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I've been hunting this exact red for months. Not the orange-red or the brick one, the deep blood red with just enough brown in it. Nothing in the smalti catalog was right and I was getting tired of mixing and matching. Then I remembered my yiayia's old kitchen. When they tore down the house in 2019 I kept a box of the tiles because I couldn't not. Took me three days of working up the nerve to cut one, because once you cut it it's gone, you know? No going back. Night before last I finally clamped one down, scored it, snapped it. The crack ran clean and there it was. Exact red, forty years old, still perfect. Half a box of them. I nearly cried over a floor tile in my own apartment. The piece I've been blocked on for a month is moving again. Sometimes the material is out there waiting and it just happens to be your grandmother's floor. Keep the thing. Even if it feels like clutter. You don't know what it's for yet.

there's a shelf in my studio that's just mended plates and cups with chunks missing. I can't stop picking them up. something about a crack that someone already tried to fix with that bright gold kintsugi stuff, or a handle that's been glued back slightly wrong. they feel more alive than the perfect ones. I've got about fourteen now and zero plan. maybe I'll embed them in something. maybe they're just gonna sit there judging me until I figure it out. anyone else collect things they can't use yet?

I took on a commission last year that I was genuinely unsure about. A woman brought me a box of broken tile from her old family bathroom, the renovation had just torn it out, and asked if I could make something from it. Not a mosaic of something, she said. Just... the tile itself, made into something that feels like it means something. I said yes because I liked her face and I needed the work. Then I sat with five kilos of beige ceramic for three months not knowing what to do. Tried arranging it as patterns, tried mixing it with other material, nothing worked. It just looked like broken bathroom tile. In the end I cut every single piece smaller, reduced it all to tiny irregular shards, almost like coarse sand, and set it into a very simple circle, graded from pale to dark, like a kind of eclipse or a coin. No image. Just the material, transformed by being reduced and rebuilt. Took weeks of just cutting and placing, cutting and placing. She picked it up yesterday and cried. Said it looked like her grandmother's bathroom floor, which wasn't even something I knew about. I don't know if I'll ever do that again, but I'm glad I did it once. Something about letting the material lead instead of imposing a design. Hard to describe. But it worked.

So I got my first (small, tiny, one wall) gallery show in the dumbest way. I was carrying a box of three of my wonky vessels across town for a market, they were rattling and I was sure two were cracked, and I stopped for a coffee on the way. Owner of a little space next door sees me, asks what's in the box. Next thing I'm showing him one on the floor of his cafe. He put them on a wall for a month and sold one. No email, no portfolio, no nothing. I keep wondering if that's normal or if I just got lucky with a man who likes coffee and ugly ceramics. So tell me, how did you actually land your first gallery? Cold email, walk in with the work under your arm, a friend hooked you up, an open call you almost missed? And did it go anywhere after or was it a one-time thing? I want the real story, not the polite version.

I sent one last month and I'm still recovering. Subject line: "ceramics, Valencia, please look." That's it. I wrote it at 1am with clay still under my nails and hit send before I could think. No answer, obviously. so I'm asking the people who've actually had a yes: what goes in the subject line? do you name the work, put your name, write something that sounds like a person and not a catalogue? I keep swinging between boring and too cute and both feel wrong. and did anyone ever get a reply from a terrible email? tell me there's hope for the 1am ones

Ok so I finally worked up the nerve to walk into a small local gallery last month, the one by the library that I've driven past for years. I had three pieces in the car. Did not bring them in. Instead I stood there for ten minutes pretending to look at a ceramics display and then when the owner came over I said, and I quote, "your lighting is really nice in here." That's it. That was my pitch. Then I bought a $12 card and left. So I want to know: what do you actually SAY? Like the first sentence out of your mouth when you walk in cold. I clearly need a script because my brain goes blank and I start complimenting light fixtures. If you've done it successfully, give me the real words. And if you bombed it, tell me that too, it'll make me feel better 🙂

Not on purpose. I left the little glass dish there Saturday after cleaning brushes, forgot it, and found it Monday soft as butter, almost dripping off the palette knife. Ground it warm and it went onto the canvas differently than the tube ever does. Covers three times faster, and the transparency, voilà, that's the thing I've been chasing for a month on this drapery and couldn't get with medium. So now I'm warming pigment on a radiator like an idiot. I have a small ceramic bowl, I put the lumps in it in the morning, and by two o'clock it's workable. The tube stuff seems dead to me this week. I keep a thermometer near the window because the studio drops to 15 in the morning and I want to know when I've crossed into the good range. Downside: I left one batch too long Thursday, came back and it had skinned. Forty grams gone. My daughter asked why the studio smells like a bakery and honestly I don't know what to tell her. Somebody here must grind their own with a muller. Do you warm the slab or just accept it cold? I'm half a step from buying a heating pad for this and I'd rather hear I'm not the only one before I do.

Small thing I don't quite know how to hold. There was a little art fair on ul. Józefa yesterday, mostly ceramics and prints, one table with my pastels because a friend pushed me into it and I said yes mostly to stop talking about it. I priced them low. I was sure nobody buys a pastel in a plastic sleeve anyway. A woman in her sixties stood at my table for a long time and kept coming back to one head study, an old man on grey toned paper that took me three tries because the first two had no life in them. She asked who he was. I told her nobody, just someone I invented to practice the jaw on. She laughed and said that's the one, and paid me in cash and wanted the receipt signed, which I've never done before and my hand was not steady. It's the money, sure, but it's more that a stranger walked around for ten minutes and chose the face. My partner came home and I told him and then I cried in the kitchen, over a pastel. Ridiculous. I keep going between feeling proud and feeling like she made a mistake and will figure it out. Anyway. Does it get less strange, the first time someone you don't know takes a piece home?

So a Barcelona-based clothing brand reached out, they wanted to use photos of my pieces styled with their new collection for a lookbook. I thought cool, my wonky little ceramic heads next to nice linen, why not. They offered 400€ and a bunch of clothes, I said yes. The second I posted the announcement, the comments were... not mean exactly but disappointed. Like I was selling out. "Oh so we're doing fast fashion now?" "Mateo no." A couple people said it felt off-brand. And ok, I get it. But also, I'm 27, my kiln is held together with wire, and 400€ is 400€. The brand is small, Spanish, not Zara. They make stuff by hand too, different material but same energy. I felt good about it until I didn't. I don't know. I still think independent artists and independent brands can help each other without it being gross. But the reaction made me second-guess everything. Has anyone else done a collab that felt right but your audience just wasn't there with you? How do you tell the difference between selling out and just... making rent?

I had this whole thing planned out for today, I was gonna paint this corner of my studio where the afternoon light hits this dumb little ceramic donkey my mom got me at a flea market, and I mixed this perfect warm gray for the shadow side, really felt good about it, and then I walked away to let it settle for literally two minutes and came back and it was already cracking. Gouache is such a brat sometimes. Like alright fine I guess we're starting over?? And I KNOW it's because I didn't work the pigment back enough before I put it down, I was too excited, I rushed it. I do this every time I'm really into a piece. My partner says I need to slow down but like, the thing is when I'm excited about something I just wanna GET IT DOWN you know?? And then the materials are like nope sorry try again. Anyway I'm re-mixing and I'm gonna be real patient about it this time lol. The light's still good for another hour or so. We'll see if I learned my lesson.

Ok so the light coming through my window changes every 40 minutes and I have been chasing it for like 6 months now. My partner thinks I'm insane because I'll be mid-sentence at the table and just stand up and go "sorry" and walk to the other room because the shadow on the sill just did the thing. It does the thing around 4 in the afternoon in fall, this long gold stripe that hits the left jamb and then the whole window frame goes almost violet where it's in shade. I've done 9 versions now. Nine. Two of them are actually good and I can't tell you what I did differently. Anyway I'm on my third sheet today because I got greedy with a wet-in-wet on the sill and it bloomed into this grey mush that honestly looks like a bruise. Watercolor doesn't forgive that. People think it's a soft medium and it is NOT, it's the least forgiving thing I've ever worked with, you get one shot at that edge and if you hesitate it's over, no second chances, no painting back over it like oils. Which is exactly why I love it and exactly why I ruined my afternoon. The one thing saving me is this gross old ceramic saucer I use for a palette. It's from my mom's kitchen, has a chip in the rim, and the pthalo green has basically stained it forever. I've got a proper porcelain palette, nice one, wells and everything. Never touch it. The saucer dries my puddles out faster which should be a problem but I've learned the timing on it now and honestly the timing is the whole painting. Is anyone else weirdly attached to a thing you'd be embarrassed to show in a studio tour. Because I would hide that saucer from a camera so fast and yet it's carrying my entire practice lol

so I've been doing markets and little fairs for a couple months now and I've been writing prices in pencil on a little card, erasing and rewriting whenever someone's face did the thing. you know the thing. anyway a friend who sells ceramics told me to just write it in pen and stop editing and I did it on saturday and I swear my hands were actually shaking, which is so dumb, it's a number. I wrote $180 on the big one. the window one, the fourth version of it. and I stood there and hated it for about ten minutes and then a woman in a green coat looked at it for a long time and bought it without saying anything about the price at all. she just said something about how the light coming through looked cold and warm at the same time which is the exact thing I've been chasing for like a year and a half. I don't know. I think I've been pricing like I'm apologizing. like I'm asking for permission. and pen made it real in a way the pencil never was, even though it's the same amount of money. which makes no sense. it makes complete sense. the nail on that wall is empty now too and I keep walking past it

A woman asked me about a commissioned portrait, a half figure, pastel on grey toned paper, maybe 30x40cm. I spent two days with the pricing. Not the drawing, the pricing. I looked at what other pastel artists in Poland charge, then at what people abroad charge, then back again, and I landed on 400 zł because I was afraid that anything more would make her disappear. She didn't reply for a week. I checked my phone at night like a teenager. When she finally wrote back she said it was more than she expected and asked if I could do "just the face" for 200. I said yes. And here is the thing I am still turning over. She wasn't rude. She was honest. I gave her a number that sounded like an apology, so she treated it like one. My friend who does ceramics told me she never negotiates, ever, not by one złoty, and she sells out her kiln twice a year. I don't know if I believe it works or if she just has a face that says no. So I am doing the small one now and of course it will take me just as long, because that is how pastel is, you cannot rush the layers and the fixative needs the day to dry anyway. I am not sure if I am annoyed at her or at myself. Mostly myself, honestly. I wrote 750 on the next enquiry and I have not sent it yet. It is sitting in drafts since Tuesday.

ok so I mixed this green glaze a month ago and every cone 6 firing it's a whole different color. first batch came out a deep forest with a matte finish, second one bright almost jade, third one this weird grey-green that I actually hated and then loved by the end of the week. same recipe, same bucket, same clay body. the only variable is how long I let it sit between firings and I'm starting to think that's the whole story. I've got three vessels sitting in the same kiln load right now, all dipped in the same bucket at the same time, and I'm genuinely nervous they'll come out as three different greens. which would be fine if I wasn't trying to sell them as a set. I know the ceramic answer is probably "just mix it fresh every time" but there's something I like about the unreliability, you know? like the glaze has its own mood that day. is that a cop-out or is that actually a thing people lean into?

I had this little study going, just a corner of my desk with the morning light hitting a ceramic bowl, nothing ambitious, and it was genuinely working. The washes were doing exactly what I wanted, the edges were soft where they should be soft, I was so pleased with myself. And then I started "fixing" things. Just tiny little adjustments. A little more shadow here, a little more definition there. Twenty minutes later I had a muddy overworked mess and I just sat there staring at it like why do I do this to myself every single time. Watercolor is so unforgiving about that specific impulse. Oil you can scrape back, acrylic you can paint over, gouache you can reactivate if you're careful. But watercolor just sits there and lets you ruin it and you watch yourself do it in real time. I know the solution is to just stop. Walk away. Start something else. But man, the compulsion to keep noodling is so strong when something is almost there. Almost there feels worse than not even close, somehow. Anyway I started fresh and the second one is fine but not as good as the first one was before I killed it. Just needed to yell into the void about this specific flavor of artist self-sabotage. Does anyone else have a version of this or is it just me and my inability to leave well enough alone

I have a box of my ex-husband's old tax returns. Not for any sentimental reason. Just feels wrong to toss someone's financial records in the bin, even if they're from 2012. They sit in the bottom of my supply closet next to a bag of dried-out markers. Also have a broken ceramic rabbit my mom gave me when I got divorced. She meant well. The ear fell off in 2020. I glued it back on badly and now it stares at me from the shelf like a little insult. What's the thing in your studio that has no business being there but you can't get rid of?

Okay so I have this one ceramic mixing tray, no divisions, just a flat white rectangle, and I have not fully cleaned it since maybe March. It's got this crusted ring of dried gouache around the edges, layers of it, and somewhere under all that there's a stain of a green I mixed once in April that I have never been able to hit again. Cerulean + a touch of burnt sienna + something I've forgotten. It's just a ghost of a green now, sitting there mocking me. And here's the thing, my old teacher would lose her mind. We were taught to scrape down to bare white after every session, palette knife, damp sponge, the whole ritual. And I did it for years, like clockwork, felt virtuous about it. Then I went full time and something in me just stopped. Now I mix into the dirty areas on purpose because the residue does something, it warms everything a quarter step, keeps me from hitting that chalky dead zone you get when you start fresh every time. Is that insane? I honestly can't tell if it's a genuine technique or if I've just gotten lazy and invented a philosophy to cover it. The window I keep painting (the one with the fire escape) is on like attempt nine and the last three have all been ruined by the paper going grey and I think it's the rinse water, not the paper, I was so sure it was the paper. I bought a whole new block for nothing. Anyway. Does anyone else keep a gross palette on purpose or am I the only one lying to myself here

okay so I have this little palette that I use exclusively for scraping off, like when I've mixed too much of something and I don't want to waste it down the sink, I scrape it onto this sad little ceramic dish. And I've been doing this for maybe a year and a half now? It's just layer after layer of dried gouache and watercolor crust, all these colors smooshed together into this weird marbled sediment thing. I keep thinking I should clean it off and start fresh but honestly it's kind of beautiful?? It's like a geology core sample of every painting I've done since I went full-time. I scraped a warm grey off it today and it had these tiny veins of ultramarine running through it from something I painted in like March and I just sat there staring at it for a solid minute. My partner thinks I'm insane for keeping it but they also touched it once and said "oh that's actually kind of pretty" so. I'm keeping it.

ok so i don't know why i did this but i got obsessed with this stupid little ceramic mug my partner got me from a thrift store, it's this weird pale yellow-green with a chip on the handle, and i just kept painting it every morning with my coffee. same mug, same light, same angle, same rough setup on the windowsill. fourteen paintings of the exact same object. and it's genuinely taught me more about how watercolor handles light than anything i did in school??? like day three i finally stopped trying to "draw" the mug and started just trying to catch the way the shadow fell across the table. day seven i realized i'd been painting the background too warm every single time. day eleven i just sat there for twenty minutes before i even touched a brush because the light was doing something i'd never noticed before. i don't know if i'll ever show them to anyone, most of them are not good, lol, but i think i found my new morning ritual. it's like warming up before you run. except with coffee and a mug that's probably not gonna survive another move. anyone else have a weird little exercise they do that nobody asked for?