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I painted a new interior last month, spent six weeks on it, thought it was the best thing I'd done in years. Put it up next to a study I did in 2019, the one where the light was wrong and I nearly scraped it down. Guess which one sold in three days. It's not the first time. Almost every buyer who writes me mentions a painting from five or eight years ago. I should be grateful, and I am, but there's a part of me that wonders if people want the maker they already know, not the one I'm becoming. Or maybe the old ones are just more honest. A painter's early work has a hunger the comfortable work doesn't. I keep telling myself the new one will find its person. In the meantime it's propped against the studio wall and I catch myself glaring at it while I clean brushes.

There's this face I keep coming back to. Not anyone I know, just a reference photo I found ages ago, some woman with sharp cheekbones and tired eyes. I've drawn her maybe twelve times now in pastel. Different angles, different lighting, different paper colours. Most of them are bad. But I can't stop. Yesterday I finished another one and just sat there thinking... why her? What is it about this particular face that won't let me go? Maybe I'm trying to nail something I can't articulate. Maybe it's just comfort, like rewatching the same film. Anyone else have that one subject they keep circling back to? Not in a series way, just obsessively.

walked into a gallery opening last week, guy comes up, says he's been watching my stuff online. my heart's pounding because holy shit someone noticed. then he says "your work has so much raw energy but you'd sell three times as much if you just... pulled it back a little. make it more accessible." i stood there holding my wine and wanted to cry and punch him at the same time. accessible. like what i'm doing is too MUCH. like the whole point is to make people comfortable. i spent years learning how to stop making polite art. i grew up in a house where we didn't talk about what was actually happening and i painted that way for so long, safe, quiet, looking good on the surface. i taught myself to tear that open and now someone wants me to smooth it back down so it matches their couch. i told him no and he gave me this little pity smile like i'd made a business mistake. maybe i did. don't care. art that doesn't cost you anything isn't worth looking at. i'll keep painting the ugly honest stuff even if it hangs in my hallway forever 🔥

I quoted a client £480 for a study of their garden's camellia. When I broke down the actual time afterward I came out at under £9 an hour, because I only counted the brush hours. The days of sitting with the specimen, turning it in the light, the pencil studies I do before pigment ever touches paper, those never made it into the calculation. Botanical work is slow in a way that doesn't photograph well. A client sees one finished plate. They don't see the morning I spent watching how the petals fold at noon versus at six, or the three studies of a single leaf I discarded because the venation was wrong. I could raise my prices and pretend that accounts for it. I did raise them, modestly, and lost two regulars. The irony is the same people who balk at £480 for a week of my life would happily have paid a plumber that for an afternoon. I haven't decided what that says about me or about the trade I chose. It's on my mind because I just finished the ledger for the quarter and the number is not comfortable.

I'm a chronic email-er, which honestly took me forever to even get comfortable with. But last fall I was in a town with one gallery I'd been chasing online for like a year, and I figured why not just... walk in. I brought three small pieces in a tote bag and asked the woman at the desk if she had two minutes. She was so nice about it, looked at everything, kept one for their submissions pile, and I basically floated out of there. And then I never did it again because the idea of doing it a second time makes me want to crawl out of my skin haha. So genuine question for the people who DO the walk-in thing regularly: how?? Do you book it ahead or just show up? Do you bring work or just talk? And has it ever actually turned into something, or is it more of a warm-up for the email later? I need to know if I'm missing out by hiding behind my keyboard forever.

ok so I've been painting the same window in my apartment for basically the whole eight months I've been full time. same frame, same light, same cracks in the plaster. people keep asking when I'm gonna do something else and honestly??? the more I do it the less I want to. it's not about the window it's about how the light changes the whole thing and I never catch it. today at like 5pm the sun hit the ledge and turned everything this weird honey color and I did a wash that I was SO sure was gonna be the one and then it dried and it's wrong. again. but my mom called while I was staring at it and she said it sounds like I'm learning the same way I did when I was a kid drawing the same horse over and over. I don't know if that's comforting or if it just means I'll never be done. probably both. anyway if anyone else has a thing they paint on repeat for no good reason tell me I'm not insane. also the honey light is still sort of there if you want to come look

I spent six hours on a plate of a tulip last week, drew it from a specimen, got the venation right, the petal overlap, the sheen. Then yesterday I was rinsing brushes and glanced at it and saw the thing has six stamens per flower. Tulips have six, so that part was fine. The problem is the leaves. I painted the leaves as if they clasp the stem neatly at ground level, which is what everyone draws, and it's wrong. A tulip's leaves wrap high up the stem, one cupping the flower itself. I have painted dozens of tulips in my life and never once got this right because the convention is so strong that you stop seeing the plant. Nobody has said anything. That's the part that bothers me. I'd honestly rather someone had caught it. It means the people looking at it are looking at tulips-from-memory, not at the actual flower, and that's the whole point of what this discipline is for. If we all keep reproducing the same comfortable mistake, we might as well be painting from our heads and saving ourselves the greenhouse fees.

Two people this month have suggested I start a Substack newsletter. A former student who now does very well on social media told me I was "sitting on a goldmine of expertise" and letting it go to waste. The gallery that represents me sent an email suggesting it would help with "audience building." I have a small pile of beautiful, unused Moleskine notebooks and a perfectly good fountain pen. I also have a quiet studio, a waiting list for my classes, and more work than I can comfortably finish. I am not sure what problem Substack is meant to solve for me, and at 47 I find I am becoming less interested in solving problems I do not have. I understand the argument. I teach techniques that are hard to find elsewhere. I have opinions about pigments and paper that people might want to read. But the pitch always assumes the thing you are not doing is the thing you should be doing, and I am not convinced that is true. Writing a proper newsletter takes time and thought. I would rather put that into another painting or a better lecture for my students. Has anyone else here pushed back on this pressure and been glad they did? Or do I sound like someone who will regret this in a year.

I spent years putting only the final work online. Perfect lighting, good photo, the painting resolved. Crickets, mostly. A few likes from other painters. A few months ago I was frustrated with a figure painting, the hand was wrong for the fourth time, the whole thing looked a mess, and I took a photo of it on the easel with my palette旁边, just to vent to a painter friend. I put it on Instagram almost without thinking. That post got more comments than anything I'd put up in six months. People like to see the struggle. They like to see that you also don't know what you're doing for a while. I think for a long time I thought showing process would somehow diminish the finished work, like revealing the trick. But most people aren't painters. They have no idea what goes into it, and watching something get ugly and then get pulled back out of the ugly, that's the part they actually want to see. I'm still not comfortable with it. I was trained to show only the resolved thing. But I can't argue with the numbers, and more to the point I can't argue with the fact that the conversations are better. People ask real questions instead of just saying "beautiful." Wondering if anyone else has found that the unfinished, uncertain thing gets more traction than the polished final version.

Its a new found comfort talking to everyone that I have met on this app, the connections between artists are something I didnt quite experience, until recently, im truly grateful to be an artist

Okay so I have this one window in my apartment I've painted probably forty times now, it's like my whole thing, my comfort subject. And this week I was doing a gouache study and I looked up to check the light and I finally noticed there's this hairline crack running diagonally across the top left pane. It's been there the whole time. Forty paintings, not one of them has the crack because I just never once actually saw it. It made me think about how much we paint what we expect to see instead of what's there. Like I've been so locked into this idea of "the window in my apartment" that I've been blind to the actual window in front of me for years. Which is kind of humbling because I like to think of myself as someone who really looks at things, that's the whole job right. And then this crack just sitting there waiting for me to finally see it. So now I'm doing a whole little series of just the crack. Close up, different light, different times of day. It's funny how a tiny thing I overlooked for years is suddenly the most interesting part of the room to me. I honestly keep catching myself staring at it like a weirdo. Anyway if you're stuck in a rut with a subject you've done a million times, look harder at it. There's probably a crack you haven't seen either. Or a shadow, or a color you swore was one thing but is actually another. I'm a little embarrassed it took me this long but also kind of thrilled about it, you know?

there's this one shitty wooden chair i bought for $8 at a garage sale six years ago. it's not comfortable. the seat is too hard and one leg is slightly shorter so it rocks a little. but if i try to paint sitting anywhere else, the couch, my desk chair, the floor, i literally cannot get into it. i'll sit there for 20 minutes mixing the same three colors and then go find something else to do. but that stupid chair? i sit down and my brain just switches over. it's like a sleeper agent activation code or something. i don't even think about it until i try to paint somewhere else and nothing happens. idk what the psychology is there. pavlov's uncomfortable painting chair. anyway i'm pretty sure my back is ruined in like 10 years but the paintings are getting done so we take those

The curator called yesterday. Said the new piece was strong but could I make it "more optimistic." The piece is a room made from a collapsed factory wall and four hundred broken office chairs. Optimistic. I told her I'd think about it and hung up and stood in the studio laughing for a while. What is she picturing. The chairs reassembled into a smiley face. A sun made of shredded payslips on the wall. Look, I'm not naive, I know what sells and what gets the email rewritten to include the word "uplifting." But I'm fifty-eight. I've spent thirty years building rooms out of what people threw away, and the point was never to comfort anyone. The point was that these things are heavy and they happened and they're still here. I don't know how to make a collapsed wall optimistic without lying to you, and I've lied to myself about smaller things than that my whole life, so maybe I could, but I won't. She'll send a follow-up next week. I'll reply that the chairs are turning toward the light. That's optimistic enough.

For years I thought I was supposed to want fresh air. The romantic studio image, non? Open window, breeze, plein air feeling. I forced myself. This week I closed it. Put on the shitty little air conditioner I bought in secret. The light is exactly the same. The paint stayed wet longer because it wasn't drying out in a draft. I was calmer. I worked an hour past when I usually stop because I wasn't getting cold and annoyed. All that performative suffering for nothing. I could have been comfortable this whole time.

I got a commission last year for a new piece at a decent European museum. 12k seemed like real money when I signed. Then I priced the steel, the timber, the electronics for the sound element, the rented van to haul it all, the two assistants I had to pay properly because I'm not an exploitative prick. By the time the thing was built and installed I'd spent about seven and a half. The rest covered four months of my life. I ate it because the work was good and I wanted it to exist and I'll probably do it again. The math never works if you count your own time. You have to not count it. That's the trick. You make art because you're compelled to and you finance it however you can and you pretend the hours don't exist. But sometimes late at night you do the math anyway and it's genuinely funny how bad it is. Like actually funny. I laughed out loud when I worked it out. Younger artists ask me how to price things. I tell them charge more than feels comfortable and then double it. Then I watch them not do that and I understand completely because I also don't do that.

Three weeks on the same interior and I finally see what's wrong, which of course means taking the whole lower left back apart. The problem is my darks have no air in them. Every shadow is doing the same job, reading the same note, and it flattens the whole composition no matter how nice the light is on the table. I know the old trick, I learned it twenty years ago. The shadow under the chair is not the same darkness as the one behind the curtain, even if your squint says they're equal. But somehow when I'm actually mixing I keep defaulting to one comfortable dark and then convincing myself the values differ enough. They don't. On the canvas they're all cousins. What actually broke it for me: I stopped mixing and just laid in three separate darks neat, no blending, let them sit for a day. And suddenly the room had depth it never had while I was fussing. The lesson is embarrassing because I teach this. I say it out loud to students every week, trust the separate masses, don't unify too early. And then I go do the opposite on my own easel because I'm impatient and I want the painting to look finished sooner than it is. Curious if anyone else has a particular habit they know better than and still commit. Not asking for advice, I know what to do. Just want to know I'm not alone in the stupidity.

Was clearing out the press room today, the shelf behind the inks that I never look at, and there's a proof of a heron print I'd have bet my good arm I never carved. But there it is. Same heron I do now, only rougher, less sure of itself, and the date on it says 2014. I don't remember making it at all. Not a bit. It's a strange thing, coming across your own work like it's somebody else's. I studied it the way you'd look at a stranger's print in a gallery. And I was a bit jealous of the fella who made it, do you know? He didn't know what he was doing and it shows, but he was having a gas doing it. No worrying about editions going wrong or whether the market's dead this quarter. Just carving. Anyway I have it pinned up over the bench now. Might keep it as a kick up the arse. Ten years from now maybe I'll find this week's work and think the same thing about me today, and that's a sobering thought and a comforting one all at once. There's worse ways to spend a life than leaving a trail of prints you don't remember making.