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Got an email today from a man who bought a large piece from me two years ago. He wants to borrow it back for an evening. Not for a show, not for a museum, not even for a private viewing with a serious buyer. For a dinner party. He says it would "elevate the conversation." I sat with that for a while. There's a section in my contract about loans, and it's about insurance and condition reports and handling. Nowhere in there is a clause for "my wife wants the guests to see something on the wall that looks like it means something." I said no, as politely as I could manage in writing. He wrote back saying he was "surprised by the gatekeeping." That word. Gatekeeping. As if years of making the thing, and the fact that it's heavy and oil and wax and can't be shoved in a taxi, counts as some petty power trip. What I actually wanted to say is that the painting does its work in the studio and on a wall where someone chooses to live with it. It's not a conversation starter. It has nothing to offer a room full of people who will glance at it once over the wine and move on. That's not snobbery, it's just what the work is. Slow. You have to come back to it. I didn't say any of that. I said "not possible at this time." Which is the grown-up way of saying no without explaining yourself. But honestly, the fact that I had to be the one keeping the dignity of the thing he owns and I made. That sits wrong.

Last night at a friend's birthday, a woman looked at a picture of my latest interior on my phone and said, "Oh nice, what app do you use for that filter?" I said none, it's oil paint. She laughed. "No really, which one?" I had to open the actual file on my phone and zoom into the craggy impasto under the lamp to convince her. Even then she just said "wow, that's very realistic" in a tone that meant she still thought I'd run it through some AI thing. I don't even know what bothers me more. That paint is now assumed to be a filter, or that I spent four years in an atelier learning how to do with my hand what a phone does in half a second, and nobody can tell the difference anymore. The rendering was never the point. It was never about fooling anyone. It's about the light sitting in the paint itself and knowing exactly why it got there. Bof. Maybe I'm just old. But I put the phone away and changed the subject, and I felt the whole evening cool by a degree.

It was at my brother-in-law's place in the 6th. Some woman I'd never met, nice enough, works in tech. We're talking about what I do, she gets excited, says oh you should try Midjourney for your portraits, you can generate the composition and then just paint over it, it saves so much time. I said that's not really how I work. She said no but it's the same thing in the end, the image is what matters. I wanted to ask her if she'd say the same thing to a chef about a microwave meal. But I said something about observation and she changed the subject and I could feel her thinking I was being difficult. The thing is, I spent four years learning to see. Not to copy photographs. To see the actual fall of light across a real face in a real room. The temperature of the shadow under a jaw, the blue that lives in white linen at dusk. If I let a machine decide my compositions, what exactly did I learn? I know we all use reference. I know photography changed painting forever. I'm not a purist. But there's a difference between a tool and a replacement for the whole act of looking. Maybe I'm just old. Maybe in ten years every painter works this way and nobody cares. But I care. I like the slowness. I like being wrong for two hours and then something clicks.

Some woman at a dinner party last week, after I tell her I paint figurative work, she says "oh but abstract is so much easier, right? You don't have to worry about it looking like anything." I did not say what I wanted to say. I said "no, abstraction is its own discipline" like a polite robot. But what I wanted to say is: try painting a hand that looks like a hand and then come talk to me about what's easy. The disrespect is so casual. As if centuries of craft, of learning to see, of mixing a flesh tone that actually breathes, as if that's just the tedious part you get through before you're allowed to make real art. Anyway I came home and scraped a canvas I'd been working on for weeks. Not because of her. But also a little because of her.

Had a woman at a dinner party last week, lovely enough, tells me she's "really getting into painting" and wants my advice. So I ask what she's working on. She tells me she's copying a photo of her dog, in acrylic, and she's almost done but the nose looks wrong. I say, okay, bring it to my studio sometime, or send a photo, I'll look at the values. She says: "Oh, I don't want criticism, I just do it for fun." Then why ask the painter? I don't tell her to quit. I don't care that she's not serious. But don't ask a professional for advice and then preemptively refuse the thing that advice actually is. You want encouragement, say that. But don't call it asking for advice. I blame the whole "there's no wrong way to make art" line. It's true for her, fine, it's true. It's also a way of never getting better at anything. And then they wonder why their dog's nose is wrong. I ended up just saying, bring it anyway, I won't be brutal. But I thought about it for two days after. There's something about being treated as either a therapist or a cheerleader that gets under my skin.