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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 ordered cold wax in the big tin this time, two liters, because the small ones kept running out in the middle of a session and I got tired of rationing. That was three weeks ago. The tin is still nearly full. The problem: the 180 by 140 canvas in the studio has been the same grey since March. Not a bad grey. A perfectly reasonable grey. That is exactly the trouble with it. I put down a layer, scrape it back, and the thing underneath is still the thing underneath. Every morning I stand in front of it with the palette knife and think, today I ruin it, and every afternoon it is still reasonable. When I was thirty I would have thrown turpentine at it by now, just to have something happen. Now I know that a painting that resists for four months is usually one that has not decided what it wants to be, and force makes it decide wrong. So I wait. And the wax tin sits there. Naja. I know a few of you will say just paint over it. I have heard that. It is correct and useless advice at the same time, which is the most German kind.

I work with oil and cold wax, which means the wax is not a small line item. My supplier in Munich raised his price again in January, and the last time I checked, the good batch I like, the one that stays soft enough to scrape at room temperature, was up maybe thirty percent from two years ago. So I have started doing something I am not proud of. The new tins sit on the top shelf and I do not open them. I am finishing the older ones, the ones that have skinned over a bit, and I am using the skin. You scrape it off and work it into the medium anyway. It dries a little duller. Nobody looking at the painting knows. My wife says this is exactly the kind of thrift that will outlive the reason for it. She is probably right. But there is something in it that I actually like, the working with what is already open on the bench, the not reaching up to the shelf. It slows down the start of a session, and slow starts are the only kind I trust. Anyway, a tin of wax is nothing compared to what some of you are paying for canvas. Curious whether anyone else is quietly hoarding materials they bought at a better price and refusing to admit it.

Studio's warm, I opened the window an hour ago and it did nothing. The cold wax medium is sitting soft, the whole batch, and every scrape I put down just smears instead of holding its edge. I could rework the recipe, add more wax, do the sensible thing. I'm not going to. I keep working with it like this because it's doing something my hands don't fully understand yet, and half the time that's where the interesting marks come from. Fighting the material is part of it. Today the material is winning and I'm curious where it takes me. The other half of the time a canvas ends up trash and I scrape it down and start again. That's the gamble. Fine. It's 31 degrees in here. The tin of turpentine smells like my grandfather's garage. I should have taken the afternoon off.

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.

Not a big thing and I know how it sounds. But there is a jar in the corner of the studio, half full, from a batch I bought before the pandemic, and I have moved it from shelf to shelf through two rehangings and one flood. Never opened it in years. Kept it because of some vague idea that I might need it, as if cold wax goes out of production. Today I scraped it into the bin. The studio smells different now, which is strange, because the jar was closed the whole time. What is actually a win: I had a bad week with the big grey one, the one that has been fighting me since March, and clearing that corner somehow made it easier to see what was wrong with the painting. It was too polite. Everything in it was in agreement. I took a palette knife to the left third and it is worse now and better. Naja. That is the work. My wife says I keep everything. She is not wrong, but she keeps the receipts, so.

Sold a large piece last month, 140cm square, oil and cold wax, three weeks of solid days in the studio. €1,400. I did the math after because I couldn't not. Between the good linen, the cold wax, the pigment, the turpentine, and what I'd have paid anyone doing the carpentry on the stretcher frame, materials alone ran close to €380. That's before a single hour of my time. Stack the hours on top and I'm somewhere around €7 an hour for the year of this trade I've been inside since 1992. Then yesterday a woman from the opening asks, very bright, what I'd charge for one of my "quicker, smaller ones." As if the speed is the variable. As if the three weeks is where the cost went. I said the same price per square metre and she laughed like I'd made a joke. She hadn't understood it was the price. I don't know if I'm undercharging or the whole enterprise is just bad math by design. Probably both. I've been afraid to raise prices for four years because the gallery says the market here is what it is, and the market is what it is partly because we all keep saying that to each other.

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.

Sold a 140x140 oil and cold wax piece to a regular collector for €1,100. Then I saw the invoice from the framer. He'd paid €400 for the frame, plus delivery, plus the wall hanging rig. I did the math on my end afterwards: between the stretcher, the oil, the cold wax, the months of drying time sitting in my studio, and the actual painting hours, my rate came out at around €14 an hour. The frame he chose costs more per square meter than my painting does. I'm not saying the price was wrong. He's passed on two smaller pieces since, he's serious, and €1,100 for a painting that size from a mid-career artist in this country is roughly where the market sits. But there's something slightly absurd about a piece that took me a year of thinking and painting being worth less than the aluminium profile holding it up. The real problem is I'm the one who has to be the one saying the number. The framer never flinches. I do, every time. I keep asking myself what the actual number should be, and the honest answer is I don't want to find out by losing the collectors who made this a living in the first place. That's the trap, and I know it's the trap, and I'm still sitting in it.

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.

For years I have kept notes in the worst possible way. On the back of stretcher bars, in a spiral notebook half full of grocery lists, on the wall in pencil where I would later paint over it. Last week the gallery asked for a proper chronology of the series and I panicked, then sat down and wrote the whole thing out. Forty-one pages. Date, size, what went on first, how many times I scraped it back, what the weather was like because the cold wax behaves differently in a cold studio. It took four evenings. The strange thing is what came out of it. Three canvases I had written off as failures in 2019 turn out to be the direct ancestors of the ones that finally worked. I had forgotten entirely. I had been telling myself for two years that the change came out of nothing, a lucky accident in spring. I don't think I am a better painter now for having the log. But I am less superstitious about it. The work has a spine I couldn't see because I was standing too close. Naja. Next time I will keep it as I go, which I say every time.

Not the painting's fault. Mine. I finished the big one, 190 by 160, three weeks of layering cold wax and burnt umber on top of a grey ground that had finally, finally settled into the right weight. Left it on the studio table to cure. Came in this morning and there is a fine white bloom across the whole top half. Not the wax itself. The varnish I mixed myself, too much turpentine, and it has gone milky in the cold. I know the rule. I know it. Test on a scrap, wait a day, and I have told students this same thing and watched them ignore me. So now the palette knife and the rags come out and I scrape down to the ground and start the layers again. Three weeks gone by lunchtime. The strange part is I am not angry. There is something almost restful in it. The second version is usually better anyway, that is the joke I tell myself. But my hands still smell of solvent and I have a gallery call on Thursday and nothing on the wall. Cold studio, milky varnish. If you have done this, you know. If you have not, do not start.

Spent most of this week on two large ones, 190 x 150, and for once the grey held. That sounds small. It is not small. Grey is the thing that eats me alive in the studio. Mixed warm it turns to mud, mixed cool it turns to dishwater, and after three days of layering and scraping back you look at it and feel nothing. This time I took the cold wax down hard, more than I usually dare, and kept the pigment lean. It dried matte, slightly chalky, and the colour underneath keeps showing through at the edges where I dragged the scraper. Two days ago I stood in front of it and did not want to fix anything. That almost never happens. Usually I want to fix everything. The other canvas is still fighting me. Same mix, same hand, and it sits there like wet cardboard. I keep telling myself the good one only looks good because the bad one is next to it, which is probably true and also useless as advice. I have a show in the spring, so the timing is good. The market can do what it does. Right now I am mostly relieved that a colour I have been chasing since about 2019 finally stood still for a minute.

Not the collectors, not the buyers. The gallerist. Two weeks after I sent the new list, an email that had begun "Lukas, I have something exciting for you" became "let me think about the timing." I had expected pushback from the buyers. There was none. The three works that sold this spring went at the new numbers without a single negotiation, and one of them was to someone who had asked about the price in 2019 and gone quiet. So it was not the market that flinched. It was the person whose cut got smaller in relative terms, because a 30% raise on my side does not lift his commission in the same proportion he was used to. I am not sure what to do with this. I spent fifteen years being told the price is a signal, that cheap work reads as unserious, and mostly I believed it and still could not bring myself to charge it. Now I did, and the consequence is not more buyers or fewer buyers. It is a quieter phone. The studio does not care either way. I am working on three panels, 180 by 140, cold wax over a red ground, and the scraping back is going badly.

My gallery's new person keeps asking for process content. Behind the scenes, time-lapse, work in progress. I understand the logic, short clips of me scraping back layers get ten times the reach of the finished work. The problem is the work itself. A large painting of mine sits on the wall for weeks between sessions because oil and cold wax needs to cure before I can build the next layer. There is nothing cinematic about watching me wait. I could film myself scraping and smearing and make it look dynamic, but that would be a lie about how it actually happens, and I am not interested in performing a fake version of my own work for the algorithm. I did a ten second reel of the palette knife going through wet wax last week because I felt I had to. It looked great. It is the least honest thing I have done in years. The finished painting, the one that matters, will not be ready until March and nobody will watch it dry. Am I wrong to resist this? Sometimes I think the medium itself is becoming the enemy of the marketing. Then I remind myself I did not spend twenty five years learning to layer oil so I could make satisfying looped videos about it.

I stretched a canvas last week with the bars not quite square. Just a few millimetres off on one corner. Didn't notice until I'd already primed it. And then I thought, leave it. Let the whole damn thing be slightly off so the tension pulls uneven and the surface does something I didn't plan. It's working, actually. The cold wax sits heavier on one side, pools where I didn't ask it to. There's a kind of stubbornness in the canvas that wasn't there when I was controlling everything. My wife thinks I'm rationalising a mistake. Maybe I am. But I've been making the same rectangle for twenty-five years, and the one time the rectangle fought back, the painting got interesting. Probably not a method. Probably just Tuesday.

I've been working on this canvas for about six weeks now. 190 x 160. Oil and cold wax. And for the first three or four weeks I was still pushing it, you know, making decisions, applying pressure. Then at some point last week, I don't remember exactly when, the thing started pushing back. It started having its own requirements. I'm not talking about the paint itself leading you, that's something else. I mean the painting developing a kind of internal logic that you either follow or you ruin it. I had a patch of cadmium red deep in the lower left quadrant, maybe the size of my hand, and I kept wanting to extend it, pull it further into the composition. But every time I tried, the whole thing went wrong. The painting didn't want it. Two days ago I finally stopped and just left it where it was, isolated, and the whole canvas breathed again. My gallerist would hate me saying this because it sounds like mysticism. But I've been doing this long enough to trust it. The painting knows what it is before I do. My job is mostly to get out of its way in time. Anyone else have this? The moment where you stop being the author and become more of an editor?

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 spent thirteen days building up a surface. Cold wax and oil, maybe nine layers, a grey-green that had been getting somewhere around the middle of last week. Then Monday it went heavy and dead, the way it does when I have kept adding instead of stopping. So this morning I took the palette knife and scraped the whole thing back to the ground. Two by two meters. It took an hour. The ground was still there underneath, patient, the way it always is. What I keep noticing: the scraped-back version has something the worked version never had. The ghost of all those layers is in it. I know this. Every painter knows this. And still I build it up past the point again and again, because stopping early feels like giving up and the market wants a finished object and I want to be a person who finishes things. The part I actually want to ask about. Do you have a rule for when a surface is done with you? Not done, done with you. I used to think I could feel it. Lately I think I only feel it two days too late, after I have already ruined the good part.