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My easel is a cheap H-stretcher I bought second-hand in 1998. One of the crank handles broke off years ago, so I keep a pair of pliers on the floor next to it to adjust the height. People who visit the studio always offer to fix it. I tell them no. Fifteen years of my paintings came off that thing, I'm not going to risk it now. I know it's superstition. I know a new easel would be sturdier, that the pliers are ridiculous at my age. But there's something about the fact that this exact wooden frame has absorbed twenty-six years of turpentine drips and bad days and good ones. The crank is worn smooth where my thumb sits. The tilt is slightly off because I dropped it once moving studios, and I've learned to compensate without noticing I'm doing it. My daughter asked me last week why I don't just buy the good one I've been looking at online for three years. I didn't have an answer that made sense out loud. The truth is that the pliers are part of the painting now. Every time I bend down for them, it's a little ceremony before I change the height. Keeps me honest about what I'm doing. Anyway. If the bent screw gives out mid-canvas someday, I'll take it as a sign from the universe that I should finally retire the thing. Until then we're in it together.

For two years I painted under the ceiling light in the back room, which is one of those frosted dome fixtures that makes everything look like a faded photo. I kept thinking my greens were muddy. Turns out they were fine, I just couldn't see them. So my husband clamped an old architect lamp to the shelf above the easel, the kind with the long spring arms, and I put a 5000K bulb in it. Night and day. Except now I can see every wobbly edge on the tree line I've been working on since Labor Day and honestly I'm a little insulted. The lamp is doing its job. I'm the problem. Also the kids think the arm looks like a praying mantis and keep bending it around when they come in to say goodnight, so I'm re-aiming it every single night. Small price I guess. Anyone else change one thing in the setup and suddenly get a much harsher look at their own work? I don't know whether to be grateful or go back to the dome light and my comfortable delusions.

I swept my studio today for the first time in maybe two months and immediately regretted it. There was this gray-brown dust drift under the easel, charcoal and linseed oil and whatever dried out of the turps jar, and it had gone this deep purple-brown that I stood there staring at for a full minute. I literally crouched down with a palette knife like an idiot trying to match it. Couldn't. It's got something in it from every piece I've made since spring, and I can't get it back. Ended up not sweeping the rest. Just that one patch, and then I left it. Somebody told me once you can tell how long an artist's been in a space by the floor and I think that's the truest thing anyone's said to me about this whole thing. Not the work on the walls. The floor. Anyway I'm on my fourth hour on this big one, a woman with her hands over her face, and it's either the best thing I've made or I'm going to paint over it at 2am like always. No in between. There's a smudge of the floor color on the corner of it now and I might leave it there on purpose.

A 180 x 140, stretched it myself in early March, and then it just sat there on the easel like an accusation every time I crossed the studio. Not blocked, exactly. Not afraid, either. Just nothing rising. Some canvases wait for a feeling and I kept trying to force one in. Today I stopped trying. Mixed a cold wax ground with a little raw umber until it was the colour of wet pavement and just pushed it on with a drywall knife, no plan, no sketch, no idea what happens next. Took maybe twenty minutes and the whole weight of the month went out of the room. I don't know what will come after. That's the honest part. But the white is gone and I can work again. Sometimes the first layer is just permission. People overestimate inspiration and underestimate how much of painting is lowering your own bar far enough to start.

this cheap artbin easel i've had forever is driving me insane. the little knob to adjust the tilt just stripped so now it's stuck at this weird, slightly-too-upright angle. i keep bumping my head on the top edge. might just duct tape it into position lol. it's ugly but it works... mostly.

Bought it off a woman in Podgórze for 80 złoty, she said it was her mother's. When I got it home and unfolded the legs there's pencil all over the back rail: dates, mostly. 1978, 1983, then a gap, then 1994, 1997. No names. One date has "nie wyszło" next to it and I've been thinking about that for two weeks. I keep meaning to sand it off and I keep not doing it. It's not sentimental exactly, I didn't know her mother. But there's something about the gap between 1983 and 1994 that I can't stop looking at. Eleven years. She must have been doing something else. Or she was working and just stopped writing it down. Anyway the easel is fine, it wobbles a bit on the left leg, and my hand still goes to the old one out of habit. If you've got old equipment with someone else's marks on it, I want to know if you kept them or cleaned them off. Mine is staying.

ok so my easel has been at the exact same angle and height for like two years and last night i could not sleep so i decided this was the problem with my work. not the composition, not the fact that i've painted the same three colors for a month. the angle. so i moved everything. flipped the whole thing around so i'm now working against the window instead of with it, which means the light hits wet paint from the side and every single mark looks like garbage. you ever make a change to your setup at 1am and wake up with a studio you don't recognize and a weird sense of dread about it. that's where i'm at. anyway i'm gonna give it a week before i admit it was fine the way it was. drop your setup, or don't, i'm not your dad

There's a layer of charcoal dust down there, thick enough that if you step wrong you slide. My friend came by Saturday, took one look, and started to sweep. I yelled. Actually yelled, like she was about to throw out a box of my mail. She doesn't get it. That dust is the whole week. Every time I dropped a stick, ground one down to nothing trying to find the edge of a jaw, that's a mark on the floor. I work kneeled down half the time, big sheets on the ground, and the charcoal just rains off. There's a gray ghost of a shoulder smeared into the concrete that I've stepped over for three days without thinking. Swept studio = nothing happened in it. That's my rule and I know it's a dumb rule. Anyway I've been on this one face since Tuesday and I keep losing the mouth. Six hours today and the mouth is still wrong. It's the kind of wrong you can't see till you stand up and walk away, and by then the light's gone. Gonna go stand really far back from it now with a cigarette I'm not supposed to be smoking anymore.

Tried plein air for the first time last Sunday. Picked a little spot by the creek, got all set up, and the wind just wrecked me. My easel tipped over twice, a leaf landed wet side down right in the middle of my sky, and I packed it up after about forty minutes with maybe ten minutes of actual painting done. But here's the thing. I got more done in those ten minutes than I do in a whole afternoon of painting from photos. The light on the water was doing something I've never been able to fake in the studio. I've been chasing that same look for weeks from reference photos and it's always flat. Now I'm looking at those little wind-proof clamps for the canvas and a heavier easel, and I keep checking the forecast for a calm day. I think this is my new thing. Just wish I'd tried it before I turned forty.

Painted a still life tonight at the kitchen table after the kids went down. Same table we ate spaghetti at two hours earlier. I wiped it down, laid out the drop cloth, and there's still a smear of tomato sauce on the corner of my reference photo that I just decided to live with. I used to feel bad about not having a real studio space. Read all these posts about people's dedicated rooms with north light and proper easels and I'd get all wistful. But honestly the kitchen table works. The light is awful. The cat walks across my palette at least twice a session. My 8 year old stuck a drawing of a dinosaur to the easel I can't even use because there's no room for it. But it's the only uninterrupted hour I get and I'll take it. Finished a decent little pear study tonight, better than my last one. That's the whole win. Packed it up and now I'm eating leftover spaghetti over the sink like a civilized person. Who else is painting on a dining room table or a folding tray or wherever they can grab space?

My easel is too short for the big canvases. So there's a Rust-Oleum can in the corner, dented lid, half dried out, and I stand on it to reach the top third. Been doing it for two years. My ankle knows exactly where to land. Someone came by last month and asked why I don't just buy a taller easel and I genuinely didn't have an answer. It's not a money thing, a decent one is like 200 bucks. I think I like the instability. You can't get precious about a mark when you're balanced on a paint can, you make the stroke and get down before your foot slips. Also my knees are shot, so there's that. But I did the best face I've ever done climbing off that thing at 1am, wet charcoal on my forearm, radio going, and I'm not giving it up yet. Anyway. Whats the dumb thing in your studio you refuse to fix

Not a joke. My easel is wedged between the toilet and the tub because the bathroom is the only room in this house with a door that actually latches and no one knocks on it for twenty straight minutes. But here's the thing I figured out last month: the light in the hallway outside it, the little high window over the toilet, that flat afternoon light is the best I've ever had for judging value. My greens stopped going to mud. I did a whole 8x10 of the field behind the elementary school and for once the darks read as darks. So now I have a stool in the shower and a tube of titanium white on the back of the sink and my husband has stopped asking why. Downside is I don't have a bathroom door that stays dry and I've dropped a brush in the toilet twice. Wondering if anyone else ended up working in a room they never planned to. Not looking for the pretty answer either, I want to hear where the easel actually is.

ok so for two months i've been fighting a 30x40 canvas. burnt orange ground, this big flat black shape that was supposed to sit like a shadow with weight. it just sat there like a dead sticker. repainted the black four times. my studio is basically a paint graveyard now, i have like six ruined rags that used to be promising. today i scraped the whole black back down to the raw ochre with a palette knife and just left it. and it works. the thing i was chasing for 8 weeks was the absence of the thing i kept adding. anyway i'm not gonna pretend this is a metaphor or whatever. i'm just glad it's off the easel. what's the longest you've fought a single piece before it gave up

The tube split open this morning near the crimp, so I had to decant the last of it into a small jar. Zinc white I have had since maybe 2019. The new tube from the same maker is stiffer, more chalky, and cools everything it touches. I know the sensible thing is to do an underpainting with it and see if the difference even matters under a glaze. Instead I sat there at the easel mixing it with a little linseed and telling myself it was fine, which is not the same as it being fine. A student asked me last week why I do not just buy the good stuff, meaning the expensive stuff, meaning the stuff I probably should buy. I did not have a good answer. I have a good answer for almost everything else in that studio. Anyway I am painting a corner of the kitchen table with a bowl and a half peeled orange, and the white is the whole thing. Everything else is just the white being interrupted.

A woman came by the studio this afternoon to look at a small panel I did in March. Copper pot, two pears, the corner of a linen cloth. Nothing ambitious, I painted it in two sittings and mostly to work out a problem with the shadow side of the pot. She stood in front of it a long time. Then she said it was her grandmother's kitchen and her eyes went. I did not know what to do with my hands, so I made tea badly and we sat on the two good chairs with the painting between us on the easel. She bought it. That is not really the win. The win is that for about ten minutes I stopped calculating: whether the price was right, whether the gallery would have wanted it, whether a small panel even counts as a serious painting. She was looking at the thing itself. That is what I have been chasing for twenty-five years and I forget it constantly, sometimes for months at a time. Anyway the wall where it hung is empty now and I keep glancing at the nail.

Painted a portrait of my sister all week. Her face, the whole thing, really got somewhere with it around 2am. Woke up this morning and I couldn't look at it. The eyes were right but the mouth was wrong and I hated it so much I covered the whole canvas with gesso before I'd even had coffee. Now it's just a white rectangle on the easel and I already miss her. Wild how that works. I'd rather have an ugly painting I could've fixed than a clean slate. Every single time and I never learn. My therapist says this is a pattern. Yeah. It's called making art I guess. 😭

I had a booth at a local craft fair Saturday and a woman picked up one of my acrylic landscapes, looked at it for a good minute, and said "oh this is nice, I could probably do this with my daughter's $5 watercolor set." And I just stood there like... okay. So do it then? I'd love to see you mix titanium white into a puddle of Crayola paint and get that kind of coverage on canvas. Please. Film it. I didn't say any of that of course. I smiled and said "you should give it a try, it's really relaxing!" and she moved on. My husband said I was too nice and I probably was but also what's the point. People who think art supplies are all the same are not people you're going to convince in one conversation at a folding table. Still felt like packing up my easel and going home though.

My sixteen-year-old came into the studio yesterday without knocking, which she never does, and stood behind me for maybe a full minute while I was working. Then she said, "Maman, your paintings look less sad now." I wanted to be defensive at first. But she's right. I didn't even see it until she said it. For years my palette was all terre verte and raw umber and bone black, everything in that low grey northern light. I think I was painting the inside of my own head without realising it. The fallow years I had, the disappointment, it was all there in the colour, every time. Now there's more warmth. Not bright, not cheerful, just... alive. A little Naples yellow in the shadows. A red glaze where I would have left it dead. Kids see things. She doesn't know about the decade I lost, she only knows what she sees on the easel. And she saw it.

Small confession. I have one of those little sandpaper blocks for sharpening pastels, the proper one, and it lives in a drawer. Today I could not be bothered to open the drawer, so I did it over the kitchen bench. Over the fruit bowl, actually. Everything in that corner is now a fine dusty orange. The bananas look like they are blushing. My partner came in, looked at the bench, looked at me, and said nothing, which was worse than if he had said something. And the ridiculous part is the pastel I sharpened is a cheap one I don't even like. I was avoiding the face. I had been avoiding it for an hour already, so I made work for myself instead. This is my process, apparently. When the portrait is not going, I clean the studio, or I reorder things, or I ruin the kitchen with cadmium. Anything but the actual face. The drawing is still there on the easel and it still has the wrong mouth. I know that is what I have to fix and I am telling you people about sandpaper instead. Anyway. If anyone needs me I will be wiping orange dust off a toaster.

I've got maybe 45 minutes a night to paint, so three tries at the same patch of sky is basically my whole week gone. Working on a marsh scene from a photo I took at a rest stop in Delaware last fall, and the sky there is this washed out gray-blue that's honestly kind of ugly in real life, but in the painting it just turns to mud. Tonight's version is too purple. Tuesday's was too gray. Friday's was closest and I covered it up because I decided it looked unfinished. I keep doing this. I think it's because I only get the short window, so everything has to feel like progress, and a sky that's already right doesn't feel like progress. Anyway I'm leaving tonight's purple disaster on the easel until Sunday so I can look at it with actual eyeballs instead of tired ones. Anyone else paint better in the first pass and then ruin it trying to be careful? Also if you use Liquitex heavy body ultramarine, is yours weirdly glossy straight out of the tube or did I get a bad batch? Might be my medium but I don't think so.