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Went back this morning to the old house on the corner near Sunday market. The one with the chajja that's been drooping for years. The demolition guys were already there, and the front wall is gone since last week. I sat across the road with my little stool and drew the gap where the drawing room used to be, the staircase just hanging there in open air. Thing is, I've painted that house maybe six times over the last two years. Every time meaning to catch it before this exact morning. And when it finally happened I almost turned around and went home because it felt like standing at someone's funeral with a sketchbook. But I forced myself to sit. Twenty minutes. The plaster dust kept drifting over my palette. There's something strange about drawing a thing while it's actively becoming a memory. The sketch isn't even good, honestly. But I'm glad I did it instead of driving away. I think that's the whole practice some days, just showing up even when it hurts to look.

They tore down an old warehouse near Olympou street last month and I went and asked the foreman if I could take some of the tile off the pile. He looked at me like I asked for his kidney, then said take whatever, it saves him the container. So I filled two bags. Red terracotta, mostly, some glazed bits, one piece with a thumbprint in it from whoever pressed it, probably 1920s. 40 euros in bus fare and coffee for the guy and my back for three days. And now they sit in the studio in a bucket and I don't want to cut them. Every other material I have, I cut without thinking, it's just stock. These I keep turning over like they're going to tell me something. My friend says this is why the work goes slow. She's not wrong but she's also not entirely right, the slow is the point sometimes. Anyway the bucket is still there. Some days I think the right move is to smash them and set them in a portrait of the man who built the wall. Other days I just like having them in the room.

There's a house on Hutchins Road, the pale yellow one with the carved wooden brackets under the balcony, and the board went up last Tuesday. I'd been meaning to draw it for maybe three years. Kept saying next weekend. So I went on Wednesday morning with my book and a flask of chai, fully prepared to be shooed off. The watchman looked at me for a while, asked what I was doing, and then brought out a plastic stool. Two hours. Nobody else came. It was just me and the sound of someone inside taking the window frames out whole, because apparently the contractor's uncle wants them. I've posted maybe forty finished paintings this year. This one is a scrappy pencil study, half of it smudged because I was holding the flask in the other hand, and it's the only thing anyone has messaged me about. Four people asked which house it was. One woman sent a photo of her grandmother standing in front of the same gate in 1987. I don't fully know what to do with that. It's not exactly a marketing lesson, or if it is, it's one I don't like very much, because the thing that worked was the thing I wasn't trying to sell. But I'm going back on Saturday to draw the staircase before it goes, and this time I'll post the smudged page again. Anyway if anyone else has figured out how to make "I went and sat somewhere and drew it badly" into something that pays the electricity bill, do tell me.

Someone pulled out a 1960s bathroom three streets from me and I said yes to the tile before I saw it. Forty kilos, mostly that pale sea-green that was everywhere in this city in the sixties, plus some terracotta that's gone soft and crumbly at the edges from decades of damp. The good half cuts like a dream. Thin, even, that green turns almost grey when it's wet and comes back green when it dries, beautiful for water. The bad half is dust. I spent two hours this morning with a hammer and a hardie and got maybe a coffee cup of usable tesserae out of it, and a lungful of old grout. My problem is I can't throw it out. It came off a wall in my own neighbourhood. Somebody's grandmother picked that colour. And I know exactly what will happen, it'll sit in the crate under the bench for three years and I'll move it twice and finally use it in something small just to be rid of it. Anyway. That's the state of the studio today. Crates everywhere, dust on everything, one cat sleeping in the box of terracotta which she has decided is hers.

There's a salvage yard out past Kolbenova where I've been going for twenty years. The guy who runs it used to be suspicious of me, now he just shrugs when I show up with a flashlight and a crowbar. Yesterday I pulled out three kilograms of brass fittings from a hotel renovation, all tarnished, perfectly useless on their own, and I know exactly where every single one will go in the next room I'm building. What I'm saying is I think half my practice is just having a good eye for what other people have given up on. The other half is knowing how to wait, I've had pieces of scrap sit in the corner for four years before they told me what they wanted to be. My son says I'm running a museum of things nobody wanted. He's not wrong.

Went out this morning to sketch a house off Richmond Road, the kind with the curved verandah and teak columns, and found the demolition crew already there. Roof off, most of the back wall down. The foreman saw my sketchbook and just nodded at me like, yes, daily occurrence, get on with it. So I sat across the road and drew what was left. And honestly the strangest thing happened, the half-drawn house was more interesting to sketch than the whole one would have been. The brickwork where the plaster fell away, the exposed beams, the bathroom tiles still clinging to a wall that had no room behind it anymore. I was making this nice little study of a house mid-death and I felt awful about enjoying it. I looked up the property card later. 1948. That house was older than independence itself and I was out there enjoying the demolition like it was a landscape. I don't know what to do with this feeling. I'm glad I drew it. I also hate that I drew it. Both things are true and I can't decide if that makes me a documentarian or just someone watching the city fall down for entertainment. Anyway. Two studies done, both half-hearted and honestly better for it. Might pin them up side by side and see what the week makes of them.

Went back to my old street this morning because I heard they'd started demolition. The house we lived in till I was eighteen is gone already, just a pile of brick and those stupidly bright pink plaster chunks. But the last house at the end, the one with the bougainvillea that always looked like it was on fire, that one's still standing. The family came out and asked what I was doing, and I told them I used to live here. The woman offered me chai and I sat on their steps for an hour sketching the facade across the road. My own childhood home, and I'm drawing it from someone else's porch. The really strange part is how much I remembered wrong. The balcony I was so sure faced the main road, it faces the side lane. The window I thought was mine, wasn't even in our flat. I've been carrying this wrong mental map around for sixteen years and nobody ever corrected it because nobody ever asked. I keep painting these old houses as if I'm documenting them properly, but I can't even remember my own correctly. Maybe that's what the whole project actually is. A record of how unreliable I am. Anyway the chai was good. That house has maybe two weeks left.

The house is on a small lane off 8th Main, the kind with a red oxide floor and a wooden stair that announces every person who's ever climbed it. I've drawn it maybe five times now, early mornings mostly, since I pass it on my walk and the light hits the balcony grille in a way I don't know how to describe properly. Did a watercolour of it two weeks ago and put it up, no caption, nothing clever. A man messaged asking what the price was, then bought it and told me he's the owner's son and they've given the builder the go ahead, demolition is in March. He said he wanted the painting because he's the only one in the family who remembers the house and he lives in Whitefield now. I was pleased about the sale for about ten minutes. Then I just sat there with my tea feeling strange. There's a real question underneath this that I keep circling. Am I documenting the city, or am I making nice pictures out of other people's grief and then charging for them? Because the sale is money and the money is what lets me keep doing this at all, so I'm not going to pretend I wish I'd refused. No neat answer here. Mostly I've realised I don't want to sell any more of these to strangers who just like "old Bangalore" as a look. I want them to go to people who'll actually miss the thing. That probably means less money. Fine.

The room is for a mid-size Kunsthalle, opens in November. I gave them a budget in the spring: 40 000 CZK for materials. That is the number they wrote down and that is the number everyone has been repeating in meetings for four months, so it has become true in the way these numbers do. Actual materials bill so far is 118 000. That is before I pay anyone to help me weld the frame, and the frame is not welded. Where it goes: 9 000 for the cable and turnbuckles, 14 000 for the plywood I had to buy new because the salvage stuff warped in the studio over winter like a wet book, about 22 000 so far in screws, bolts and a specific matte black paint I have grown to resent. The rest is transport, because the pieces come from a demolition yard in Kladno and a yard in Kladno is not a yard in Prague. Each trip is a van and a person and a day. So the 118 000 is coming out of my fee, which was already the fee of a man who is bad at this. Nobody at the institution has asked me a question. Not the curator, not the director, not the woman who does the contracts. I think they assume I know what I am doing. I am 58 and I still do this, so I suppose the assumption is reasonable and completely wrong. The funniest part, if you want it funny: I have done this exact thing before. Probably four times. Each time I tell myself the budget is the budget and each time the room gets bigger than the budget because a room that is too small looks cheap and a room that is too big looks like a decision. I have never once gone back and said the number was wrong. I do not know what that conversation sounds like. I am going to have it this month, I think, and I am not looking forward to learning the language. If you have ever successfully said "the number I gave you was fiction," I would like to hear how you opened the sentence.

went out to a mall that's been half empty since 2009. security guy found me crouched in the food court taking close-ups of the carpet. he wanted to know if i was with the demolition crew. i wasn't. i just wanted the carpet. 1970s orange and brown, that pattern that pretends to be geometric but is really just chaos with a ruler. it's worn down to nothing along the path people walked to the old Sears. you can literally read the foot traffic from 40 years ago in it. nobody designed that. it just happened. he let me stay. sat on a bench and watched me for a while and then said his wife used to work at the Orange Julius there. i got maybe 30 usable frames. most of it's garbage, the light was flat and the place smells like wet carpet and nothing. but two of them are the actual thing. the good stuff is almost never in the interesting place. it's in the hallway you walk past.

I did one of those old Bangalore bungalow portraits for a family that's selling the place. They wanted it as a keepsake before the demolition. I quoted ₹6,000, felt generous about it, honestly, because it was for someone who was losing their childhood home and I wanted to be nice. Eleven hours. That's ₹545 an hour before the paper and the paints, which for good watercolour paper and decent pigment is maybe another ₹800-1000. So call it ₹480 an hour. And I know the family was happy, and I know some of you will say stop undervaluing yourself, and I know all of that is true. But the thing is, I also know if I'd quoted ₹15,000 they'd have found someone else, or gone to one of those digital artists on Instagram who does it for ₹2,000. There's this whole tier of people who genuinely cannot tell my work from the cheap version, and that's the part I don't have a fix for. Still, I did the math on a napkin after I delivered it and sat there for a full minute. I don't even know what the answer is. I just wanted it written down somewhere.

Pulled it out of a demolition on Průmyslová two weeks ago. The site foreman let me take it for free, which should tell you something about rebar's market value. Four meters short of forty, actually, if I'm honest, I measured this morning with the tape I keep hooked on the coffee grinder. The problem is I've walked past it nine times a day for two weeks now and it has stopped being material. It's just the thing that's there. I catch myself resting a hand on it when I'm thinking. Yesterday I hung my jacket on it. That's the moment it starts to become architecture instead of raw stock, and I'm not sure that's a decision I made or one the wall made for me. I know the move is to cut it. The second you cut it, it's yours again, it's stock, it's a decision. But the cutting is also the end of the possibility. Once it's bent into the shape it's going to be bent into, it's an object and I've lost the version where it was the whole room. Anyway. Coffee number three. The rebar stays. For now.

Someone asked me to paint their family home before the demolition crew moves in. Legacy piece, three generations of their family grew up there. I quoted them a price and only after sending it did I realise I hadn't charged anything for the emotional weight of it. Just paper, paint, and my hours. And honestly? I'd do it again. That house gets torn down next month and the only record of it will be my painting hanging in their new flat. How do you bill for that? You don't. You price what it costs you and quietly accept that the rest is unpaid work you chose. Still, I keep thinking about the architect salary I walked away from. This is the trade I made, na. Some days it feels like a bad one.

The piece is a walk-through. About forty square metres of it. Galerie on the edge of Žižkov, opening in October. I quoted 9,500 euro and felt almost embarrassed saying it out loud, which tells you most of what you need to know about me. Then I sat down with the receipts because I am a coward who needs to know the worst. The steel frame: 1,400. Skip hire and the three trips to the demolition yard in Kladno, fuel and the guy who helps me load, 600. Glass, 900. The lighting I always underestimate, another 700. Then the thing nobody puts in the quote, which is six weeks of me standing in a cold hall in Holešovice deciding where a door should go. Six weeks. I did not write that number next to the 9,500 because if I had, I would have had to charge triple, and the gallery would have said no, and I would have spent the winter making nothing. So the price is a lie with good intentions. Everyone in this business knows it. The young ones especially, they quote their real hours and then they starve politely. My old dealer in Vienna used to say: you are not selling the object, you are selling the twenty years it took to know where to put it. He also died with a storage unit full of unsold work, so. I raise it to 11,500 next time. Probably. Ask me in November.

Small experiment I ran over the last two months. On the website I had put "prices on request" for the commissioned location sketches. Then in April I just wrote the number down: ₹4,500 for a full day out, roughly six hours, one finished A3 watercolour and ink, plus a couple of pencil studies I throw in anyway. Enquiries halved. Straight away, within a fortnight. But the ones that came through were completely different people. Earlier I'd get eight messages asking for a "quick sketch" of a wedding venue or a house before demolition, and half of them would vanish the moment I mentioned any money at all. Now it's fewer people, and they turn up knowing what it costs, and we spend the conversation on the actual thing. Which lane the morning light comes in from, whether they want the whole elevation or just the gate and the old neem tree. Real conversation. So the number went down and the work went up in quality. I'm still not sure if halving my enquiries is a win, and I keep second-guessing whether ₹4,500 is too low for a full day plus travel across the city. Anyone else here put a real number up instead of "DM for pricing"? Did it scare off the right people or just everyone?

It is about two meters, galvanized, flattened at one end where a machine got it. I found it in a demolition pile near Holešovice in 2019. It has been in the corner, then against the door, then behind the radiator, then in the corner again. Four studios' worth of moving it around. It has never been in a piece. Every few months I decide I will use it and then I put it back. Once I actually raised it against the wall, looked at it a long time, took it down. I don't think I am saving it. I think the pipe is a small admission that not everything has to become work. Most of the good objects I have, I ruined by using them. Anyway it is currently leaning on the wrong side of the door and I have to step around it every time I go for coffee.

Found it at a demolition site in Žižkov back when they were tearing out the old telephone exchange. Bakelite, the handset still on the cord. Two men and a handcart to get it up the stairs, I remember my back hurt for a week and I told everyone it was worth it, which it was not, physically. It has never worked. There is no line to it. It stands in the corner next to the radiator and it has been in four shows now, twice as itself and twice half-buried in rubble where you could only see the receiver. What I like is the weight of the handset. You pick it up and your arm remembers something you didn't know it remembered. I have watched people walk past everything else in the room and stop at this dead phone and just stand there holding it to their ear with nothing on the other end. One woman talked into it for maybe two minutes. I did not ask what she said. I paid 400 crowns for a thing that does nothing and it has done more work than most of my ideas that cost money. Make of that what you like. I have stopped trying to.

I painted this old house on Wheeler Road maybe three weeks back. One of those 60s bungalows, the kind with the deep verandah and the latticed jali bricks above the door. Sat on the footpath across the road for an hour, the owner's son came out and asked if I was doing it for a project. I said no, just because it's beautiful. He said, "Oh. We're demolishing it next month." Went past today while running an errand. The chajja is already gone. The jali bricks are in a pile by the gate. It took them a week. I have the painting. That's something. But it's sitting in my studio and I keep looking at it and thinking I got the proportions of that verandah slightly wrong, and now there's no building left to go check against. So it just stays wrong forever. That's the part that's bothering me more than the demolition, honestly. That I'll never know if it was my eye or the light. Do other people here live with that? The painting becoming the only record, and no way to verify it?

I've started judging found material by smell before I even look at it. Wood that's been in a damp cellar for twenty years has a particular must that nothing cleans off and nothing fakes. When I walk into a demolition site and catch that, I know the rest of the haul is worth my afternoon. Today a guy in Žižkov called me about an old workshop being torn out. Rotten oak workbench, some lathe parts, a drawer full of bent screwdrivers. I went because the stairwell smelled like my grandfather's garage. Brought home more than I can fit in the studio. The screwdrivers I'll use for years, the bench becomes part of the next room. People think I'm picky about aesthetics. No. I'm picky about history that you can breathe in. You can't fake that with new material, no matter how you treat the surface. The grime has to have earned itself.

Went back to that old compound on the Basavanagudi road this morning and the gate was open for once, workers loading rubble. The wall I've sketched at least four times this year, the one with the bougainvillea growing right through the crack in the plaster, it's half gone. They let me stand there and finish anyway. Drew the remaining half and the gap where the other half used to be, because that's what was actually there. I don't know what I'm supposed to do with these. I have a whole pile of paintings of buildings that are now just dust and a bigger pile of ones I keep meaning to go back to before that happens. The sketch I did today is the first one where the building isn't there anymore while I'm painting it. Strange feeling. Half grief, half relief that I got there in time for at least half of it. Anyway. The dust from demolition does terrible things to watercolour if you're not careful. Note to self: keep a cloth in the bag, not just the one for brushes.