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so for like two years i had this whole thing going where every night i'd pack everything up. brushes rinsed, jar dumped, easel folded, table wiped down, back to being a dining table nobody eats at. full reset. took twenty minutes and i told myself it was discipline. it was not discipline. it was me not wanting to admit i live in a studio with a bed in it. last tuesday i left a tube of cadmium red open on the table, went to sleep, woke up, and just... started painting. no setup. the palette was still wet because i'd covered it with a takeout lid. i got three hours in before i noticed i hadn't eaten. best session i've had in months. i think the packing up was actually me telling myself this wasn't the real thing. like the real painters have a room with the right light and a sink that isn't shared with the kitchen. and i was doing a nightly performance of being tidy instead of working. now there's a crust on the table i'll have to sand off eventually. not gonna. the table has a job now. anyone else doing the pack-and-reset ritual and lying to themselves about why

I spent this morning wrestling with a blank sheet of Arches 300lb cold press. It’s for a series of Helleborus orientalis studies, and honestly, the paper itself feels like an accusation. It’s so… expectant. You can’t just splash about; every mark has to be considered, deliberate. I find myself sketching out the composition in pencil at least three times before I even think about touching a brush. It’s a discipline, of course, and one I value, but some mornings it feels less like a discipline and more like a quiet form of self-sabotage.

I am working up a plate of Salvia jurisicii for a client who wants the whole plant, life size, which means roughly eleven inches of stem and a good many leaves. The flower heads and the upper foliage are what anyone will actually look at. The lower third of the stem will be covered by the two largest cauline leaves, and I painted every bit of it this morning, down to the node where a spent bract is still attached, in eight or nine graduated washes. It will never be seen. Even I will not see it once the leaves go on. I know perfectly well that a competent painter would have stopped at the point where the leaf margin begins. I did it anyway and I would do it again, and I am not entirely sure whether that is discipline or a small compulsion I have dressed up as discipline. There is a real argument that this is simply waste, that the hour would have been better spent on the calyx, which is the genuinely difficult part and which I have been avoiding since Monday. I suspect the reason I painted the invisible stem so happily is precisely that the calyx frightens me. Do other people do this. Not the stem, I mean the avoiding the hard passage by doing meticulous work on a passage nobody will ever see. I would like to think it is only me.

I have been painting the same Rosa canina sprig for four days, which is longer than it warrants, and this afternoon I discovered I had cut the sheet from the wrong side. The felt mark runs underneath and the sizing is subtly different. You would not see it in the finished painting, but I can feel it. The washes sit a fraction differently and I have been quietly blaming my own handling since Monday. I am going to finish it. Throwing away four days of work over a mis-cut sheet would be a poor sort of discipline, and the specimen itself is a good one. But I have written the correct side in pencil on the pad cover now, which I should have done years ago and did not because I was certain I would remember. Does anyone else keep making the same small, entirely avoidable mistake on the grounds that they are too experienced to need a note?

I spent two days this week trying to keep an edition consistent and I hate every single print. The registration is perfect, the ink density is the same, the paper behaved. And they're dead. Completely dead on the page. I think I've been doing this long enough that I should know better. But there's something about the discipline of the edition, the obsessive checking, that kills the life out of the work. The prints that always end up in the shows are the ones I pull a little too fast, when the squeegee angle drifts, when I stop thinking and just move. I lined the dead ones up on the floor this morning. Thirty-two perfect, identical, worthless little objects. It should be the opposite. The multiple is supposed to be about the copy being alive in its own way, not a Xerox of itself. I keep telling people that. Maybe I should start believing it and pull the screens a little sloppier again.

Scanned a pastel this week that I nearly didn't bother with. The face was too soft, the chin I'd redrawn three times still sat wrong, and I almost deleted the photo on my phone. But I'd promised a friend I'd send her something, so I scanned it anyway and made a print test. It's the first thing that's sold twice in two days. Small A5 edition, €18 each, and both buyers DM'd the same thing, "the quiet one." The one I thought was a failure. I keep having this happen and I don't know what to do with it. My eye is ruthless and probably wrong. The pieces I'm proud of sit there, the ones I want to bury get attention. Is it that people feel the struggle in a piece? Or is my judgment just genuinely off about what works? I've started uploading everything lately, even the rejects, as a discipline. It's not a strategy, it's me not trusting myself less. But something about that is working and I'd rather understand it than thank my luck again.

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.

There is a piece of paper on my workbench right now, a quote for a gallery in Brno. Four months of work, roughly a ton of scrap iron and about nine hundred used books. My hand wrote 22,000 euros. My head had already worked out that 9,000 would cover it and leave something. I sent the 22. Not out of bravery. I sat with the email open maybe forty minutes. What moved me was remembering 1994, a warehouse in Holešovice, a German curator asking my price and me saying a number so low he actually laughed and then paid it. I ate lentils for a month and told everyone it was fine. It was not fine. So now the rule I try to keep: when the fear says nine, write twenty-two and close the laptop. It is not math, it is a kind of discipline. If they say no, they say no, I still have my scrap and my books and nobody dies. The part I do not know yet is what happens in my stomach if they say yes. What number do you write second, after the honest one scares you?

My water jar is a plastic bucket from a bakery near my old office. Two rupees, no lid. Someone had scratched "Bindu" into the side with a compass point. I have never met Bindu and I am weirdly attached to her. Here is the actual thing though. I paint the old houses and the sky always comes first, because once the light is right the house can be wrong and it still reads. But I got so used to chasing morning light that I forgot how to paint in it, if that makes sense. This past week I've been going out at half six to a lane behind Basavanagudi with the bucket and a cold steel tumbler of chai and just standing there instead. Twice I came back with nothing painted and did not feel bad about it. Yesterday I finally put down the wash and the paper buckled because I was standing in the shade, not the sun, and hadn't noticed. All that looking and I still got the direction of light wrong. There is a house on that lane with a green wooden gate and a small Ganpati niche above it that I have walked past for years. Scaffolding went up on it on Tuesday. I don't know if it's a repair or the end. I am telling myself repair. What I want to know, and I'm asking properly: do you all ever go out and just not paint? Because I cannot decide if this is discipline or if I have simply become a woman who loiters with a bucket.

I tear everything by hand, deliberately, because a torn edge catches light in a way a cut one doesn't. That part is fine. But then I mount it on a straight-cut board, square corners, and I line the whole thing up so it sits dead level in the frame. Spent yesterday on a small piece, maybe 18 by 24, and the torn paper was doing what I wanted, soft grey page from a 1953 Swedish almanac, one warm ochre scrap, a lot of white. Then I squared it off and it went quiet in the wrong way. Not calm. Just corrected. I keep telling myself the frame is the discipline, the edges have to hold the tearing in. But I'm not sure that's true anymore. Maybe the tearing is the piece and the square is me being afraid of it. Anyone else flatten something out of a piece and only notice after? Or is this just what mounting is and I should stop thinking about it.

Honest one. My first gallery, years ago, the owner asked me at the opening what my prints were about and I gave her the whole thing, the multiple, the copy, Benjamin, the whole architecture. She nodded for maybe ninety seconds and then said "so, they are nice, but what are they about?" I still think about that. She was not wrong to ask and I was not wrong to answer, but I had planned the answer and not the room. Lately I try a version that is one sentence and then I stop talking, which for me is a discipline. What is yours? The real one you say out loud, not the one on the website. And does it change depending on who is asking, the gallerist, the collector, the other artist in the corner? I want to know if anyone has cracked this or if we are all just improvising badly.

A canvas I finished in March left the studio this week. Two meters by one fifty, eleven layers, the last three mostly scraping back what I'd done the day before. The buyer is a woman from Düsseldorf who has bought twice before and never once asked me what it means, which I appreciate more than I can say. The truck came Tuesday morning. Two men, blankets, ratchet straps, the whole ritual. And I stood in the doorway with my coffee and watched them tip it into the van and I felt this lurch, ganz kurz, like a door closing somewhere in the building. Not sadness exactly. More like the moment the work stops being mine. While it's on the wall it belongs to the day I made it. The second it's wrapped it becomes an object with a value and a wall to hang on and that is a different thing entirely. I've sold work for twenty years and this still happens. My wife says I should be pleased and I am, the money is real, the studio rent is real. But I went back inside and the wall where it hung was just wall. I mixed a grey for a new one and it came out wrong, too warm, and I left it. Do you keep any of the big ones? I have three in the back room that I will probably never sell, and I'm not sure anymore if that's discipline or cowardice.

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.

I found a tube of Naples yellow in the back of my paint box today, the old Winsor & Newton with the lead warning still on it. It's been there since before my daughter was born. Fourteen years and the paint is still good, still buttery. Paint outlasts most things if you care for it. People think oil paint is finicky, that you need the perfect medium or the temperature has to be right. The truth is a tube of paint will sit quietly for a decade and then give you exactly what you need the day you need it. I used it for the sunlit wall in the painting I'm on and it went on like a gift. I don't clean my brushes as well as I should. But I close every tube properly, every single time, and I think that's the discipline that matters. The small one, the one you can actually keep. Anyway. If you're reading this, go look at the oldest tube in your box. See if it's still got something in it.

My daughter, she studies in Patna now, came home for Diwali and saw me sitting with the brush and she said, Baba why are you not putting this on the phone. I told her I don't understand all this. So she took the phone, and she made one of those short videos, just my hand and the brush and the fish I was drawing, not even twenty seconds. She put some music on top which I found too loud, but I said nothing. In one week people came to my stall asking for the fish painting. A lady from Delhi bought two. A girl came and said she saw me on Instagram and wanted to learn. All this after I spent so many years doing exhibitions and cooperative meetings the proper way. I felt like such a fool ji, that the thing I ignored was the thing that worked. Now I am learning. My niece is teaching me to hold the phone steady while I paint. But I am also worried. The video showed the fish and the peacock, but nobody saw the ten years behind that line, the discipline, the ritual, the grandmother who taught my mother who taught me. I want the buyers but I also want them to know this is not decoration, this is our history. How do I put the history in a twenty second video without losing the people.

Nothing dramatic. I finished the interior with the chair by the window, the one I've been circling since March, and when I stepped back it was simply done. No more to do. And then I signed it. Bottom right, thin, with the date. I realised halfway through the C that I hadn't put my name on a finished painting since 2014. The fallow years, I taught. Demonstrations, student work, corrections on other people's canvases. My own name went into the corner of nothing. I told myself it was modesty or discipline, but it was fear, honestly. A signature is a claim. You say: this is finished, this is mine, this is what I have to offer. The paint is still wet so it will sit in the studio for a week before I varnish. All afternoon I kept walking past it to look at the little dark mark in the corner, ridiculous. Bof. But voilà. Anyway. There it is.

Not a metaphor. I mean actually glued. Cyanoacrylate, which is of course the one that sets before you can blink. Thumb, index finger, and a good solid square of tabletop bonded together like we were meant to be. I sat there for maybe forty seconds just looking at it. Not panicking. Just thinking, alright, this is where I am now. This is the situation. I have committed to this table in a way I hadn't planned. The acetone was three meters away in the other room. I could have rocked and reached. Instead I just sat. Sometimes you make a decision and the decision is: wait. Eventually I peeled myself off. Left a good bit of skin behind. The table doesn't seem to mind. I mention this only because so much of the talk about studio practice is about discipline and flow states and intention. And sometimes it's just, you glue yourself to your own table and you sit there like an idiot for a minute because that's what the moment requires.

working on this big charcoal piece, torso and one arm reaching out, and the hand has eaten my entire day. three hours. redrawing the same four fingers because the knuckles kept coming out like sausages. i don't use reference for hands, which is either discipline or ego depending on who you ask, and today it was just ego. erased so hard the paper started pilling. my mother comes by, looks over my shoulder for a second, and goes "is that a hand?" then wanders off to make tea. i stood there holding a charcoal stick like an idiot. she's not wrong to ask. it looked like a glove full of wet clay. but here's the thing, the hand isn't the point, it's the reaching. nobody's gonna look at this and go wow what a hand. they're gonna feel the arm or they won't. and i KNOW that and i still spent three hours on knuckles because some gremlin in my head thinks if the hand isn't perfect the whole feeling falls apart. anyway i'm keeping it. pilled paper and sausage fingers and all. it's the most honest part of the piece right now.

Decided this week I'd start painting at six, before the light gets ugly and the phone starts. Third morning now and I have to say it: my own studio feels wrong at that hour. Too quiet, maybe. I need the day to have happened a little before I go at the canvas. The room makes a certain sound after noon that isn't there at dawn. Also the coffee situation is meaningless at six. I'm drinking espresso to wake up so I can paint about patience. There's a joke in there somewhere. Tomorrow I go back to ten o'clock and stop pretending I'm a morning person. The discipline isn't the hour, it's showing up at all. I knew that. Forgot it for three days.

Found an unopened tube of Naples yellow in the back of my paint box today. Must be from my atelier days, so over twenty years old. The label is faded but the crimp is still sealed. I opened it and the pigment came out like butter. Better than anything I buy now. I used to be so careful with paint. That whole first decade I treated every tube like it cost gold, because it did. Now I squeeze out more than I need without thinking and leave it to skin over on the palette. My student saw me scrape a mound of perfectly good ultramarine into the bin today and made a face. She didn't say anything but I felt it. Maybe the discipline is still there somewhere, it just moved. These days I spend more on a good brush than I'd have spent on a month of paint back then. I'm keeping the empty tube on my shelf. Reminds me that I used to know the price of things.