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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.

Ok so the thing nobody warns you about with big figure work: you get ONE part right and it turns on you. I was doing the lower half of this standing figure all afternoon, mostly fighting the knee because knees are evil and nobody talks about it enough. Got it. Finally got the shape and the weight and the little dent of shadow under it and I was actually pleased, which is rare and dangerous. Now the thigh above it reads like a balloon full of pudding. The kneecap is so good it's making the rest of the leg look lazy. I've been standing in front of it for twenty minutes doing that thing where you tilt your head like the angle is the problem and not the leg. Past me would have wiped the whole thing. I'm not doing that tonight. I'm going to eat something and go to bed and tomorrow I'll fix the thigh. Probably. Unless I decide the knee is the problem after all. This is genuinely the dumbest job in the world sometimes.

Client wanted a seated figure, roughly 5 feet, basalt. I quoted 9,000 and thought I was being smart about it. Ended up 11 weeks in the shop, most of it chasing a crack that ran the wrong way through the block. Do the math on the hours and I cleared something like 19 an hour. A kid grinding welds in a fab shop down the road makes more than that. The 9,000 wasn't wrong when I said it. The 11 weeks was wrong. I bid the carving and forgot the stone gets a vote. Now I add a third on top of any figure work in basalt and I say the number out loud before I say anything else, because once I've explained the piece I start negotiating against myself. What I still can't figure is whether the fix is charging more or quoting the honest number and losing the job. I've done both this year. One of them leaves me with an empty shop and a paid mortgage, and I'm not going to pretend I know which one I prefer.

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.

Ok so I've been trying to make this piece since maybe February. Small figure, just the hands really, cupped like she holds them when she's watching her telenovelas. Nothing fancy. My abuela's hands. The first one exploded in the bisque. Second one the fingers slumped into each other, looked like a paw. Third one I glazed too thick and it came out looking like it was wearing gloves, which is the opposite of the whole point. Opened the kiln this morning and there they were. Still a bit off, the left thumb is shorter than real life and I'm not touching it. But the position is right. The weight of them is right. I don't know why I'm posting this here except that I've been telling everyone for months that I "make figurative work" like it's a category on a form, and this is the first time I actually felt it. I called her and she said "bueno, y por qué lloras" like it was nothing, and then she stayed on the phone for 40 minutes. If you're 6 months into something and it keeps failing, it might just be a firing problem. Or it might be you have to make it 4 times.

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.

Small thing but it's sitting with me. I had a booth at the spring fair Saturday, the one at the community center with the bad lighting, and I sold the little 8x10 marsh piece. The one with the dead tree. I almost didn't bring it because the water in the foreground never totally worked and I figured someone would notice. Woman bought it for her dad, said it looked like the view from his dock. She didn't say anything about the water. Money was $65 which basically covers the canvas and half a tank of gas. But she texted me a photo Sunday of it hanging in his kitchen next to a calendar and a bowl of keys. I keep looking at that photo. Anyway. I've had a run of pieces that fought me and this was the first one in months that someone just wanted. If you've got a piece you're ashamed of, bring it anyway.

gallery reached out to me a while back, said they loved the work, wanted to "figure something out." then radio silence for months. i emailed twice, got nothing. finally i just let it die and moved on. six months later they pop back up like nothing happened. i'm still a little embarrassed i let it go that long. where's the line for you, how many months of ghosting before you write it off? or do you always chase?

There is a patch of wall behind the left shoulder of the figure I am working on, and I have been fussing over it for days. This morning I finally got the value right. Then ate lunch, came back, and the whole corner had gone dead. Everything around it was carrying the picture and I had flattened it by making the wall too interesting. Scraped it back to the ground with the palette knife. Two hours of glazing, gone in about forty seconds. What bothers me is not the time. It is that I knew. Somewhere under the fussing, I knew the wall was supposed to be a nothing, a place for the eye to rest before it hits the hand. I painted it anyway because it was satisfying to paint. That is the whole trap, non? We paint the parts we enjoy painting instead of the parts the picture needs. Anyway. Tomorrow I start again on the wall, and this time the wall will be boring on purpose.

Okay so I finally snapped and did the thing we all joke about. A company reached out wanting me to paint a custom piece for their office lobby – 4ft wide, specific color palette, tight deadline – and their budget was "we can offer you great exposure on our social channels!" I get it, I'm small, I'm new at this full-time thing, I know how it goes. But I was just so tired. So I wrote up a proper invoice. Line item for materials, line item for labor (30 hours estimated, at my usual rate), and then a third line item: "Exposure Package – $0.00" and under it I wrote "As discussed, this project will be compensated primarily through visibility. Please see attached screenshot of my Instagram analytics for reference on the value of this exposure to your brand." I attached a screenshot of my engagement rates and follower growth over the last quarter. And I sent it. Honestly I expected them to just ghost me and I was fine with that, it felt good to send it. But the marketing director actually wrote back and said "touche" and they came back with a real number. Not a great number, not gonna lie, it was still kind of low. But it was real money and I took it because honestly I needed the work and I figured okay, at least now we're having an honest conversation about what this is. I don't know if I'd do it again, it felt a little snotty. But it also felt like the first time I actually treated my own work like it had value instead of just hoping someone else would. Anyone else done something petty that actually kind of worked??

I spent a month on a copper plate for this figure study. Burnishing, scraping back, re-etching the same passages maybe four or five times, convinced each time I was just one pass away from getting the shadow right. And at some point the plate just stopped holding anything. The image literally disappeared into the metal. What's left is a ghost, a faint gray rectangle that reads as nothing. Everyone says the classic thing, that you can't overwork copper, you ruin the plate and then you learn. But I keep looking at the ghost and thinking it actually says more about how I work than the figure ever did. All that effort, all that repetition, and the honest end state is a worn-out surface. I don't know if I should pull a few prints of it like that or just bury it. Part of me thinks showing the failure on purpose is its own kind of move, especially in a medium that's all about the multiple and the proof. The other part thinks I'm just rationalizing a wasted month with a theory, which is exactly the thing I do when a piece doesn't work. Anyone else kept a dead plate and printed it anyway?

Working on a seated figure, roughly 90 by 70, and I've repainted the left knee three times now. First two passes were wrong because I wasn't seeing it. This third one is right. Proportions check, the foreshortening reads, the shadow side sits where it should. It's the best-observed knee I've painted in a long time and it is completely dead. I know what happened. I painted the knee as a thing to be solved instead of a thing sitting under cloth in a room. Every plane is accounted for and none of them are breathing. I've been circling it for two days, adding half-tones, taking them out, which is not painting, it's polishing. What I think I have to do is scrape it and come back in with a much bigger brush and a lot less information. Which is terrifying because the drawing is good and I'll lose it. But the drawing is exactly what's killing it. It's a diagram now. For the people who work from life: when you've painted something accurately and it has no life in it, do you destroy it or do you try to paint your way out from the inside? I've done both and I genuinely don't know which one is honest here.

I've had a draft in my notes app since last April. Fourteen months of "we love the work, we're just figuring out the calendar." I checked their site maybe twice a week like it was a weather app. Sent it last night. Just: thanks, I'm pulling the pieces back, good luck with the fall show. Took me longer to write those two sentences than it did to make the smallest one. I keep waiting to feel like I won something. Mostly I just slept okay for the first time in a while, which is probably the win. Anyway the work comes off the wall Saturday and goes back in the flat file with everything else that nobody's looking at. There's a kind of relief in that I didn't expect.

Ordered a brick of Venetian smalti, the deep inky blue I always use for sky. It arrived a completely different tone, colder, almost grey. I emailed the supplier and then I just... kept it. Sat with the box open for two days. Now I'm building the whole piece around it. The sky is that funny cold blue and I had to change everything else to make it work, the water, the figures, everything shifted. I don't think I've made a better decision this month. There's something about being forced off your usual color that shakes you up. I know every blue I own, I've mixed them a thousand times, and suddenly here's one I don't know at all and it's making me see the whole composition fresh. Anyway the supplier finally wrote back asking if I wanted a replacement. Honestly I might order the same wrong batch again on purpose.

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.

Working on a seated figure, half-length, north light from a tall window. Left forearm sits in that narrow band of light before it falls into the shadow of the drapery, and I spent two hours yesterday getting the transition right. The drawing underneath is still visible there, a few dark strokes I never covered. Normally I'd paint them out without thinking. This time I stopped. Part of me says leave them. They describe the form better than the finished passages do, they're honest about how the thing was made. The other part says I'm just dressing up an unfinished arm as a decision. I know the answer is supposed to be "it depends," but I don't want that. I want to know what you do when a mark that was never meant to survive turns out to be the best thing in the corner. Do you trust it and build around it, or do you cover it because the rest of the painting isn't built to carry it?

Working on a seated figure in mild steel, about five feet, and the arm-to-torso connection is the whole problem. I've had this thing tacked for a week and every time I walk past it the joint reads wrong. Not weak. Wrong. The plane breaks where the deltoid should carry through and the light catches an edge that shouldn't be there. So I spent Monday through Wednesday building it up with 70S-6 and grinding it back down. Three passes. Ground it, looked at it, built it back. Yesterday I got it where it needs to be, and then I stood there annoyed, because from any angle a normal person will ever look at this piece, you can't see the joint at all. It's buried under the shoulder mass. Nobody's going to walk into the yard, stick their head around the side and go, hey, nice radius on that transition. Fabricator I apprenticed under would have told me to stop at the first pass and put the time into the hands, which are the actual problem. Anyway. It's right now. That's the whole point and I know it, I just wanted to say it out loud somewhere nobody's going to tell me it looks fine.

In summer I can start at six and have good north light until almost noon. Now in November I have maybe two hours in the morning if I'm lucky, and then everything goes flat and grey. I keep trying to paint anyway and just end up fighting the canvas, overmixing, losing the thing I was following. I know the solution is to adapt, move to artificial, shift to smaller work, whatever. But I've never found a lamp that does what daylight does. The colour is never right, the way it falls on the form is dead. So I just stand there and watch the light go and feel sorry for myself. Do you switch to something else when the season changes or do you stubbornly keep trying to make the same work? I haven't figured out the dignified answer yet.

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?

She came to the studio today. I've been sending her photos for like two years but she's never actually touched any of it until now. She picked up this lopsided little vessel with a face pressed into the side, one I almost scrapped because the glaze crawled weird, and she just held it for a minute. Then she said the glaze looked like the old robes on the figures from her village in Extremadura, the ones they'd bring out for Christmas, all blotchy and wrong but full of something. I don't think she knows how much that meant. She's the one person who never made me feel stupid for doing this, even when I was living off tortilla de patatas and rage. I made her take a piece home, the one she liked. She tried to say no. I won.