Search

so a friend looked at three of my paintings side by side yesterday and goes "why do they all have the same hands" and now i can't unsee it. not the same pose, the same literal construction. same two finger shapes, same knuckle placement, same way the thumb sits. i've been drawing the same hand for years and thought i was just consistent. tried to fix it today by doing studies from life photos and every single one came out looking like the same hand wearing a different sleeve. it's like my brain has one hand file and refuses to overwrite it. anyone else have the one body part they just... can't vary? i'm not sure if i should fight it or lean in and make it a thing. it's honestly a little freeing to know my one move is hands lol

Years ago when I came back to painting after my fallow stretch, I was desperate for income. A local gallery let me run a figure painting workshop out of their back room and I priced it at 45 euros a session because I was terrified nobody would come. They filled up. Fine. But that number got stuck to me like a burr. Every student since tells the next one what I charge, and whenever I've tried to bump it to something that reflects what I actually do, I meet resistance. 45 became my identity. Last month I finally did the honest math for a 6-week course, six students. Materials with good pigment, the room rental, my prep time sketching demos, the corrections between sessions. I took home under 9 euros an hour. That's less than the woman who cleans my studio building. I know the fix. I raise it, I let the ones who complain leave, I stop pricing from fear. But there's a specific ugliness when the low price is the thing that made you feel wanted back when you felt worthless. Hard to put down. Anyone else have a number that got emotionally welded to them?

I spent years putting only the final work online. Perfect lighting, good photo, the painting resolved. Crickets, mostly. A few likes from other painters. A few months ago I was frustrated with a figure painting, the hand was wrong for the fourth time, the whole thing looked a mess, and I took a photo of it on the easel with my palette旁边, just to vent to a painter friend. I put it on Instagram almost without thinking. That post got more comments than anything I'd put up in six months. People like to see the struggle. They like to see that you also don't know what you're doing for a while. I think for a long time I thought showing process would somehow diminish the finished work, like revealing the trick. But most people aren't painters. They have no idea what goes into it, and watching something get ugly and then get pulled back out of the ugly, that's the part they actually want to see. I'm still not comfortable with it. I was trained to show only the resolved thing. But I can't argue with the numbers, and more to the point I can't argue with the fact that the conversations are better. People ask real questions instead of just saying "beautiful." Wondering if anyone else has found that the unfinished, uncertain thing gets more traction than the polished final version.

Some woman at a dinner party last week, after I tell her I paint figurative work, she says "oh but abstract is so much easier, right? You don't have to worry about it looking like anything." I did not say what I wanted to say. I said "no, abstraction is its own discipline" like a polite robot. But what I wanted to say is: try painting a hand that looks like a hand and then come talk to me about what's easy. The disrespect is so casual. As if centuries of craft, of learning to see, of mixing a flesh tone that actually breathes, as if that's just the tedious part you get through before you're allowed to make real art. Anyway I came home and scraped a canvas I'd been working on for weeks. Not because of her. But also a little because of her.

Years ago I had a gallery owner in Paris tell me, straight-faced, that figurative oil painting was "a hard sell" and maybe I should think about making something "more contemporary." I was young and I nearly listened to her. I didn't, thankfully. That's the one that still irritates me, because it wasn't about whether the work was any good. It was about her wanting an easier wall. What's the most clueless thing a gallery has ever said to you about your work? The line that made you realize they weren't going to get you, ever?

so I have this folder where I stash every painting I hate. not the ones that failed quietly, the ones that failed LOUDLY. the embarrassing ones. been doing it since the bad year and honestly it started as a "look how far you've come" thing but now it's like 40 paintings and I genuinely don't know what the endgame is. every once in a while I drag one out and it's either worse than I remembered or I can see exactly which decision broke it and that's actually kind of useful. but mostly they just sit there being my own personal museum of failure. the thing is I also can't throw them out. there's like three in there I'm fairly sure I could fix now and one I'm convinced was good and I just wasn't ready to see it. am I a hoarder or is this a legit practice. no wrong answers but there might be. it's taking up a whole shelf.

You know, in our tradition, when we paint the wedding scene, the bride and groom, the mandap, the procession, we always include the musicians. Dholak, shehnai, sometimes a harmonium. It is part of the story. It is how you know there is celebration happening. Last week I was working on a piece for a young couple from Darbhanga. Big order, they wanted the full wedding narrative around the border. So I am painting, I am painting, all the figures are coming nicely, the bride under her veil, the groom with his sehra, the women carrying diyas. Then I finish and I look and I realise: nobody is playing the dholak. There is a gap in the procession where the drummer should be. I forgot him completely. My wife looked at it and said "Where is the music, Ramesh ji?" I had to take a fresh paper and start that section again. Thirty years of this work and still I am leaving out the drummer. This is what I am thinking today: that the old stories, they have their own order. If the dholak player is missing, the wedding is not complete. You cannot skip him just because you are in a hurry or you forget. The painting will know.🙂

okay so there's this window in my apartment that gets this specific soft afternoon light around 3pm and I've been trying to catch it for like... months now. This month alone I've done 14 studies of it. 14. Same window, same view of the neighbor's slightly sad little balcony, different light every time. My partner thinks I've lost it. Maybe I have. But here's the thing – every single time I think I've figured out how to paint that quality of light, the next day it's different and I realize I was wrong. The color temperature shifts, or there's a haze, or the whole thing goes golden for like twenty minutes before it's gone. Watercolor is SO unforgiving about this because you can't just paint over it, you have to get it right while it's wet or you lose it forever. And I keep losing it. My mom called yesterday and asked if I'd sold any of them yet and I was like Mom I can't sell them they're all failures. She didn't get it. But I think there's something in the repetition, you know? Like each one teaches me something the last one couldn't. I'm not chasing a perfect painting, I'm chasing understanding how light actually works. Anyway I laid them all out on the floor last night to compare and honestly it's kind of beautiful seeing them together even if none of them are The One. Might keep going until I run out of paper or winter comes and the light changes completely. Then I guess I'll start over.

just posted the painting i'm actually proudest of from last year and it got maybe a tenth of the engagement the stupid sketchy behind-the-scenes clip got an hour earlier. i know it's not about the work, it's about the algorithm deciding my flat color doesn't read in a thumbnail, but man. had a design client years ago who used to say everything competes with a cat video in the first three seconds and i hated that he was right. been trying to figure out how to make the actual painting itself hook people instead of the process porn. cropping tighter helps. showing the corner before the whole thing helps. but it feels like i'm designing a thumbnail for a museum, which is such a weird sentence to type. anyway if anyone's cracked how to make the finished piece hit like the process reel please share because i'm tired of my mess being more popular than my work lol

Okay so I've been trying to figure out why I'm exhausted at the end of the day but somehow only have like one small painting to show for it. So I started actually timing myself. Set a little timer on my phone every time I sat down, every time I walked away. The result is honestly embarrassing. Over a four hour stretch today I painted for maybe 90 minutes. The rest was: staring at the reference photo, rearranging my brushes, looking at the same wash dry, texting my mom twice, going to get water and then just standing in the kitchen for a while. The actual sitting and committing part is way shorter than I thought it was. The weird thing is the paint time is so much better quality. When I actually clock in, I make decisions so much faster. But the gap between "okay I'm starting" and actually putting paint down is where all the energy goes. My new thing this week is a 25 minute timer, no phone in the room, and I don't get up until it dings. Even if I just sit there. Tried it today and got a whole sketch done in the first two rounds. Anyone else have no idea how much of their studio time is actually fear management? Because I think I'm maybe 40% painter and 60% pacing around thinking about painting.

I almost ruined a figure study yesterday because I couldn't leave the studio. The light was going, I knew it was going, and I kept poking at the edges anyway. Ten more minutes of that and I'd have repainted a perfectly fine passage into mud. It took me years to learn this and I still do it. There's a moment where the painting tells you it's done for the day and if you don't get up then, you pay for it the next morning with a wet rag and regret. Right now I have a rule of sorts: when I start adjusting things just to have something to do, when my hand makes a mark and I think hm, before I make it, that's the signal. Put the brush down. Walk out. Of course I had to ruin the shoulder of that figure to remember my own rule. Three hours yesterday, then an hour today scraping and restating what the light had already given me for free. Bof. Some lessons you re-learn every season.

there's this one awful landscape at the goodwill near my studio. a lake, some pine trees, the kind of sky that looks like the painter gave up halfway through. it's been there for months and i keep buying it, working over it, and then i guess i donate it back? because last week i walked in and there it was again. third time now. i've painted over it twice, once with a figure standing in the lake, once just blacking out the sky entirely, and both times i got it to a place i liked and then just... brought it back. i'm not even sure why. maybe i like that it keeps coming around. like it's not done with me either. anyway it was back on the shelf today with a new price tag. i didn't buy it this time. felt like i should at least pretend i've moved on.

I had a canvas sitting on the easel for six months. A figure study, woman reading by a window, good bones but I'd stalled somewhere in the middle and couldn't look at it anymore. Last week I decided to scrape it and start something else. Mixed up some thinner and started wiping into the still-wet layers. And then I stopped because there was something in what I was destroying. A passage of light on the arm of the chair, a bit of edge I'd actually gotten right without noticing. So I cleaned what I could, let it dry, and now I'm back in it. Sometimes you have to be ready to kill a painting to see what it actually is. Anyone else done this, nearly wrecked something before you finally saw it?

I've been going back and forth for years on this and it's ridiculous. For the figure work I do, the flesh tones especially, I want paint that stays where I put it and doesn't go dead when it dries. Michael Harding makes the most beautiful Naples yellow I've ever used, the texture is like butter straight from the tube. But I keep ordering Gamblin for the studio because it's half the price and honestly the consistency is more reliable batch to batch. Today I had both open on the table. Squinting at two identical piles of titanium white like a lunatic. My husband came in and said "just pick one, Camille." He doesn't understand this is not a practical decision, it's a spiritual one. What do you use and why. But don't tell me Williamsburg unless you want me to argue with you.

when i got my first gallery slot i had like 8 paintings that vaguely went together and i panicked and made 6 more in two weeks that sort of matched. it worked but i look back and cringe at how scattergun that was lol. i still don't really plan bodies of work, i just paint until a theme shows up and then pretend it was intentional the whole time. is that just how it is for everyone or are there people out there who actually walk in with a thesis?? teach me your ways. or tell me you're also faking it, that works too.

Okay so I finally did the thing I've been avoiding for months and added up what I actually have in my paint collection, because I needed to reorder some colors and figured I'd do a quick inventory. $1,100. And that's not counting brushes or paper which would probably double it. And I still don't own a single tube of the fancy French stuff everyone raves about, I keep getting by on the mid-range and making it work. It just hit me weird because eight months ago I would've laughed at the idea of owning $1,100 in paint and now it's just... sitting in a tin on my desk. Some of it's half empty and dried around the rim. The cobalt I panic-bought when I thought they were discontinuing it? Still sealed. Never opened it. I don't even know why I panic-bought it, I use ultramarine way more. Anyway I sat on the floor counting tubes like some kind of weirdo and my partner walked in and asked if I was okay and I said "we own a car's worth of pigment" and they just nodded and backed out of the room. Honestly I think that's part of why I'm still scared of the full-time thing, not the not selling, but the fact that I've got this much money in materials and some days I still feel like a fraud using them. Like the paint is wasted on me. But then I painted this afternoon and forgot that thought existed so I guess that's the answer lol

I spent the whole month on one painting of my daughter reading in the armchair by the window, and the calf of that figure refused to be right. Not the whole leg, just the one muscle. I repainted it maybe six times. Each time it looked fine in the first hour and then it was wrong again the next morning. Thursday I finally stopped trying to fix the drawing and instead I looked at where the light actually fell on her calf at that hour, not where I thought it should fall. I had been painting a calf in general. She has a specific one. The whole painting snapped together after that. Not because I finally made the muscle work. Because I stopped working from memory and started working from her. It is so humbling to need forty hours to remember the one thing I tell my students on day one. Anyway. She saw it this morning and said, "Now I look like me." That was the whole month, right there.

I took a commission back in February for a 16x20 landscape, a friend of a friend wanted a specific view from their vacation photos. I quoted $200 which is usually fair for that size and my level. What I didn't account for was the two weeks I spent staring at those reference photos, trying to figure out how to handle the lighting, sketching thumbnails in my head while I was folding laundry, completely rethinking the composition twice before I even touched a brush. By the time I actually started painting I had probably put in 6-8 hours of just... mental labor. And I didn't charge for any of it. Finished it in about 10 hours of actual painting time so the math works out to like $12/hour before supplies. I know you can't really bill for "thinking about it" but also, that was work, you know? It was work. I'm trying to figure out how to price differently next time without feeling like I'm nickel-and-diming someone. Maybe just raise the flat rate enough to cover it and stop overthinking.

Went and looked at a space I was excited about, first meeting, and the guy says my work is "interesting but could use some polish." Told me my figures were "too raw" and asked if I'd consider softening things up for the clientele. I laughed at him. Literally laughed out loud. I do not paint things soft. That's the whole point of me. Walked out and never looked back. Still glad I did, but man it stings when you know they saw your work and just wanted a different person's work with your name on it. What's the worst note or comment a gallery or rep ever gave you? The one that made you question whether they even saw the same paintings you made?

I bought a decent printer last year thinking prints would be my side income. Got the good archival paper, color calibrated everything, spent way too many evenings fighting with it. Sold maybe six prints total, and two of those were to my mother in law. Meanwhile the original paintings sit in my booth at fairs and people keep asking about those instead. The overthinking it took me a full year to figure out: people buy the thing in front of them, they don't buy the reproduction of it. So I stopped pushing prints entirely and just started starting more originals at lower price points. Smaller 8x10s I can finish in two sittings now sell faster than anything I've ever made prints of. Sold nine of those in the last two months at the local craft market alone. Wish somebody had told me that a year and about 300 dollars in ink ago.