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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.

Spent three weeks pulling a six-colour screenprint edition of 40. Zinc white over a warm grey, the registration had to be perfect or the whole thing read as mud. Got them all numbered, signed, wrapped in glassine. Then the gallery calls, cheerful voice, to tell me they've sliced the margins down to fit their standard 50x70 frames. Every sheet. My margins. Gone. So now the image sits flush to the edge like a cheap poster, and I have to write to 40 people and explain that the edition they bought is technically a different object than the one I made. Half of them won't notice. The half who notice are the ones who'll never buy from me again. The thing that's actually eating me is that I can't decide if I'm furious about the work or about the fact that I said thank you when they told me. I heard myself do it. Thank you, of course, no problem at all. Printmaking is supposed to be the medium where I control the exact specifications. The whole point. Same plate, same paper, same pressure, repeatable, documented, honest. And it still only takes one person with a paper trimmer and a tidy idea of what a frame looks like.

For twenty years my portfolio was a PDF. Sixty pages, properly photographed, the works shot in good light, the lot. I sent it to maybe four hundred people over the years. Response rate near zero, and I never thought to ask why. Earlier this autumn a curator in Brno asked to see my work and I was tired, so I sent a link to one page. Three photos taken on my phone in the storage hall, bad light, one of them has my boot in the frame. Four lines of text. Where the work has been, what it is made of, what I need to build the next one. Two serious enquiries that week. One is now a real commission for next year. I think the sixty-page PDF was doing the opposite of what I wanted. It was proving I was serious. It was not showing anyone a door. A curator has eleven minutes and forty other artists. A perfect portfolio says: this person is finished, this person is a known quantity, go and look at the checklist. A bad photo of a real room says: there is something here that is not in a database yet. I am not saying make ugly documentation. I am saying I had confused thoroughness with invitation. Thoroughness is for your own archive. Nobody walks into your archive. Now the part I am less sure about. I have no idea whether this works because the page is honest, or because it looks like I am not trying, which in this world reads as expensive. Possibly both. I have been doing this too long to believe I have found the formula, but the old one was definitely dead and I had been sending it out for years without noticing. Still keeping the PDF. For grants. Grants love a PDF.

A gallery in Barcelona wants to do a small solo show in October, my work, but also some documentation of process, which is fair, the whole thing is basically tidepool alchemy. They asked for my notes on the seawater development, dilution ratios, exposure times, how I account for different salinity levels. And I sat down to write it and realised I have none. I just know. I've been doing this so long I can feel it, the weight of the paper, the way the light sits, the smell of the water. I never standardised any of it because every print is a different day, different sun, different batch of Atlantic. I told them I'd put something together and now I'm staring at a blank page trying to remember how to explain something I only understand with my hands. I think this is the gap between making work and showing it. The making is private and intuitive and full of failure and small victories nobody sees. The showing asks you to translate all of that into something legible. I don't know how to do that without flattening it.

I went back to a street in Malleswaram today. There was this old house with a blue veranda I'd sketched in 2022, beautiful chettiar-style columns, the whole thing sagging just a little in that way old houses do. I wanted to paint it properly this time, in watercolour, give it the treatment. Pulled up to the spot and it's a construction site. Apartment going up, probably 14 floors from the look of the pit. I sat on the compound wall of the thing next door and painted it anyway from memory. Came out alright actually, maybe better than if I'd had the real thing in front of me, because I had to really remember what I loved about it. Weird feeling, documenting things as they disappear. But I'm glad I have that old sketchbook at home. At least someone drew it.

The installation came down in March. Two tons of salvage, a crane, eleven hours, gone. Standard. But I had a photographer in for two days beforehand and now I am sitting here editing 340 frames and I have a problem I did not expect. The photos are better than the room was. Not technically. Technically they are fine, maybe too fine, the light did something in the north corner that I never got right with the real fixtures. But they have an order the room never had. You cannot put a camera in a space without turning it into a composition. The room was a place you moved through badly, bumping into things, half-seeing. The photograph is a decision. And now galleries are asking for the photos and not the work, because the work is expensive and the photos are not. Which is honest, I suppose, but it makes me feel like a man who builds sets for someone else's picture. I have started refusing to sell the prints without the room attached, which is a stupid rule commercially and I am not sure I believe it myself. Anyone else find their documentation has quietly become the thing people want?

Went for my walk at seven as usual and the compound wall was already rubble. They'd been at it since about five, I think, because the dust was still hanging in the air and the man on the JCB was eating breakfast out of a steel tiffin box, sitting right there on the machine, perfectly calm. I've drawn that house three times over two years. Once from the road, once from inside the gate when the watchman let me in because I gave him chai, and once badly, in the rain, standing under someone's tree. All three are in a folder and now the folder is the only place the house exists. What I keep turning over is this. I have the drawings. I have the proportions, the railing detail, the way the light came through the jaali in the afternoon. And I still feel like I missed it. Like documenting a thing is not the same as holding on to it, and I've been telling myself for a while now that it is. My husband says at least I got there. He's not wrong. But knowing something is different from feeling it, na. Anyway, the JCB man offered me his chai. I didn't take it, I was already late for nothing in particular.

Spent the morning writing the artist statement for the March group thing and it came out as nine hundred words of nothing. Deleted it. Wrote six lines. Deleted those too. What I actually wanted to send: this piece is made from a photo of my brother's kitchen that I tore into about forty pieces and glued back together wrong, on purpose, because that's how I remember the room. There's a coffee ring near the corner. I left it. Instead I have a document that says "explores the tension between preservation and loss." My friend Jen read it and said it sounded like a grant application for a hospital. She's right. Anyway, my real question, and I'm genuinely asking: does anyone actually read these things, or do they just get filed and nobody looks until after the show. Mine's going in the frame on the wall and I keep thinking I should just print the six honest lines and let it be uncomfortable.

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.

For years I shot everything the same way: tripod, two softboxes, neutral grey, fill in every corner so nothing was lost in shadow. Correct, and completely dead. Then in November I delivered a small interior to a client in Villeurbanne and she had already hung it before I got my coat off. Afternoon light coming sideways across the room, one half of the canvas frankly too dark to read. She was delighted. That is what the painting does in a real room, and I had spent a decade photographing it as if it were a passport photo. So now I photograph the new work where it lives. Same corner of my studio, north window, no lights, one shot at three in the afternoon when the light rakes across and the impasto shows, and I let the darks go dark. Enquiries went from almost nothing to about one a week, and the people who write are the ones who noticed the light, which tells me they will notice it on their wall too. The obvious objection: a client cannot judge the whole canvas. True. I send the full flat documentation to anyone who asks, privately, and nobody has ever been unhappy to receive it. The public image is not the record. It is the invitation. Bof, and the flat grey shots are still on my site, in the archive, where they belong.

A gallery in Berlin asked if they could document my studio as it is right now. Dust, the collapsed table, the half-finished thing from 2019 I keep meaning to throw out. I said yes so theyd stop asking, and now they want to show it as an installation. Somebody else's trash is art, your own is a mess. I worked decades to get out of rooms like this and now they want to put the room in a room. I should be flattered, probably. Instead I am thinking about which corner to clean and hating myself for thinking it.

my brother was not good at photography. like, genuinely bad. half the frames are his thumb. the other half are blurry pictures of things he was excited about, usually food or our cousin's dog. but I found the box of negatives last week, tucked behind some tax paperwork in a closet I'd been avoiding. spent the whole weekend making contact sheets in the darkroom at the community center, just to see what was on them. there's this one where he's trying to photograph the ocean and instead got like, a wall of beige blur. and I can't stop looking at it. it's so incompetent. it's so him. I've been staring at it like it's the most profound thing I've ever seen. I'm going to try to work with these somehow. torn paper collages from the contact sheets maybe, or cyanotypes of his worst frames. not sure yet. but I've been sitting with the fact that he put all this energy into documenting his life and most of it is just... bad. and that's the whole point somehow. anyway. if anyone has experience working with found negatives that are mostly garbage, I'd love to hear how you approached it without making it sentimental garbage yourself.

Okay I need stories because I almost walked into a trap this week. Gallery loved my work, talked all this big show stuff, then slid in "small admin fee" and I got that itch. Walked. My worst one though was way back, first time I ever had a gallery interested. The owner kept calling my pieces "decorative" and said they'd need to see my "process documentation" before they'd commit. Real weird. I should've known the second they said that, but I was so desperate to be wanted I almost went along with it. What's the biggest red flag you've seen from a gallery and did you get out in time? Or did you ignore it and pay for it later? Tell me I'm not the only one who's been this naive 😭

Back in 2009 I had a show in a small gallery in Brno that no longer exists. The gallery put up a basic website with installation shots. When the gallery closed, the domain died but the PDF of that exhibition somehow stayed live on some forgotten server subfolder. Last year a curator from Oslo emailed me. Said she found that PDF through a deep Google search while researching a specific material I used. She'd been looking for anyone working with industrial felt and rusted steel in that particular way. The PDF was the only document online that showed it. She booked a studio visit. I got two museum shows out of it. Norway, of all places. Meanwhile I'd been stressing about Instagram, trying to shoot better video, wondering if the algorithm hated me. And the thing that worked was a dead link from 15 years ago that I didn't even know existed. I don't know what the lesson is. Leave things online and don't delete them, I suppose. The internet forgets slower than we think. Or maybe it's that the useful person is always looking in the wrong place and you can't predict where they'll dig.

I spent years tweaking my website. Better photos, cleaner navigation, more process shots, less process shots, SEO keywords my friend who works in tech kept telling me to use. And I'd get maybe three inquiries a month, usually from students asking about internships I don't offer. Two months ago my domain expired and I just... didn't renew it. Put together a single PDF with recent work, editions, prices in a table, and my email at the bottom. It's ugly. It's just a document. I send it to people who DM me or write. That's it. And somehow this feels more honest? Like the website was performing professionalism for nobody in particular, and the PDF is just me handing someone what they asked for. I've sold more prints in the last eight weeks than in the previous six months of having a proper site. I don't know if this scales or if it only works because I'm a printmaker with edition sizes I can count on one hand. But I'm starting to think the whole "you need a professional web presence" thing was built for a different kind of practice, or maybe a different decade.

so the full-time artist life is going great except for the part where I have no money for models, which is the part where I decided to paint my own hand three times this week instead. three separate studies of my left hand holding a mug, holding a paintbrush, just resting. hands are SO hard. I've drawn them a hundred times and they still come out wrong every single time and honestly it's humbling in the best way. but here's the thing. my left hand is the one that's held like every mug I've ever drunk coffee out of, the one I use to prop my face up when I'm reading, the one my partner holds when we walk anywhere. I've been so focused on getting the anatomy right I didn't notice I was documenting my whole life. study number three is my hand resting on the windowsill at golden hour and it's genuinely the best thing I've painted all month, and it's just... my hand. my boring left hand that does nothing special. anyway I'm framing it. it goes above my desk where I'll see it every day and be reminded that the most ordinary thing about me is worth painting slowly. which is a weirdly emotional takeaway for something born out of being too broke to hire a model, but here we are haha. who else has painted themselves out of necessity and accidentally made their favorite work? I can't be the only one

Was sketching this old Raj-era guesthouse off MG Road last week, the one they're pulling down next month. Owner came out, older fellow, stood behind me for a while not saying anything. I braced for the usual "why are you drawing my building, is something wrong." Instead he said, "Take your time. Take two hours. I'll get you chai." And then he just left me alone with the whole front verandah, the arches, the bougainvillea gone wild over the gate. Two hours of no one asking anything of me. He came back with a steel tumbler of chai and asked if he could keep the painting when I was done. I said I'd frame it for him. He got a bit quiet. "My grandfather built that place," he said. "Nobody's asked me a single question about it in forty years." Finished it yesterday and walked it over. He wasn't there, his daughter took it, said she'd hang it in the hall. I don't know why that's stuck with me more than any sale. Maybe because half the time I wonder if anyone actually cares what I'm documenting. Turns out the ones who lived it do. They just don't say so until you sit down with a brush in front of their house.

There's a construction site visible from my studio window and honestly it's become part of my reference collection whether I like it or not. Two months ago they knocked down this beautiful old bungalow with a veranda and those arched windows, the kind nobody builds anymore. This morning I looked up and the new tower is already at the fourth floor. I've done three sketches of the same view at different stages and I think I'm accidentally documenting the city disappearing in reverse. The workers start at 6am, before the light is even good. I've started timing my chai break to when they break too, mostly because the sound of all that hammering stops and I can finally hear myself think. I keep telling myself I should go draw the older house further down the street before it goes too. But I keep putting it off, same way I keep putting off a lot of things. Maybe that's the real habit to break, na?

it went to a woman in Rotterdam who found me through a photo of a detail shot, the corner where his address is still legible under the wash. she didn't ask me to explain it. that's the part I keep turning over. it's the first thing I've sold that has his actual hand in it. a page from a repair manual he'd written his new address on in pencil, 2009, before he moved and before everything. I taped it into the panel and painted around it until it stopped being a document and started being a place. then I put it in a show anyway and priced it like I meant it, which took three tries. packing it up yesterday I had a moment where I thought, I could just keep this. there's no rule that says it has to leave. I taped the box shut instead. mostly I'm fine. slightly unmoored. it turns out there's a difference between making a thing out of what's left and letting a stranger take it home in a box.

She told me I need to "document the process." So I've been taking photos of the same chunk of limestone every few days. It's a bust. Half the face is still buried in the stone. I don't know who wants to watch that. But here's what happened. I posted a photo of my chisels laid out on the bench. Just the tools. Nothing fancy, dirty handles, worn down. That one got more likes than any finished piece I've ever put up. So I'm trying to figure out what the point is. If the work itself doesn't draw people, but the mess and the tools do, what am I actually selling? Because I'm not interested in selling the romance of being a sculptor. I'm interested in selling the sculpture. Hasn't made me any money yet. Just more people asking if they can come watch me work. Which I don't allow.