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I've been using the same Gamblin cold wax for about six years now. Same supplier. Same shelf in the studio. And the last two tubs I've opened, the consistency is off. Not separated, not bad exactly, but it's stiff in a way it never was before. You know how it should feel when you mix it fifty-fifty with the oil? Like soft fudge. Now it's more like, I don't know, cold mashed potato. You have to work it longer to get it to incorporate. I mix a lot of my own paint, so this matters. When the wax doesn't move the same, the whole layering rhythm shifts. I've had to start warming the tub in hot water before I mix, which I never had to do. Could be a batch thing. Could be they changed the formulation and I missed the announcement. Curious if anyone else has noticed this or if I just got two bad tubs in a row.

I've got this 2kg tub of Gamblin cold wax that's been sitting in the studio since maybe March. Not old. But the top layer has this weird stiff skin on it, almost rubbery, and underneath it's still soft. I scraped the skin off and stirred what's left and it seems fine but I'm not sure if the ratio's changed, wax medium is supposed to be consistent and if it's lost solvent or something I'll feel it in how the paint moves. I know the official answer is keep it sealed, use it faster, don't let air get in. But I've got four paintings going at once and I don't work through it that fast. So do people just stir and carry on, or does this stuff actually degrade? Because I've had a tub that went completely hard after a year and that was done, but this in-between state I don't trust.

We've had three weeks now where the studio hits 32° by noon. I can't open the skylight without letting in the construction dust from the building next door, so I've been working with the door propped and a fan that just moves the hot air around. The cold wax medium behaves completely differently. It's soft before you even put it on the palette. The layers that should take three days to set are still tacky after a week. I had a piece I was building up, white over warm grey, and I went to scrape back and the whole top layer came off like butter. Ruined it. Or maybe it's a different painting now, I don't know yet. I've been mixing the wax a little stiffer to compensate but then it drags on the knife and I lose the gesture I want. There's no solution, really. You just adapt and the work becomes what the weather lets it be. What I actually mean is: I hate summer in the studio but I also kind of need it, because the winter work comes out too controlled and I don't realise that until July shows me what I was missing.

I did the math on a recent sale because I was trying to convince myself it was worth it. Large oil and cold wax, 160 x 200 cm, worked on it for about six weeks on and off. Gallery takes 50%, which is standard here. Fine. Then: stretcher bars and canvas, oil, cold wax medium, pigment, about €280 because I don't buy cheap canvas. Transport to Berlin in a hired van because it wouldn't fit in my car, €120. Insurance for the transit. The opening, where I bought drinks for a few people and we all went to dinner after, and I picked up the bill because the gallery director looked at me and I knew I was supposed to. That was about €340. So €4,200 becomes €2,100 after commission. Subtract €740 in costs I can track. That leaves €1,360. Then maybe six weeks of work, but not full-time weeks, so call it 18 days. That's about €75 a day. And I haven't paid tax on the €2,100 yet. I don't know what to do with this information. The painting is sold. The collector is happy. The gallery wants more. And I'm sitting here thinking I should feel good and instead I feel like I ran a small business that lost money on a job. Which I did, if I paid myself minimum wage. The problem is the painting wouldn't exist without those weeks. I can't separate the time from the thing. And the gallery can't sell a painting they never see. And I can't get the painting to Berlin for nothing. So the costs are real and the math is bad and I don't have a solution. Just the numbers.

I mixed a big batch of cadmium red deep with a little burnt umber and a touch of cold wax medium last Tuesday. Laid it down in a broad band across the bottom third of a 180 x 140. Looked right. Earthy but alive. Yesterday I walked in and it had gone brown. Flat and dead. Not dried differently, the mixture itself seems to have settled or separated or just decided to be something else overnight. This happens to me more than I'd like and I still don't fully understand the chemistry. The pigment particles are heavy, I know that. Maybe the cold wax lets them migrate in ways I'm not accounting for. Or maybe I'm just not mixing thoroughly enough. But I stir it for a good five minutes, scrape and fold. I'm wondering if other people have a colour they love that reliably betrays them after a day. And if you've found a fix that isn't just mixing fresh every session because at this scale that gets expensive fast.

The radiator in my studio gave up yesterday. Temperature this morning was just above freezing. I put on a second sweater and stayed because I realised the cold was doing something I'd never deliberately tried, the cold wax was setting up almost immediately, the oil was stiff, the marks were staying exactly where they landed instead of bleeding or shifting. Normally I fight that, want the slow drag, the uncertainty. Today I worked with it and it was like a different vocabulary. I don't know if there's anything useful in that, or if I was just too stubborn to pack up and go home. Probably both. But I'll fix the heater tomorrow.

I had a canvas on the wall for three weeks that just would not come together. Too much going on, every layer fighting the last one. Tuesday I got fed up and started scraping it down with a palette knife, ready to kill it and start clean. And somewhere in the middle of destroying it, the thing I'd been trying to paint was suddenly there, underneath. Just the ghost of what had been there, with the raw linen showing through in places and the cold wax residue catching the light differently. I stopped scraping and walked away. Came back the next morning and it was the best thing in the room. It's a strange thing about this medium. Sometimes the work happens not when you add but when you subtract. Or when you give up trying to save it and the thing saves itself. I don't know how to plan for that. You can't plan for it. You just have to know when to put the knife down.

Sold a 160 x 200 cm painting last week that I painted in 2019. It had been sitting in storage, first at the gallery, then in my studio, then back at the gallery. Five years. The buyer paid €4,800. The gallery takes 50%, so €2,400 to me. Sounds fine until you add up the materials: the Belgian linen, the oil, the cold wax, the pigments, the panels I had built for the stretcher. That's maybe €350 for a painting that size, depending on how many layers I burned through. Then the storage costs, I pay €180 a month for my studio, plus a separate small unit for older work. That painting took up wall space that could have held newer work. Hard to calculate exactly but it's not nothing. So €2,400 minus €350 materials, minus let's say €150 in storage over five years, minus transport to the gallery twice, minus the opening night I stood around drinking bad wine and making conversation. Per hour of actual labour? I don't even want to know. And this is a good outcome. The painting sold. Many don't. I'm not complaining exactly. I knew what I signed up for. But when students ask me about making a living as an artist I don't know what to tell them anymore. The math has never been worse and the rent has never been higher.

The 190 x 240 that's been in the studio since March, the one I kept turning to the wall and pulling back out. Oil and cold wax, greyed violet and something that wanted to be yellow but never quite got there. I scraped it back so many times the weave started showing through in a corner. Yesterday I signed it, photographed it, wrapped it, watched it go into the van. All day I told myself it was just another piece. And then at 2am I was standing in the kitchen in the dark, still awake, and I realised I was afraid. Not of it failing, of it meaning something. To someone else. Outside the room where I made it. That's the part you can't rehearse. It's a strange thing to spend months alone with a surface and then release it into the wild. Like watching your kid get on a bus for the first time. You want them to go. But you also want to pull them back and keep them safe. Anyway. It's gone now. I'll know in a few weeks. Or I won't. Sometimes you never know.

Started three canvases this week and killed all three by Thursday. Overworked, muddy, the cold wax turning to glue because I wouldn't stop pushing. You know that feeling when you can feel yourself making it worse and you keep going anyway. This morning I scraped one of them down to the linen with a palette knife. Just a ghost of yellow ochre left in the weave. I thought, good, now it's a fresh surface and I've got nothing. Sat with it for an hour. Then I took a tube of Prussian blue and a rag and just wiped it across, thin, no plan, no composition. Let it dry forty minutes. Came back and put one mark on it, a single stroke, cadmium orange, right through the middle. Stood there. That was it. That was the whole painting. It's small. 60 x 80. But it has something the other three didn't have. It knows when to stop. I don't learn that lesson, I relearn it every time.

I've been using Arches 140lb cold press for nearly twenty years. It was reliable. You knew what you were getting. That block of paper I opened this morning has sizing so uneven the paint is pooling in patches on the first three sheets. I'm not talking about a minor inconsistency. I'm talking about washes that lay down flat in one area and bead up like wax in another. I wrote to them a few months ago about a different batch and got a polite form letter suggesting I might be using too much water. Which, no. I know how much water I'm using. I've been doing this long enough to know the difference between a technique problem and a materials problem. I've already switched to Fabriano Artistico for my commission work. I didn't want to. I liked Arches. But I can't keep fighting the paper. If anyone else has noticed this I'd be curious, though I suspect most people just adapt and don't say anything.