'm losing. That gap between the two has never closed for me in forty years of this, and I wonder if it ever closes for anyone or if we just get better at pretending the wall isn't right about us.

A man at the garden centre watched me inspect three identical sedum plants for several minutes and felt moved to inform me that they were, in fact, all the same variety. I thanked him and explained I was checking the leaf colour against a specific hue. He told me I was overthinking it. The leaves were green, he said, and that was that. I held up two leaves side by side and pointed out that one had a distinctly bluer cast, which would matter for the study I'm preparing. He looked at me blankly and repeated that they were the same, and I should just buy one. I did not buy any of them. I bought nothing at all, in part out of principle and in part because I no longer trusted my own judgement in that aisle. The frustrating part is not the man himself. He was harmless, if tedious. It's that I let him make me doubt my own eyes for a full two minutes afterward. At 47, after a scientific career and two decades of painting, I still second-guess a perfectly accurate observation because a stranger decides it's fussiness. I should know better by now. I keep telling myself I will stand firmer next time, and then I don't.

Just quoted a small bronze casting, maybe 10 pounds of metal. The foundry's minimum charge is $1500. That's before any finishing work. I had to tell the client it's going to cost more than the actual metal. It’s hard to make a living on these small pieces when the overhead is the same as a much larger job. You end up losing money or scaring people off with the price. Anyone else struggle with this on smaller commissions?