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Had a young guy at the booth this weekend, looked at my price tag, nodded like he'd figured something out. Said he could probably do the same thing himself with a Dremel and some YouTube tutorials. I said maybe he could. But I'd been thinking about it all evening and it still bothers me. Not the disrespect, I don't care about that. What bothers me is the assumption that the tool is what matters. Like the only difference between me and him is I own bigger equipment. I've got a 50lb tungsten chisel that I dressed myself because nothing on the market was right for the cut I needed. I spent three months learning to sharpen it right. A Dremel wont teach you how to read grain or when to walk away or what to do when you're 40 hours in and the stone decides to split wrong. Anyway. He walked off with a print. Probably gonna try to carve it this weekend. I hope he does. That's how you learn the difference between wanting to make something and wanting to have made something.

Someone at a studio open day asked what I work with. Collage, paper, I said. And he launched into a long thing about texture and grain and how he could really help me with my sanding technique. Sanding. I don't even own a sander. I tear pages with my hands. I didn't correct him. Just said "that's not really the material, but thank you" and went back to my corner. Two minutes later he was telling someone else about the artist he'd given advice to. I keep thinking about the word "help." Nobody ever offers to help me with the thing I actually do, which is sitting very still and deciding what to leave out. That part has no equipment, so it doesn't register as work.

Gallery sold one of my bigger installations last spring. Fine, good money, I thought it was over. Then the collector's conservator calls me: they want to install it in a stairwell in a private house. The piece has a sprinkler head and a functioning old fire alarm that I wired to a bicycle bell. It's not decorative. It goes off if the humidity shifts. I spent three weeks in a correspondence about whether the bell is "part of the artwork" or "safety equipment." Their lawyers had an opinion. My whole life's philosophy was in that email thread. Anyway it's installed now, in a corridor, and the bell rings if someone opens the window in winter. The collector loves it. Says it's alive. Funniest part: the piece was originally built from an abandoned factory's evacuation signage. I made it about how we don't hear warnings anymore. Now it's genuinely annoying them in their own house. Sometimes the work knows better than you do.

I did the math on a commission last week. Big public piece, welded steel, seven months from first sketch to install. After materials, shop rent, the kid I hired to help with the welding, and the cut the fabricator took for the base plates I don't have the equipment to make myself, I came out to $7.50 an hour. I remember when I started out I'd have been thrilled with that. Thrilled. Now I look at it and think what the hell am I doing. The worst part is the client was happy. Paid on time, no complaints. So the price felt fair to them. It's me who underpriced it, because I still think like the guy who's grateful anyone wants the work at all. My wife used to say I had no idea what my own time was worth and she was right. Three years since she passed and I still hear her saying it. Anyone else do the math on a finished job and feel like a damn fool?

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.

Ten years of photographing finished paintings under whatever light was convenient, and I only got it right this spring. The problem, as I now understand it, is that I had been lighting the work rather than letting it be lit. Two daylight bulbs on adjustable arms, a grey card, the whole apparatus. The photographs were bright and clear and wrong. Payne's grey kept going slightly blue, and the yellows in a foxglove study flattened into something closer to mustard. I told myself it was a monitor issue and did not look into it further, which is how one avoids learning things. What changed was a small job for a neighbour, a simple study of a hellebore, that I photographed on the north-facing porch at about eleven in the morning because I was late and could not be bothered to set up the lights. Overcast, no direct sun, pale wall behind. The photograph looked like the painting. Not better than the painting. Like it. I have since done every piece that way, and I now keep a note of the weather in the file name so I can reproduce it for a reprint. It is slower and it depends entirely on the sky cooperating, which offends the part of me that likes a controlled setup. But there is no arrangement of lamps I have found that does not lie about a green. The thing I keep turning over is how long I defended the equipment. I had spent real money on it and I think I needed it to have been the right purchase. Somebody in this channel said something similar about a daylight lamp recently and I found myself nodding at the screen before I had quite admitted it to myself.

I don't know the first thing about lighting a photograph. I carve the thing, I put it in the yard, I take the picture with my phone and it comes out looking like wet gray mud every time. So Tuesday I dragged a 400 pound basalt piece out into the afternoon sun because that's the only light I've got. Set up on a tarp, phone propped on a bucket. Eleven shots, all bad. Then I turned around to move the bucket and hit the shutter by mistake, and that blurry crooked frame is the only one where you can actually see the chisel marks. It's the one I posted. My daughter tells me there's a whole science to this. Angles, contrast, some kind of ring light. Maybe. But I've been doing this thirty years and I still can't get a photograph to show what the stone looks like in person, and I've stopped pretending otherwise. The camera flattens everything. You lose the weight of it. Somebody scrolling past can't feel that the thing weighs more than they do. Anyway. If anyone's got a trick that doesn't involve buying equipment, I'll listen.

People assume the important equipment in the studio is the welder or the gantry. It's a magnet on a length of builder's twine. Maybe 40 cm of twine, a speaker magnet from a dead radio, and I lower it into whatever cavity I've built and listen for the click. Steel frame, hidden nail, a screw I forgot. If it snags, I have found the thing that will hold the weight. If it goes quiet the whole way down, I go back and rethink. I have a laser level. It lives under a pile of rags. The magnet is in my jacket pocket right now and has been for maybe six years. There is something honest about it. It cannot lie to me and it does not need batteries and when the piece is finished nobody will ever know it was there. Most of the work is like that. Also the twine has a knot about a third of the way along that means nothing. I have forgotten what it was for. I will not be removing it.

There's a Miller Syncrowave 250 at the shared shop I work out of some days. Been there twenty years. Last month the high-frequency start started sputtering. Now it's catching about half the time. Rest of the time the arc wanders and you get this weird snake-track bead. I keep asking the guy who runs the place to call a service tech. He says he'll get to it. Meanwhile three of us are just working around it, wasting gas and tungsten, telling ourselves it's fine. It's not fine. A machine that old, you respect it or you replace it. You don't let it limp along getting worse. Anyone else dealing with equipment that needs real maintenance and nobody's stepping up? Or is it just my shop that runs on deferred repair.