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Every single time. The body will be alive, charcoal doing exactly what I want, the shoulders and the tilt of the head all working. Then I get to the face and something in my hand goes tight and I overwork it into a mask. Dead. Flat. I know the fix is to stop. I never stop. I stood back today and looked at this piece that was genuinely good up to the chin and I wanted to throw it across the room. I think it's that I'm scared. Like if I don't nail the face then the whole thing was for nothing, which is dumb because the whole thing IS the whole thing. The face is like 10% of the surface. But my brain treats it like the final exam. Anyone else do this with a specific part? Where you'll happily wreck a whole canvas but the second you hit this one spot you turn into a control freak? I've been trying to paint the face last and loose, just suggestion, and I keep caving. Would honestly love to know if anyone broke this or if we're all just fighting the same gremlin.

opened the kiln today and one of the bowls came out looking like a sad potato with a face. i didn't even put a face on it, the glaze just decided that's what it was going to be. i'm honestly keeping it. it's the most honest piece i've made in weeks. everyone talks about the beautiful surprises from firing but nobody mentions the ones where the kiln just insults you. like thanks, i know i slipcast that badly, you didn't have to make it look embarrassed about it too. putting the potato out at the market next sunday with a little sign. "face not intended." see if anyone bites.

Someone asked me yesterday what my price list is and I had to say out loud that I don't have one, and I have been taking portrait commissions for three years. What I have is this: I look at the reference photo, I decide how hard the face is going to be, and I say a number. Soft round face with good light, 350 zł. Sharp bones, tricky eyes, four hours just on the nose, 600 zł. It is not a price list, it is an anxiety reading. And it has been mostly fine, which is the worst part, because it means I never had to fix it. Then in March I did two pastels the same size, both A3 on grey Canson, both heads. One was a man I liked, easy face, done in two evenings. 350 zł. The other was a woman with very dark skin in a strong window light, and I fought with the values for a week and a half, maybe eleven hours total, and I charged her 400. So I made less per hour on the harder one. Of course I did. The harder ones are the ones I am scared to put a number on. I am not writing this to ask what to charge, I know what the answer is, I want to raise it and I am just not doing it. I am writing it because saying it here is the closest I get to doing anything about it. If I put 500 zł on my page tomorrow I think my hands would shake a bit while typing it.

I had this tall wonky vessel, hand built, took me like three weeks. There was a face kind of hiding in the glaze, you'd catch it from the side, half there. Not painted on, just the way the oxides pooled and ran. It was the best thing I'd ever made honestly. My grandmother saw a photo and said it was smiling at her. Then I decided it needed one more layer of something. A clear coat, to protect it. And the face just... died. Buried under the gloss. Now it's this perfectly fine vessel with nothing in it. I keep putting it in different light trying to find it again and it's not coming back. I know you don't get to undo a firing. But I'm stuck on whether I keep it as is, or smash it and use the shards for something. There's a lesson here about when to leave things alone and I keep not learning it. Has anyone else killed their own work by "finishing" it?

I keep noticing it in my slab pots and cups with faces pressed into them: every single one reads sad, even the ones I'm not trying to make sad. I'll be in a good mood, building something playful, and then I open the kiln and it's just this wall of melancholy staring back at me. I think the problem is the glaze pooling in the eye line. I carve the face before bisque, put a white slip on top, and the glaze settles heavy into those scored lines, so the mouth curves down even when I made it straight. The piece is technically fine, the proportions work, but the feeling is wrong and I can't control it. This one with the little figure on the shoulder, I genuinely meant it to look mid-laugh and it came out like she's seen some things. Anyone else fighting the emotional accident thing? Where the material does the opposite of what you intended and it works, but only if you lean into it? I keep trying to fix it with the tools and I think I need to fix it with the glaze math instead.

I paint by the window in the morning because the light is supposed to be better, that's what every tutorial says, right? But my window faces west. So the light I'm getting at 7am is this weak, flat thing that barely casts a shadow. By the time the light gets interesting, it's 2pm and I've already lost momentum. I keep telling myself I'll shift my table to the other room where the east window is. But that room has the dining table and my mother-in-law's plants and it just doesn't feel like my space. So instead I sit here at my west-facing window with my lukewarm morning light and make it work. I finally bought one of those little clip-on daylight lamps last week. It helps, but it's not the same. There's something about real morning light on watercolour, the way it hits the paper at an angle and you can actually see the sheen of the wet wash. Can't fake that with a lamp. Anyone else make do with a workspace that's technically wrong for what you do?

She came to my home, sat on the mat, looked at my mother's old painting of Laxmi on the wall and said, "Ramesh ji, can you make her face a little more... you know, like contemporary? Like Deepika or someone." I said, Mata Laxmi? Like Deepika Padukone? She said yes, why not, we have to keep up with the times. I told her I have been painting Laxmi since I was a boy. In Mithila, the goddess has a certain face. The lotus, the elephants, the gold coins falling from her hand, the proportions of these also are fixed by tradition. You cannot just give her a film star nose and call it Madhubani. She said okay but can you at least make the eyes bigger and more modern. I took the order anyway because my daughter's school fees were due. I painted it the way it should be. She came to collect it and said it looks very traditional only. Took it but I could see she was not happy. My wife said, next time, make her wear sunglasses also.

so I've got this tall hand-built vessel, maybe 60cm, leaning on purpose like it's about to say something. been working on it for three weeks. spent two whole evenings on the face that comes out of the glaze around the shoulder. opened the kiln yesterday and the glaze crawled off the chin. just. gone. a bald patch right where the jaw was, and now it looks like the figure has a scar I never planned for. here's my problem and I need someone to be honest with me about it. half of me thinks the scar is better than the face was. the other half thinks I'm doing the classic thing where I call a mistake a "choice" because I'm too tired to start again. I've got a market in two weeks and this is supposed to be the piece on the table. I know what the fix is technically. grind it back, refire lower, thin the glaze on the second pass. that's not what I'm asking. I'm asking how you know when an accident is actually better, and when you're just lying to yourself because the kiln is a bastard and you're tired.

Found a scan from 2014 today, first pastel portrait I ever attempted. Same subject, same reference photo I keep coming back to because I'm stubborn. Put mine from last week next to it. The old one is so bad. I remember being proud of it when I finished. I remember thinking this is it, this is what I can do. And ten years later I can see every single thing wrong with it and I still kept trying the same face over and over until it finally came close to what I saw in my head. I think the win is not the new one. The win is that I didn't stop in 2015 when I should have, or 2018, or honestly last January when I nearly quit pastel for good. Nobody told me to keep going, I had to decide it myself, weeks at a time. And it worked out in a way I couldn't see from inside the bad years. Anyway. Old me would be so confused that the face in the picture is the same and everything else is different. 🙃

Got talked into a portrait bust in Indiana limestone last fall. Widow wanted her husband, done from photographs. Quoted 6,000. Sounded like money. Here is what it actually was. Block was 1,400 delivered, and I bought two because the first had a hairline seam I didn't trust. 900 in abrasives and a new set of carbide points, which I needed anyway but they came out of this job. Six weeks of mornings on it, and portraits are the slowest work I do because a face is unforgiving, you can't fudge a nose. Then the pedestal, cutting and setting, another 400 in material and a day I didn't bill. Add it up and it's under 30 an hour. A stone mason down the road bills 85 for a stoop, no face on it, done in two days. The bust came out right, which is the only reason I'm not angry about it. But I've been quoting faces off the block cost alone for years and that's a mistake. Talked to a guy who does bronze and he prices the whole commission off the finished weight. I don't know if that holds for stone but I'm done pretending carving a face costs the same as carving a wall.

I am on the eleventh version of the same woman's face. Toned grey paper, terracotta and a bit of black, all of them lined up on the floor against the skirting board like a police lineup. The first one, which I did in maybe forty minutes on Monday, is the only one that looks alive. Numbers two through eleven are technically better. Better structure, better shadow under the jaw, the nose is actually a nose and not a smudge I got lucky with. And they are all dead. Flat. Like I drew the anatomy and forgot to put a person inside it. I don't know what to do with this information. Do I stop at the quick one and trust it? Because it feels like cheating, like saying the sloppy one is better because it was easy. Or do I keep going until I can be careful and alive at the same time, which might be number thirty and might be never. Frustrating week. Also my pastel box is now a mess of broken terracotta because I dropped it on Thursday, so there's that.

i built these three little heads last month, all from the same lump of clay, and i swear they were meant to be the same face. same pinch, same eye sockets, same mouth line. open the kiln this morning and two of them have the mouth pulled open like they're saying something, and the third one looks like it's asleep. same clay. same firing. i did nothing different and the kiln decided they were three different people. my grandmother came by and said the two open ones look like they're arguing with each other, which is fair, they do. now i have to price them and i don't know if i can sell the argument. it's mine now, in a way the sleeping one isn't. anyway the glaze crawled off one of the chins, so there's also that. friday.

Got turned down by a gallery years back. Owner was nice enough to sit down with me, which I respected. Then she told me my steel work was "very accomplished" but she couldn't see a way to sell it because "sculpture is a hard room and the collectors who come in here want something livable." Livable. My work's built to sit in the weather for fifty years and she wanted something that fit above a couch. Worst thing anyone's said about your work to your face? I still think about that one.

Nine hours on this head. NINE. Got the mouth exactly where I wanted it, the whole lower half was singing. Then I stepped back and the thing was dead. Correct and dead. Like a very good photograph of a person who wasn't there. So I took a rag and wiped through the whole face. Not carefully. Just dragged it. Now there's a smear where the nose was and somehow it's doing more than the nine hours did. I keep walking past the easel and getting that drop in my stomach like when someone looks at you too long. I know people will say I ruined it. My neighbor already said it and she was standing in the doorway so I couldn't even argue. Anyway I'm not sleeping tonight. Not in a bad way. Not in a good way either. Anyone else work themselves into a hole just to find out the hole was the point?

So I've been emailing back and forth with a rep about maybe putting a few pieces in a group show. Small space, back room of a coffee place, whatever, doesn't matter. She called yesterday to talk through it and asked, casual, where I studied. And I said I didn't. Didn't finish high school either, actually, not in any way that counts. There was this pause. Not long. Like two seconds. But I heard the whole thing land in it. Then she goes "oh, so you're self taught" and I could hear the word sitting down in a smaller chair than the one it was in before. I don't know why it got me. It's not new. I've had that same pause with maybe forty people at this point and normally I just move through it. But I sent her the images after and stared at the ceiling for like an hour, one of the big charcoals, the one where the hands are doing more than the face is, and I kept thinking, does she actually see it or does she see the gap. Here's the thing that's actually sitting on me. I don't know if I want to be in the show if she says yes now. Because I don't want to be the story. I want the drawing to be the story. Anyway I said yes to the call and framed the date like it was nothing. It's next Tuesday. I'll report back.

Not on the easel. On the wall. Facing me. Started it the night my head was loud and got the mouth right probably in the first twenty minutes, then kept going and lost it, then kept going again and buried the whole thing under like four layers of oil because I couldn't leave the mouth alone. Now it's this gray muddy thing with a mouth that almost works under all of it and I walk past it every morning with my coffee and look at the floor instead. I know what to do. Scrape back to it. I just don't want to dig. Three weeks of not wanting to dig. Meanwhile I've started two new ones and finished neither. Anyone else got a piece they're actively avoiding, or is it just me being a coward about a canvas

Was at the market on Saturday, same spot I've had for years, and this fella stops in front of my prints. Looks at the big hare for a good long while. I'm thinking grand, we have a looker. Then he points at it and says, "That hare is anxious, you know. The eye's too big. I could sort that out for you, ten minutes with a pencil." Ten minutes with a pencil. On a linocut I carved over three weeks and pulled fifty of by hand. As if it's a doodle he can just fix. I says, "Ah sure, that's the thing about hares, they're anxious. That's the whole point of them." Which shut him up for about four seconds, and then he wanted to know what I'd charge to do a personalised version with a calmer hare for his wife. I told him I'd knock a tenner off if he promised to stay out of the studio. He laughed. I wasn't joking. Bought the small print in the end, the one with the heron, so all's well. But the head on me walking home. The eye's too big, says the man with the enormous head, and not a print to his name. Anyway. Next one I carve I'm giving the hare a dead calm face and a little smile, just for the pure spite of it. See how he likes that.

third face on this vase. first one the nose slumped in the kiln, second one the glaze ran and she came out looking like she was crying brown tears. this one, the eyes are actually there. she's looking slightly past you, a bit annoyed, and I have no idea how that happened. it's not a good piece. the neck is too thin and I already know it won't survive shipping if anyone buys it. but I sat on the kitchen floor at 1am with the light on and just turned her around in my hands for like twenty minutes. my flatmate came out for water and asked if I was okay. anyway. nobody in my family has seen it yet. I sent a photo to my grandmother and she said "this one has a soul." she says that about everything so. but this one I almost believe her. nine months of noses sliding off and now I don't want to touch the kiln again in case I break the streak.

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'm going to be honest, my first real wall was not a gallery at all. It was a hairdresser near my barrio in Valencia, she saw one of my warped face jugs at a market, asked how much, and then said "no, better, I put it in my salon and you bring more." Sold two from there. Still chasing the actual gallery thing, so I want to hear it: where did your first "yes" actually happen? Be honest, it doesn't have to be a proper gallery. Bar, bakery, friend's restaurant, someone's office lobby. Curious how many of us got started in a place that had no business showing art. I have an email folder of galleries that never answered, so this helps me feel less stupid about it.