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my sister-in-law's friend asked me months ago if I could paint her parents' lake cabin for their anniversary. I kept putting it off because the pressure of doing something for someone else, someone paying me, felt so much heavier than painting for myself. finally got it done this week and mailed it out this morning. I'm not sure how it landed honestly. I kept second guessing the colors, the angle I chose, whether it even looked like the place. but it's gone now so it's out of my hands. she paid me $200 which felt like both a lot and not nearly enough at the same time. told myself I'd use it to buy better brushes but I'll probably just spend it on the kids 😅 anyone else get weirdly nervous about commissions or is it just me

Okay so I took a commission to paint a memorial portrait and the whole week leading up to it I was like... this is a real person's actual loved one, what if I ruin the one thing they wanted to keep. I've done a million washes and landscapes and that same stupid window, but a face has to actually look like someone. That's a different kind of pressure. But I got the photos and it was this older man who apparently kept every bird feeder in his neighborhood full, and his daughter wrote me the sweetest email about him and I just... cried in my studio for a minute and then got to work. I did the underdrawing three times before the proportions felt right. Started the wash at like 10pm on a Tuesday and didn't look up until 3am. His eyes took me four attempts. The daughter wanted him mid-laugh and I must have painted and scraped that mouth area so many times the paper started to complain. It dried last night and I stood there just staring at it for a really long time. It's him. It's actually him, I got the laugh right. I sent her the photo and she said her mom cried, and then I cried again, and honestly I think this is the most scared I've ever been while working and also the most right it's ever felt. I've been so worried that going full-time meant I'd end up just grinding out work I don't care about. But this one mattered. That's the whole point right??

Was stuck for three weeks on a commission piece. Big granite commission, the kind you cant mess up. I kept walking around it, chalking lines, erasing them. Gave up one afternoon and grabbed a chunk of steel scrap from the bin behind the shop. Just fooling around, letting the welder do what it wanted. Three hours later I had a small piece I actually like better than anything I've made this year. Walked back to the granite with fresh eyes and cut the first real line in it the next morning. Funny how that works. The pressure piece you cant touch and the throwaway piece you can't stop. I've done this long enough to know you can't force it, but I still forget every time.

Today I was cleaning my brushes after finishing a small fish motif piece and I counted the years on the oldest one. That brush came from my mother's hand when I was maybe seventeen. She gave it to me for my first independent commission, a wedding scroll. It has lost hairs, the handle is wrapped in thread twice over, but the point is still true. My son says I should buy new ones, that the bamboo from the market is cheap. But a brush that has learned your hand is not the same as a new one. It knows how much pressure I put when I am drawing the fine lines of the peacock feathers. New brush, it will wobble. This one, it behaves. People these days they think tools are to be replaced when they become old. I think tools become useful only when they become old. Like a good wife's rolling pin or my father's plough, still in the shed even though we have tractor now. Some things you keep because they carry the memory of the work. The thread wrapping is from my mother's old sari, by the way. So even the repair is from her. How can I throw that away. 🙏

For about a year I tried to do the Instagram thing properly. Reels, stories, a little carousel about my process. I was showing up, I was consistent. And it worked, in a way, more eyes, more likes, a few commissions. But I was spending the part of the day when the light is right sitting inside editing a video of the light. Last autumn I just stopped. Not deliberately, not as a strategy, I had a show to prepare for and the choice was between making the prints or making the content. So I made the prints. I'm not on TikTok. I don't have a newsletter. My website is a single page with an email address. And honestly? This year has been better than last. Not richer, but better, the people who find me find me through word of mouth, or because someone saw a print in a friend's house, or because they walked into the shop that carries my work. Every sale has a real thread attached to it. Nobody found me through an algorithm and asked for a discount. I don't think this is advice. It's not scalable and I'm not trying to make a living off prints alone, my partner works, I teach a workshop now and then. But the pressure to perform the making instead of just making is so constant that I wonder how many of us are burning our best hours on it. The sea doesn't care about your content calendar.