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not a disaster exactly. the water was grey-brown with charcoal in it and it went across the bottom third, and honestly it looks better than what I had there. I'd been fussing at that section for days, layering and wiping and layering, trying to get the paper to look like it had been rained on for years. one cat, one jar, done in four seconds. so now I'm sitting here at 11pm trying to figure out how to fake an accident I just had. which feels like the dumbest possible job description. the problem is I can't really repeat it. I know what happened but not the angle or the volume or how long it sat before I blotted it. if I try to do it on purpose it'll look like a technique. that's the whole thing, isn't it, the second you can do it on purpose it stops being the thing you wanted. anyway. the cat is fine. the cat is asleep on a pile of offcuts like nothing happened.

I've got a piece laid flat on the floor, maybe a third of the way done, and both cats have decided the empty corner of it is prime sleeping real estate. Not the concrete, not the old rug. The corner where I haven't set tesserae yet. Every morning I come in and push a warm pile of fur off the andamento and get back to work. By noon they're back. I used to fight it. Shoo them off, shut the door, the whole thing. Then I realized one of them sleeps exactly where I hesitate the next day, and I sort of trust the judgment now. It's like a tiny furry second opinion on the composition. Anyway if you ever wonder why your mosaic has a slightly warmer, fuzzier corner, that's it. My insurance against the piece looking too perfect, I call it cat-approval quality control.

People always ask how my knees survive and the honest answer is they don't, I just work low because that's how the job goes. You can't set smalti on a table and see it true. So I'm down on the floor eight hours and the cats treat me like furniture. Melina slept on the unfinished corner of the piece yesterday and I let her. She was warm and the image is of water anyway, a cat shaped dent in the sea is fine. Started the morning cutting last year's leftover white tile because I refuse to buy new until it's gone. Found a piece with 1970s cement still crusted on it and it cut like butter anyway. Old stuff is better. New smalti has no patience in it. My actual studio right now is a floor covered in glass dust, three cups of cold tea I keep refilling with hot, and a mosaic of a harbor that's been looking at me for two weeks waiting for me to commit to the sky. I keep putting the blue down and taking it up. Somewhere in me I know the answer is fewer colors, not more. I'll get there by Thursday or I'll throw the whole thing in the sea where it belongs.

Eight years doing this and the single thing that got me work was a video of a smalti tile popping out of place and rolling across my studio floor, cat chasing it. My serious process videos, the polished finished shots, the "here's the story behind this piece" posts, nothing. The cat chasing a gold tile got me two commissions and a conservation inquiry from a museum in Vienna. I've stopped trying to figure out the algorithm. It's not a craft, there's no skill to learn, it's just weather. Some days the light hits your post, most days it doesn't. So I make the work, post what I feel like posting, and treat social media the way I treat the weather in Thessaloniki. I don't argue with it, I just dress for it. The people who do well on here spend their whole day on here. I don't have that in me and neither does my back. I'd rather spend four hours on my knees in marble dust than four hours curating my feed. Some weeks that feels like stubbornness and some weeks it feels like the right trade. Mostly it's a wash. But the cat video still got me the Vienna thing, so I'll keep one outtake in every ten posts and call it strategy.

ok so i spent three days on this little sculptural vase, handbuilt, textured surface, this glaze combo i've been testing for weeks. really proud of it. posted a reel of the process, lighting nice, good music, the whole thing. got maybe 300 views. then yesterday i posted a story of my cat sitting in a bisqueware bowl i forgot to trim down. phone footage, bad lighting, my thumb in the corner for half of it. 4.2k views. 14 dms asking if the bowl is for sale. i don't know what the game is anymore. i'm not even mad, just... confused. like the algorithm has decided my cat is the artist now and i'm just the assistant who cleans the kiln.

So I painted these two pet portraits, same size, same level of detail, both head-and-shoulders of someone's dog. A stranger commissioned me and I charged $150 and felt nervous about it. Then a friend from college asked me to do her cat and I immediately went "oh for you, $50" and then I painted the cat and it actually came out better than the stranger one. So my friend got the better painting for a third of the price and I keep thinking about that. Like I know we all do the friends and family discount thing and it's fine but it bothers me that my work isn't the same price regardless of who's asking. Or maybe it should be different because the relationship is different? My mom says I'm overthinking it because the friend will tell people and send me more work but also my mom thinks I should charge more for everything so I don't even know anymore. I guess I'm wondering where the line is between being generous with people you love and just devaluing your own time because you feel awkward asking for money from someone you actually know.

Like, I'll get a video of me just doing a really simple wash technique, something I thought was pretty straightforward and maybe helpful, and it'll get like, 100 views total. Then I'll post a sped-up video of me painting my cat, Bartholomew, looking super derpy, and it blows up to 10k. Bartholomew, of all things! haha. I'm not saying cats aren't great, but it's so hard to tell what the platforms actually want or if they're just messing with us. It makes me wonder if all the effort I put into explaining the pigment mixing or the paper buckling is just… wasted on them? It’s frustrating because I want to share the skill of it, you know? Omg, anyone else feel like they're just throwing paint at a wall and hoping something sticks with the algorithm gods lately?

Three years. Three years this thing sat under my workbench wrapped in old sheets, half-cut, wrong, not working. It's a portrait of my yiayia's hands, she was a seamstress, those hands knew things, and I could not get the light right in the smalti. The gold kept coming out flat, like a coin, not like afternoon sun on old skin. Took it back out two months ago and finally saw what was wrong. Wrong andamento, wrong direction of the cuts. I'd been setting the tesserae like fabric folds instead of like hands. Had to pull half of it out and start again. Sent photos to the client this afternoon. She cried. So did I, a bit, alone in the studio with the cats looking at me like I'd lost it. Anyway. Sometimes the work needs to wait until you're ready for it. That's the thing nobody tells you.

You know that moment when you're three rows into a section and you realize the particular batch of smalti you pulled has just slightly too much green in the blue, and now the whole thing reads like a bruise instead of sky, and nobody else would ever notice, but you notice, and it's going to burn a hole in your head for the next ten years if you leave it. So I unpicked the whole section. Recut the curve from a different batch. It took three days and the difference is barely there. But it's there. My conservator friends would say this is insane. My regular friends don't understand why I didn't just paint it. My cat sat on the loose pieces twice. Anyway the curve is right now. Worth it? I'll let you know when my knees forgive me. 🙃

I stopped photographing my work the way galleries want. No seamless backdrop, no tripod, no little grey card for the white balance. I shoot it where it lives. On the studio floor with the tray of cut smalti still spilled beside it, the broom somewhere in frame, cement dust on everything. A gallery person told me last year it looked "unprofessional." Fine. The last three pieces I sold went to people who saw them on my kitchen table, next to a half-finished cup of coffee and a cat tail at the edge of the shot. Two of them told me it was the floor mess that made them trust it, that the polished shots looked like something from a catalogue and they stopped looking. Meanwhile the gallery took its own photos for the exhibition. Beautiful. Bright. Completely dead. A visitor walked straight past the actual mosaic on the wall, which is standing there glowing, and looked at the printed photo on the label card for forty seconds. I watched her do it. So now I'm sending out images with my knees in them and my father's old tile nippers lying there and I've made 2 sales this month from DMs about the background clutter, not the work. I don't fully understand it. I just know that the beautiful photo has stopped doing anything.

took a freelance logo job i was dreading because rent was due and my studio's a glorified walk-in closet. and it was... fine? client actually let me pick the palette, paid half up front, didn't ask for 47 revisions. i know that sounds like a five-star yelp review for basic decency but in this economy that's basically a miracle. the real win is i finished it in three days and still had energy to paint something for me after. first time in months i didn't feel like a vending machine that dispenses the same beige logo for "exposure points." i even sort of liked the logo by the end. not enough to say it out loud to anyone who'd make fun of me, which is why i'm telling strangers here instead lol rent's paid, i've got a canvas prepped, and the cat finally stopped sitting on my palette. good week.

Found a little screwdriver in my coat pocket today. The kind that folds open, cheap steel, worn wooden handle. I have owned it since I was maybe twenty three. It has been through two marriages, one divorce, the fall of a regime, and about four hundred pieces of work. I do not remember ever buying it. It just exists, like a cat that moved in and never left. I think the thing I keep is not the tool. It is the fact that I opened and closed it ten thousand times without once noticing. You want proof you were alive somewhere, it is not in the exhibitions. It is in the things your hand did automatically while your head was somewhere else. Tomorrow it will go back in the same pocket and I will lose it again for six months. Fine. That is our arrangement.

Been hearing a lot about "content strategy" and "funnels" in these threads. Meanwhile my best sale this year happened because a woman I'd never met spent twelve months quietly watching my story highlights, then one day just wrote me a message in broken English asking if I could do a small version of a piece she'd seen me post back in January. No ad, no post boost, no newsletter. Just a person who liked looking at my work long enough to trust me with her money. The part nobody talks about is that I almost didn't post that piece. It was a commission that got cancelled halfway through, I was annoyed about it, and I only photographed it because I'd already set the lights up. One of those throwaway posts. My Instagram is a mess. Irregular, half-finished work, cats knocking tiles off the table. And it's the regularity of the mess that does the work, not the polish. People watch you be real for long enough and they stop seeing a stranger. The thing that actually sells is time. Nobody can buy that for you. All the paid reach in the world won't do what a year of showing up did for that one message.

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?

just posted the painting i'm actually proudest of from last year and it got maybe a tenth of the engagement the stupid sketchy behind-the-scenes clip got an hour earlier. i know it's not about the work, it's about the algorithm deciding my flat color doesn't read in a thumbnail, but man. had a design client years ago who used to say everything competes with a cat video in the first three seconds and i hated that he was right. been trying to figure out how to make the actual painting itself hook people instead of the process porn. cropping tighter helps. showing the corner before the whole thing helps. but it feels like i'm designing a thumbnail for a museum, which is such a weird sentence to type. anyway if anyone's cracked how to make the finished piece hit like the process reel please share because i'm tired of my mess being more popular than my work lol

I nearly didn't put it up. Bad light, the smalti looked grey instead of the deep red it actually is, and you could see my slippers in the corner of the shot. I posted it anyway because I had nothing else ready and the algorithm is a hungry animal. Two days later a woman in Zurich wrote to me. She wanted a panel two metres wide for a stairwell. Paid the deposit the same week, no haggling, no "can you do it cheaper if we skip the gold." I asked her later what made her write. She said the slippers. She said it looked like a real person's floor, not a showroom. Meanwhile the professionally shot photos I paid a photographer 400 euro for, the ones with the grey backdrop and the careful angles, they got the likes. Nothing else. Likes and nothing. I still don't fully understand what I'm doing out here. I post less now and half of it is badly lit. But I've stopped pretending the work happens in a white room, because it doesn't, it happens in my kitchen with one cat sitting on the tesserae I just sorted.

Drove out to Matosinhos at six this morning with a box of paper I'd coated the night before, and did a run of six photograms on the flat rocks below the fish market, using the tide pools as my trays. Two came out. One of those is the best print I've made this year and I genuinely do not know why it worked, which is a strange thing to feel pleased about. I can tell you the paper was 300g Fabriano, coated a bit too thick, and the sun came through the haze for maybe ninety seconds of the exposure and then went. That is all I have. The other four are in the bin, and I'm not sorry about it. I think the thing I am actually happy about is that I stopped trying to repeat last spring's results. For months I was chasing a print I made in April, the same weed, same rock, same hour, and every one of them was a pale copy of a memory. Today I just put the paper down and let the sea do what it does. Anyway. Six sheets, two prints, one that might be something. The rest of the day is for sleeping in the sun like a cat.

I shipped a small gouache piece to a buyer in Portland nine days ago, tracked, packaged like it was going to the moon, and the tracking has said "in transit" since Tuesday of last week. Which is apparently a real status that can just sit there forever like a cat on a fence. The thing is, it wasn't even an expensive one. It was a 6x8, a corner of my window in the morning when the light comes in orange and hits the radiator. I did it fast in one sitting and it's the only piece I've made in months that I didn't pick apart afterward. Sold it for basically nothing because I wanted it to go somewhere. Now some box is somewhere between here and Oregon and the buyer keeps messaging me "any update?" every two days which is fair and also making me want to put my phone in a drawer. I spent $14 on extra padding at the UPS store. $14! For a box that is now a ghost. Anyway I'm going to go repaint the radiator out of spite. If anyone has ever successfully gotten a package unstuck from "in transit" I would love to hear how, or just tell me your worst shipping story so I feel less insane

Painted a still life tonight at the kitchen table after the kids went down. Same table we ate spaghetti at two hours earlier. I wiped it down, laid out the drop cloth, and there's still a smear of tomato sauce on the corner of my reference photo that I just decided to live with. I used to feel bad about not having a real studio space. Read all these posts about people's dedicated rooms with north light and proper easels and I'd get all wistful. But honestly the kitchen table works. The light is awful. The cat walks across my palette at least twice a session. My 8 year old stuck a drawing of a dinosaur to the easel I can't even use because there's no room for it. But it's the only uninterrupted hour I get and I'll take it. Finished a decent little pear study tonight, better than my last one. That's the whole win. Packed it up and now I'm eating leftover spaghetti over the sink like a civilized person. Who else is painting on a dining room table or a folding tray or wherever they can grab space?

Mine was a show of patience. Also desperation. 1993, nobody in Prague wanted rooms full of scrap and I had a storage bill I couldnt pay. I walked into a space that was really a bookshop with a back room, put photographs on the counter, and talked to the owner for two hours about her cat. She gave me a month. I slept in the storage room behind my own work for three of those weeks. No strategy in it. Pure circumstance and stubbornness. How did yours happen? Cold email, someone vouched, you walked in off the street, they saw your work somewhere? I suspect most of us have a slightly humiliating story and I want to hear yours so I feel less like a fool all these years later.