Search

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.

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.

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.

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.

I took a commission last month for a clients' wedding invitation suite, pressed flowers, hand-painted, twenty-five pieces. They wanted original watercolor originals, not prints. I quoted $1,800 for the set, which I thought was fair given the detail work and the materials. I sat down yesterday and actually tracked the hours. Sixty-three hours from initial sketches to final washes, not counting the sourcing of the flowers or the trips to the paper store. That comes to roughly $28.50 an hour. Less than I made as a graduate teaching assistant in 2003. The work is beautiful. The client is thrilled. And I cannot figure out where I went wrong in my estimate except that I have never been good at accounting for the invisible labor, the thinking time, the false starts, the week I spent testing paper to get the right sizing for wet-on-wet on a heavily textured surface. I charged for the painting. I forgot to charge for everything that makes the painting possible. I raised my studio rate by 15 percent this morning. It still feels like I'm guessing.

just spent three hours "saving" a piece that was fine at hour one. now it's got this muddy patch in the corner that i'm going to have to look at for the next week before i figure out how to unfuck it. i know the rule. i know exactly when i passed the point of no return. i did it anyway. every single time.

Myself Ramesh, I was finishing a large piece for a client in Delhi. It depicted the marriage of Shiva and Parvati, very detailed work with natural colours on handmade paper. For weeks, my eyes were glued to the fine lines, the tiny figures. When it was done, the client asked for the final price. I calculated everything – the cost of the paper, the pigments which are becoming costly now, my time spent over many days and nights. When I told him the figure, my own hands started to shake a little. It was a good price, a fair price for the work, but still, it felt very high for me. We are not used to such figures in Madhubani, you see. He paid without any question, thankfully. But I am still thinking about it.

pulled an old canvas out of the closet today that i started in like... 2021. deep in the bad year. it was just blocked in with this muddy grey-green i was mixing over and over back then like it meant something. couldn't finish it. couldn't throw it out either. finally figured out what it wanted today. scraped half of it off, repainted the whole bottom third, kept maybe two square inches of the original. it's done now. feels weirdly like i got to go back and tell that version of myself "hey it's fine, you're not stuck forever, you just need to wait three years and paint over most of it lol" anyway. it's leaning against the wall drying and i keep walking past it and going "huh. okay. it's good." feels like i earned that one.

A small gallery I've been talking to finally offered me a solo show for next spring. I was buzzing about it for like a day. Then they said the budget for materials is $200. I don't think they're trying to screw me. They're tiny. But $200 barely covers the paper and panel for one large piece, let alone the paint, the medium, the charcoal, the adhesive, the found materials I buy from estate sales. I'd be eating the rest myself and I already have a day job I hate. I said yes because the opportunity is real and I've been wanting this. But I'm already doing the math in my head and it's not great. I have about 8 months. I'm trying to figure out if I can pull this off without it costing me more than whatever I might sell. Anyone else done a show where the "support" was basically symbolic? How did you handle the gap without looking ungrateful?

I've been doing the whole "wake up, post a nice finished piece, tag materials, use hashtags, be consistent" thing for months and it's been working okay but like... okay. Then last week I was in a really bad mood about a painting I'd been fighting with for three days, the wash was drying wrong, everything was lifting when I went back in, and I just filmed myself scraping the whole thing off with a palette knife and going "well, that's going in the bin" and posted it on a whim. No caption strategy. Just pure frustration. That stupid, messy, nothing video has more saves and shares than anything I've posted in the last two months. And it's not even a good video, it's just real. I've had four commissions come through from it, including one from someone who said "I don't know anything about art but I felt that." I keep hearing we're supposed to "provide value" and "educate" and I'm not against that but I think maybe the value is just... letting people see you fail? In real time? Without making it a tidy lesson? I don't know, I'm still trying to figure out if I can be that messy on purpose or if it only works when it's genuine. Anybody else finding that the stuff you almost didn't post is the stuff that works?

Okay I need to know if I'm losing it or if this is real. My tube of W&N cobalt turquoise, the one I use in basically everything, I'm not exaggerating, it's in like 80% of my pieces, I bought a fresh one last week and it's behaving totally different. The pigment's the same number, same series, but it's lifting off the paper in a way the old one never did. Like it's sitting on top instead of sinking in. And the granulation is almost gone? That soft sandy settle it used to do in the washes was THE thing I loved about it. I called the art store and the guy was like "maybe they tweaked the binder formulation" and I almost dropped the phone. I have paintings where that specific granulation is doing so much of the heavy lifting and now I have to either stockpile old tubes or figure out how to work with whatever this new version is. I know it sounds dramatic but this color is basically a signature for me at this point. Has anyone else run into this with a specific color you rely on? Like a color that just IS your work and then it changes on you?

Someone asked me to paint their grandmother's house in Malleswaram, the one being sold, about to be knocked down for yet another apartment block. They wanted it as a gift for the whole family. I was so touched by the reason I just said ₹3,000 without thinking. Then I actually did it. Reference photo was terrible, old phone pic, bad lighting, half the house hidden behind a tree. I had to go there twice to sketch it properly, spent a full Sunday morning sitting on the kerb drawing, then another two days painting at home. The house had this lovely old chettah-style window detail and I ended up redoing the whole thing because the first wash went muddy. So that's roughly 20 hours of work for ₹3,000. ₹150 an hour. Less than what I pay my domestic help. The family loved it, cried actually, and that's worth something. But I sat there thinking, why do we do this to ourselves? Because the story was good? Because saying a real number felt awkward? I wouldn't ask my plumber to work for ₹150 an hour. Still haven't figured out what I should have charged. ₹8,000? ₹12,000? I honestly don't know what a fair rate is for this kind of thing in Bangalore. What do you all charge for a detailed architectural watercolour, a full house, not just a loose sketch?

this never happens to me. usually by the third session i'm convinced it's garbage and i'm just moving paint around out of spite until something clicks or i give up. but this one just... worked from the start? i kept waiting for the other shoe to drop and it just didn't. it's a big one too, 36x48. neon orange background with a figure sort of dissolving into it. been staring at it dry on the floor for two days trying to find the thing i'm gonna hate about it and i keep coming up empty. feels wrong honestly lol. like i'm getting away with something.

okay so I know this is such a specific complaint but I have been fighting for my life with my gouache the last few weeks because it's finally warm here and the drying time is just… different?? Like I'll lay down a wash and it's practically dry before I can even blend into it, and then other times it stays tacky forever and picks up the layer underneath. I feel like I'm relearning my own medium every June. I've been working on this little street scene from a photo I took on my phone last fall, just a corner bodega with that orange awning you see everywhere in Brooklyn, and the sky went from a smooth gradient to a streaky mess in about 90 seconds because I hesitated. Had to let it fully dry and go back in with a damp brush to finesse it and honestly it's fine now but I was so mad in the moment lol. Do you guys adjust anything when the seasons shift or do you just suffer? I keep telling myself I'll figure it out by August and then August comes and I'm equally confused.

I finished a portrait commission last week, a three-quarter figure, and I finally sat down to calculate the material costs. I knew it was going to be high, but seeing it laid out was something else. The pigments alone, mostly expensive earths and cadmiums, came to nearly 200 euros. That's not even counting the linen canvas, the mediums, the solvents, the varnish. And this is for a painting that I can sell for, what, 4000 euros? It feels absurd. The sheer amount of time and skill you pour into something, and then you look at the price of lapis lazuli and think, 'this is what I'm fighting against.' Bof.

i realized today that my "studio organization system" is just. piles. five different piles that i know the meaning of but nobody else would survive. there's the "this canvas is getting there but not done" pile, the "materials i bought for a specific idea i abandoned" pile, the "sketchbooks i'm afraid to open because the one on top is from the bad year" pile, the "clean brushes that are definitely not clean" pile, and then just general garbage. it works until it doesn't. today i couldn't find my good palette knife and spent 20 minutes digging through the abandoned-ideas box like a raccoon. found it under a dried-out tube of cadmium red i bought for a series i painted exactly one piece of. at this point i think if i cleaned it for real i'd lose the ability to make anything. the entropy is part of the process. or that's what i tell myself lol

ok im going to say the thing and i already know some of you will hate me for it. last month i used an AI tool to mock up a composition, purely to test colour layouts before i committed. then i painted the final piece entirely by hand, every brushstroke mine. a collector bought it and loves it. and ive had this gross feeling sitting in my chest ever since, like i cheated somehow, even though i didnt trace a single thing. where is the actual line here. genuinely asking, because i can't work it out and im tired of pretending i have it figured out