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so i did this thing a few months ago where a neighborhood coffee shop asked for four 24x36 acrylic pieces. walls are big, they wanted "something colorful," easy brief. i quoted $400 for all four because i'm an idiot and thought "bulk discount" like i'm selling socks. $100 per painting. that's like $2.60 an hour if you count the sketching and the repainting and the repainting again because acrylic dries fast and i hate myself. finally deliver them. they're thrilled. two weeks later i walk in for coffee and they've framed them in these cheap black frames from michael's. completely covering the edges. i paint the edges. that's like. a thing i do. the sides are part of it. they just. framed over them. i didn't say anything. i drank my latte and left. still haven't said anything. $400 and my edges are in framing jail forever.

I need to say this out loud to people who will understand. There is a shoulder in the interior I am working on, a woman seated at a table with a window behind her, and I have repainted that shoulder four times since Monday. The problem is not the shape. The shape has been right since the second pass. The problem is that in getting it right I kept softening the edge against the wall behind it, wet into wet, because every time it looked a half millimetre too hard I reached for the brush instead of leaving the room. Now the paint there is about a centimetre thick in places and the edge has gone to mud. It reads as fuzzy, which is worse than hard. Hard is at least a decision. Classical training gives you a lot of beautiful words for edges and none of them help when your hand is nervous. So tonight I am scraping that shoulder back to the ground with a palette knife, which will take two days to dry properly, and then I will paint it once. One pass. Then I put the brushes down and go and eat something. Anyone else have a place on a canvas where the number of attempts has become the actual subject?

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.

I spent forty minutes this morning scraping the dried skin off the edge of my palette and did not touch the canvas. Barely moved a brush. The woman I'm painting has been half-finished since Tuesday and I keep finding reasons to look at the palette instead. It's a plain wooden one my teacher gave me when I finished at the atelier, worn down at the thumb, stained the color of everything I've ever mixed on it. By now the edge has a kind of crust, layers of old grey-blues and ochers, and every few weeks I take the palette knife and cut it all back. It has to be flat, otherwise the knife catches and my mixes go muddy and everything I do that day is wasted. My daughter came in and asked if I was actually working. Fair question. I let her scrape a bit. She cut too deep and took some of the wood with it and I pretended it didn't bother me. I think the truth is I was not ready to paint her hands. Hands are the hardest thing there is and I have been putting them off. The palette is honest work with no risk in it. Anyway. Back in a minute. Hand first, and the rest can wait.

Sitting in my studio with a small interior I've been working on since the start of the month, a woman at a table with morning light coming from a window behind her left shoulder. The whole thing is nearly done. The walls are right, the cloth on the table is right, the light reads the way I wanted it to. And her hand on the table is dead. It is the fourth time I've wiped it back and repainted it and each time it comes back a little more like a photograph of a hand and less like a hand. Here is the specific problem. I can build the form fine. Palm, knuckles, the taper of the fingers, all correct. What I can't find is the edge. The place where the light side meets the shadow side. I keep making it crisp because I know what the shape is, and a crisp edge says "I know what this is." I don't want her to know what it is. I want the light to have made it. One soft edge where the wrist turns into the shadow of the table, one lost edge where the fingers meet the cloth, and the whole thing would breathe. I know all this. I've taught it. And I still paint a hand like I'm describing it to a police sketch artist. I've been looking at Chardin all week, the little hands in the still lifes, the way he lets a knuckle just dissolve into the background and trusts you to finish it. It is a kind of confidence I don't have yet at this size. At a big scale I can be loose. Small and I get nervous and tidy. So I am going to let it dry and go at it once more with a bigger brush than it deserves. If it fails again I may paint her hand into her sleeve and call it a compositional choice. Not really. But it's been that kind of week.

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 had a small show open at a library in Majorna in March, six pieces, and I did the sensible thing for once: no announcements, no countdown, no "link in bio". Posted nothing at all for the six weeks around it. Partly stubbornness, partly I was in the conservation studio four days a week and just did not have it in me. Result: eleven people came. Two of them were staff. One bought a small piece for 1,200 kronor, which for me is a good sale, not a great one. The thing that did anything was a photo I took on the table by accident, half the work cropped out, just a torn edge and a bit of old ledger paper with the light across it. Put it up at nine in the evening with no caption. Four people asked about the paper. One of them is now coming to the studio in May. I have no idea what that means and I am not going to build a method out of it. What I keep turning over is that the photo was worse as a photo and better as a thing to look at. The proper shots, the ones my partner took with the good lens, did nothing. Flat, correct, dead. I think people could tell there was a person behind the bad one. Not advice. I am not going to start posting bad photos on purpose, that would be a tactic and it would show.

Someone in a crit last week said my collage work has "a consistent gesture" which I think was a polite way of saying every torn edge I make curls the same way. I checked three old pieces this morning. Yeah. Every single one, the paper rolls toward the same side. I tear with my right hand, pull down and left, every time, for years. It's like finding out you have a signature you never signed. Not sure if this is a thing to fix or just lean into. It's not a bad look honestly, the curl catches light. But now that I've seen it I can't stop seeing it, and knowing it's muscle memory kind of grosses me out. Anyone else ever find a habit this dumb baked into years of work?

Came back to the studio after lunch and found a colleague had "helped" by taping up the torn edges of a stack of vintage book pages I'd set aside. Clear tape. On every single sheet. Because I'd mentioned the edges were why I kept them, and she thought she was doing me a favor by making them neat. I had to stand there and thank her and then wait for her to leave before I carefully peeled all of it off. Took an hour. Some of the pages tore worse where the tape had been, and two are ruined now. She's kind and she meant well and I'm still quietly furious hours later. The torn edge is the whole point. The damage is the material. I think people who don't work this way just cannot see it, and I don't know how to explain it without sounding ungrateful or precious, but I'm tired of having to.

I dropped off a completed study at a framer yesterday. Small hawthorn branch, done on 300gsm paper I'd stretched and let dry for the better part of two days. Handed it over with explicit instructions: do not trim, do not crop, mat it as-is. Came back today and he'd taken the tiniest sliver off the bottom edge. A millimeter, maybe less. He was genuinely proud of it, said it "balanced the margins better." I stood there looking at the sheet. The signature. My signature was on that trimmed edge. He had cut through my name. Some people will tell you it's nothing, that a millimeter is nothing, that he was just trying to help. But I drew right up to that edge on purpose. The whole composition depended on that lower margin being what it was. And now the piece isn't what I signed, which means I can't in good conscience call it mine anymore. I took it home and I'll redo the whole study. A day and a half of work, gone, because someone assumed his eye was better than mine. I've learned to check every single thing I hand over to someone else. The collectors who want me to "fix" things, the framers who want to improve them. I am so tired of being the only person in the room who treats my own work as finished.

Made a bench hook there in February. Grand bit of mahogany off a fella in the woodturning club, two stops, glued and screwed, more time in the finishing of it than the actual cutting. Proud as punch with it. Have I used it? Have I fuck. It's sitting on the shelf under the press with a lovely coat of oil on it and I'm up at the table with the block balanced on the lip of a copy of the Independent, same as I've done for fifteen years, chasing the wee shite around the table every time I put any weight on the tool. Nearly went through my thumb on Monday, which is when the whole thing came home to me. I'm not against it nor anything. It's a fine hook. The problem is my hands know where they go and the shelf is where the hook lives and the two facts don't seem able to meet. Wondering if anyone else has a thing they bought or built that's technically better than what they do, and the hands have just said no.

A neighbour across the street is gutting her bathroom and she called me before the skip arrived, so now I have four crates of 1980s seafoam green tile in my hallway. Glazed, chipped on the edges, and I have no idea what it is for yet. My partner in crime in these things says I am a hoarder with a title. Maybe. But I know what this tile is, it is the same colour as half the bathrooms in this city and it will not be made again. In thirty years there will be nothing left of it except in photographs. I have been turning over the idea of a floor piece with it, something where the chipped edges are part of the pattern and not a defect. It might be ugly. I will find out in about six weeks. Anyone else work with material they rescued and then had to justify keeping?

Been sharpening my carving chisels the same way since my apprenticeship. Flat on the stone, edge up, standard grip. Did it a thousand times without thinking. Visited my old mentor two weeks ago. He watched me sharpen one for a minute and said nothing for a long time. Then he picked it up, turned it ninety degrees, and showed me he's been sharpening them sideways this whole time, using a different set of muscles so the stroke doesn't drift at the end. Said he's been meaning to mention it for about twenty-five years. Thing is, I can feel it. The edge comes off the stone cleaner. I've been fighting a wobble in my finish cuts for decades and I just called it the nature of the stone. Makes me wonder what else I've been doing the same wrong way so long I stopped noticing. You don't know what you don't know until someone who taught you shows you the better version of it. And you have to swallow the pride and take it.

So the small cheap brayer I'd been using for years finally gave up, the roller went egg-shaped on me around last Tuesday, and I went in to the art shop in town half intending to buy another cheap one and came out with a proper hard rubber one for a tenner. I know. Wild spending. But here's the thing, I've been printing the same block of a heron for about three weeks now trying to get an edition of twelve out of it, and I was blaming the lino, blaming the ink, blaming the damp weather in the shed, and it turns out the whole time it was the brayer. The cheap one was pressing uneven, so the middle of the block was picking up ink lovely and the edges were starving. Twelve prints in and the last six look like a different block entirely. So many years at this and I still spend a fortnight giving out about the wrong yoke. The block was grand. I was the problem. Trimmed the first six in half for test prints, which killed me slightly, but they're in the bin now and I've moved on with my life. Anyway, the heron's nearly there. Much darker at the edges now, properly moody, which is what I wanted all along.

There's a fella in the market who sharpens things for a living. Kitchen knives, secateurs, shears, he's there every Saturday with his stones and his strops and a little whetstone wheel rigged up to a bicycle chain somehow, and sure it's an education to watch him. I brought him my best carving gouge last week because I'd nicked the edge on something stupid, a staple I'd missed in a bit of lino, was raging with myself, and he handed it back and just said "whoever taught you to sharpen taught you right." And I thought about that more than I expected to. I learned from an old printer up in Sligo, man who could carve a heron's wing feather in a single cut and make it look like breathing. He taught me to sharpen dry, no oil, on a fine arkansas stone, and to feel the burr with your thumb rather than look for it. He'd say "you're not grinding metal, you're coaxing an edge out of it" and I used to think that was gas altogether till I realised he meant it. Anyway it got me thinking about how much of how we make things is just passed hand to hand like that. Little rituals. The way you hold your knife. The angle you trust without measuring. Someone showed you once and you've been doing it their way ever since, maybe without even knowing. I still sharpen dry. I check with my thumb. And I think of him every time.

i have this flat tupperware thing i use as a stay-wet palette and it has not been fully cleaned since... february. maybe january. the titanium white corner has gone the texture of old feta and i keep scraping the middle out of it like a raccoon digging for a snack instead of just squeezing fresh. the thing is the dried stuff is actually useful. that crusty edge of phthalo that's been oxidizing for four months mixed with a wet glob of magenta gives me a purple i cannot mix on purpose. i've tried. i get mud, i get a bruise, i get nothing. the crust gets it right every time. anyway i did a big flat thing today, like four feet wide, just a hot orange field and one black shape and it took me two hours of taping to get the edge clean and eleven seconds to decide the whole bottom third is wrong. no notes on that, just saying it out loud. anyone else hoarding dried paint like it's a sourdough starter or is that just me being unwell

I dropped my Winsor & Newton Series 7 this morning, the size 2, the one I've had for maybe six years, the one that's shaped exactly to my hand now. Fell off the desk while I was trying to reach for my phone and caught the edge of the ferrule on the way down. The bristles are fine but something about it feels wrong now. Like we both know what happened and we're pretending it didn't. I think part of being in a studio long enough is that you start treating things like people. This brush and I have been through three moves, two cities, one very humid monsoon where I was sure it would mildew. And now I'm sitting here considering whether to buy a new one or just… keep working with it and see if it forgives me. Anyway, I taped a little note to my desk that says "keep things off the edge" so that's the level of professionalism we're at today. 😅

There's a piece of glass I collected from Praia do Carneiro maybe two years ago. Frosted, worn soft at the edges, the kind the Atlantic takes decades to sand down. I have kept it on the shelf with the other shore things and never once put it on paper. Too much of it, I think. The whole summer my father was ill, that glass was in my pocket. Took it out on the sand in August and thought, no, not yet. This morning I coated a sheet of Fabriano, laid the glass down, weighted the corners with two pebbles, and put it in the sun at 9:40. Nine minutes. Nine. Two years of not-doing it, and the whole thing took nine minutes of ordinary winter light. It came out like a thing that had been underwater a long time. The frosted part went a pale milky blue where the paper stayed damp. Around the edge, where the seawater dripped, that dark Prussian rim I can never quite plan for. I don't know why the waiting was so long. Maybe it needed to be a different person holding the paper down. Anyway it is on the line now, drying, and I keep going out to look at it and coming back in. Small win. But it's the one that has been following me around the house for two years, so it counts double.

Dropped a slab of bluestone off at a quarry supply yard this week to get it re-surfaced. Been using this same stone thirty years. Same yard, same guys, most of them know me by name. New kid behind the counter. Twenty-two maybe. Sees the work order, sees it's going to a sculptor, and launches into a lecture. Sandstone is softer, better for fine detail, you should really be using limestone if you want it to hold an edge. Talking at me like I just walked in off the street. I let him finish. Then I asked him when he last dressed a block with a point chisel, or even held a bushing hammer. He said he hadn't. I said the bluestone's fine, I've carved about four hundred tonnes of it, and my edge holds plenty. He's still mad about it. I paid and left. Young enough that being wrong in front of people still costs him something. I get that. But I've earned the right to not be schooled by a kid who's never swung a fretsaw. The worst part is I'll get older and do the same thing to someone else. That's what's coming for all of us.

there's a pair of kitchen scissors i stole from my ex-husband's apartment four years ago that i use for everything, cutting paper, trimming thread, opening packages of charcoal, cutting my own hair in a pinch. they're the worst scissors for art. not sharp, the pivot is loose, they leave a ragged edge on everything. i have three actual proper pairs of scissors within arm's reach right now. i reach for the bad kitchen ones every single time. i think about this more than makes sense. like, am i punishing the material? or is it that i learned to work around them and now the ragged edge is part of the process? or i just like that they're mine in a way nothing else in this room is mine. anyway. the paper i'm cutting right now looks like it's been chewed by something. i'm leaning into it.