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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.

First pour out of a new shell mix went wrong in March. Cold shut on one shoulder, whole piece scrapped. Rebuilt the pattern, remade the shell, and today the sprue cut off with a hacksaw and a chisel and the casting underneath was sound. No porosity, no chasing to hide anything. Thirty years and I still hold my breath on that cut. You never really know what's under there until you're through. Foundry man said it was the sand. He's probably right.

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.

I've had a student since October, a woman in her fifties who spent her whole life in accounting and paints like someone who has never been told a thing is good enough. She had the hardest time with the first lay-in. Everything she did, she wanted to finish immediately, blend it smooth, make it look like a photograph of a thing. I kept telling her: ugly now, beautiful later. She did not believe me, which is healthy, honestly. Tuesday she brought in a cast study, a plaster foot, and the grisaille was correct. Not pretty. Correct. Values sitting in the right place, the halftone where it belongs, the edges soft only where the light actually turns. She was almost apologetic about it, said it looked "unfinished and dirty." I told her that is what an underpainting is supposed to look like, and she went very quiet, and then she said, "oh. So I've been painting the wrong part of the process for forty years." That's the win. Not the foot. The forty years. I'm going to let her glaze it next week and I'm a little nervous, because glazing over a good grisaille is like putting a coat on a child and sending them out the door. If she overworks it I'll be sick. But she earned it.

Studio floor is currently a museum of other people's junk. Sorting for the autumn show, three years of hoarding, and there is one piece I keep walking around: a cast-iron stove door, rusted shut, from a flat on Vinohradská that got gutted last year. It's the best object in the room and I won't put it in. Reason is stupid. It's too good on its own. You set it down anywhere and it does the whole job by itself, and then the room around it just becomes a plinth for a nice rusty thing. Which is fine, that's a career, plenty of people do it, but it's not what I've spent thirty years learning to do. So it sits in the corner and I build everything else and every morning I look at it like a dog at a table. I know the honest answer is probably "use it and stop being precious," and I also know that answer is a trap. Sometimes the object that carries the piece is the one that kills it. Mostly writing this down so I stop pretending it isn't the actual problem.

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?

Noticed tonight that the middle of my palette is one gray-brown mass that I keep reactivating with water instead of squeezing out anything new. Burnt sienna, ultramarine, a little hansa yellow in there somewhere. It's basically mud with a history. It started because I was trying to stretch paint during the school break, and now it's August and I'm still doing it. Squeezing a fresh blob off the tube feels almost wasteful, like I'm spending money I don't have on a color I could just fake. Which is silly, tubes cost what they cost and I bought them already. But here's the thing I actually noticed. Everything I've painted since spring has the same temperature to it. That grayed-out look. Even the porch light in the painting on my easel right now, which should be warm, has this dead olive cast because I mixed it out of the pile instead of starting clean. So tomorrow I'm scraping the whole thing down to the white. Scraping it, not wet-paper-toweling it. Getting the plastic knife out and everything. I've got a tube of cad yellow light that's been sitting unopened since my birthday in May. The kids go back next week and I'll have my evenings again. That's part of it I think. Hard to start anything new when you're snatching twenty minutes at a time.