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I had a small crisis in the studio yesterday that I'm still turning over. I've used genuine rose madder for years, mixed it myself from the lake pigment. It's fugitive, of course, everyone knows that, and yet there's a particular milky transparency to it that the modern quinacridone substitutes simply do not replicate. I've been rationing my last tube like it's contraband. Then I stopped and asked myself what I'm actually doing. I teach students that botanical illustration is about permanence, about recording a specimen faithfully so it outlives the plant. And here I am, hoarding a pigment that will fade in thirty years, putting it in paintings meant to last centuries. It's a bit absurd. Sentiment dressed up as craft. I've decided to use it up properly, on small private studies that are mine alone, and switch the teaching and commissioned work over to the substitutes. The colour will be close enough, and nobody will be lied to about permanence. But I do find I'm oddly reluctant to open that final tube. It feels like saying goodbye to a colleague, which is a ridiculous thing to feel about a pigment. Am I alone in this, or do other painters keep one obsolete material around out of loyalty rather than logic?

I've been thinking about endings lately. I've been with the same gallery for nine years now, and it's been a good run, but I've seen more than enough colleagues walk out over things that should've been caught early. Money that never reconciled, shows that got quiet, work returned with damage nobody owned up to. I'm curious about the other side of it: what made you finally pull your work from a gallery? Was it one clear incident or a long slow build of small things? And did you regret it, or was it a relief? For me, the closest I came was over a show where the framing was done poorly without my consultation and then the gallery charged me for it. I stayed, but I learned to put framing in writing. I sometimes wonder if leaving would have been the better lesson.

For ten years I kept a paper notebook of every piece I sold. Who bought it, how they found out about me. Back when that was mostly gallery openings and word of mouth. Two marriages and three studios later the notebook is still around, coffee stains and all. Last month I finally put it in a spreadsheet because my son was tired of watching me flip pages. And there it was, plain as day. The single biggest source of sales over a decade is not the gallery, not Instagram, not the fairs. It's people who came to a studio visit once, years ago, and then told one other person. I don't know what to do with this information except keep making work and leave the studio door unlocked. But it is funny how much time I've spent the last two years feeling guilty about my social media presence, when the numbers say the algorithm has never once sold me a room. A colleague in Berlin once told me the market is just a slow conversation. I think about that more than I should.

I raised my base botanical commission from $450 to $550 at the start of the year. First real increase in three years, and I'd been charging that rate since before I even left the lab. In the first week I lost two regular clients over it. One of them wrote back a polite paragraph about their budget and I never heard from them again. Here's the uncomfortable part. I did the math on what the old rate actually paid per hour, counting the specimen sourcing, the prep drawings, the two rounds of revisions on each piece, and it worked out to roughly $13 an hour. Thirteen. I have former colleagues who make that as a graduate stipend while they sleep. And yet the moment I raised it, I felt like I was being greedy. I still haven't fully reconciled that. The clients who left were not the ones who complained about the work. They were the ones who got a good bargain for a decade. I have three commissions on the books at the new rate and two of them came from complete strangers who never blinked. I keep telling myself that says something, and I keep not quite believing it. When did everyone else stop flinching when they named their own price?

Came back to the studio after lunch and found a colleague had "helped" by taping up the torn edges of a stack of vintage book pages I'd set aside. Clear tape. On every single sheet. Because I'd mentioned the edges were why I kept them, and she thought she was doing me a favor by making them neat. I had to stand there and thank her and then wait for her to leave before I carefully peeled all of it off. Took an hour. Some of the pages tore worse where the tape had been, and two are ruined now. She's kind and she meant well and I'm still quietly furious hours later. The torn edge is the whole point. The damage is the material. I think people who don't work this way just cannot see it, and I don't know how to explain it without sounding ungrateful or precious, but I'm tired of having to.

I have painted since I was nineteen. I have glazed since I was nineteen. And this week I discovered I had been doing it wrong the entire time. Not the paint. The medium. I was cutting my glazes with linseed and the damn thing kept dragging, kept muddying, and I just accepted it because that's how you do it, c'est tout. A colleague, a young one, twenty-five, showed me how he dilutes with stand oil and the difference is not subtle. It's like the light finally has somewhere to go. I redid a passage on a painting I had more or less abandoned, a small interior with a window, and I had to stop and just look at it for a long minute. Twenty years of the same habit and I never once questioned it. My daughter asked me why I looked so annoyed and so happy at the same time. That is exactly the feeling. I don't know whether to be thrilled or furious. Both, I think.

I teach a private student one afternoon a week, glazing and edge handling mostly. €95 for two hours. She said, without any malice, "that's so cheap." And she was right and also completely wrong and I've been chewing on it since. The thing is I don't price like a business. I price like a colleague. I remember what it cost me to learn this stuff and I want it accessible. But she's the one sitting there telling me it's undervalued, not the other way around. When did I get so shy about the years of practice that went into being able to say "no, the light catches there, soften that edge" and actually be right? I raised it to €125. She didn't blink. Now I'm annoyed at myself for not doing it two years ago. But also slightly proud that I finally said the number out loud. The hardest word in this métier is just asking for what the skill is actually worth. C'est ça.