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First group show I did, years ago, the owner hung my figure study between a hunting scene with dogs and a very large seascape with a lighthouse. I stood there for an hour trying to understand the logic. He said, "you will sell better next to the lighthouse." I did not sell. So, tell me the truth: what did a gallery hang you beside, and did it help or hurt? I still don't know if placement is a real strategy or just a wall that needed filling, and I'd like to hear from someone who has been hung well. Or badly. Both are useful. Bof, I'll say it plainly. I think it matters more than galleries admit.

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.

It's sitting on the shelf above the palette, unopened, and I've been walking past it for two weeks. Flake white, the real one, with lead. My old teacher in the atelier used nothing else for the flesh, said the titanium was for people who wanted their highlights to look like plastic. He was a difficult man and mostly right. Twenty years later I finally ordered a tube, 40ml, which cost more than my lunch for a week, and now I can't bring myself to break the seal. Part of it is the safety business, of course. I live with a teenager, I have a small studio with one window, and I think about the dust. Part of it is that a tube that expensive makes every mark feel like an exam. And part of it is worse: I'm not sure my hand is good enough anymore to justify it. That's the real reason it's still closed. Bof. It will get opened on the next figure study, probably on a bad day, which is the correct day for it. Does anyone else do this? Buy the good thing and then leave it on the shelf like a hostage?

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 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?

Been wrestling with this same piece since Monday. Big charcoal study of a seated figure, hip tilted, weight on one hand. Could not get the left shoulder to sit right. Kept pushing the value darker thinking that would fix it. Made it worse and worse and worse. Finally stepped back this morning and realized I'd drawn the whole arm wrong at the structural level. The angle was off by maybe ten degrees from the start and everything I did after that was just trying to prop up a mistake instead of undoing it. Erased the whole arm down to the paper. Redid it in like twenty minutes. Now it works. Hate that I spent three days being stubborn when the answer was just admit I was wrong and start over. Love that the drawing is finally saying what I wanted it to say. Both feelings true at once. Anyone else ever fight a piece for days only to realize the fix was way simpler than you were letting it be? Or is that just me and my brilliant stubborn brain 😭

So my partner asked me last night, very gently, "is the window thing a series or are you stuck?" and I genuinely did not know how to answer that haha. Because it started as a study, right, just me trying to figure out morning light on the fire escape across the way, and then the light changed, and then the light changed again, and now I have 23 of them stacked on the shelf under my easel and I can't stop. The thing is I'm not doing the SAME window. I'm doing the same window at 7:10am in October vs 7:10am in February and those are completely different paintings, the light is cooler and it comes in lower and the brick reads almost purple and I get genuinely emotional about it which sounds insane typing it out. But also. Also there's a part of me that thinks I'm avoiding something. Like the window is safe, I know exactly how the gouache sits on that 300lb cold press, I know where the cat sits on the sill, I could do it half asleep. And meanwhile there's a whole sketchbook of figure stuff I keep shutting. So. Is it a series or is it a hiding place, and does it matter if the paintings are good. My mom said "just paint what you want, honey" which is the least helpful and also correct thing anyone's said about it. 🙂

The canvas has been sitting on the wall since 2021, primed, blank, staring at me. I stretched it myself, 140 by 110, lead white ground, and then I just... let it sit. Taught around it, painted small studies, told myself I was waiting for the right light. Today I mixed the raw umber and terre verte and blocked in the figure. Two hours, rough as anything, just finding where the mass wants to sit. My hand was shaking a little at the start, which is embarrassing to admit at 44, but there it is. By the end the fear had turned into work, which is where I wanted it. It looks like mud. I don't care. It's on the canvas now.

The plate itself is not the difficulty. It is a flowering stem of Pulmonaria officinalis, seven or eight blossoms in different stages, and the calyces are maddening because the hairs catch the light and you cannot fake them with a wash. Four weeks at the pace this needs is four weeks where not much else gets done. I said 2,400 euros. Then I heard myself explain, at some length, that this included the colour study and the vellum and that I do not charge extra for revisions within reason. As though the figure needed defending in court. She had not questioned it. She said yes before I had finished the sentence. I have been turning this over all evening. The apologising is the problem, not the number. If I am going to name a price I should name it and stop, the way one puts down a brush. I am not sure I know how to do that yet, but I know the flinching costs me something even when the client pays. What I cannot decide is whether 2,400 for four weeks is generous to her or to me. I have done the arithmetic on hours and it is respectable, but a plate like this one will still be on a wall in fifty years and my hourly rate will not be the thing anyone remembers.

ok so this happened tuesday and I'm still weirdly annoyed about it. There's this watercolorist I've followed since like 2019, I have her book, I've basically studied her washes. She reposted one of my gouache pieces to her story. I sat there refreshing like a maniac. 40 new followers in two days, which is more than I usually get in a month, and I was SO sure this was it, this was the breakthrough, I'd finally have to figure out how to do a mailing list properly. Two people emailed me. One of them asked if I could paint a portrait of their dog for $60 because "it's just a small one." The other was a company asking if I'd do a free piece in exchange for exposure. Meanwhile the thing that's actually kept me fed since I quit the café is a 3-person email list (ok slight exaggeration, it's 91 people) where I send a photo of whatever's on the easel and a paragraph about how it's going, and I sell something almost every time. It's ugly and unglamorous and I keep trying to make it prettier than it needs to be. I think I've been chasing the wrong number this whole time and I don't totally know how to stop. Followers feel like a scoreboard. They're not. Anyway if you have a mailing list, what actually goes in it? Because mine is basically a group text at this point and I'm not sure if that's the secret or if I'm just getting lucky with 91 very patient people.

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.

There's a house on Hutchins Road, the pale yellow one with the carved wooden brackets under the balcony, and the board went up last Tuesday. I'd been meaning to draw it for maybe three years. Kept saying next weekend. So I went on Wednesday morning with my book and a flask of chai, fully prepared to be shooed off. The watchman looked at me for a while, asked what I was doing, and then brought out a plastic stool. Two hours. Nobody else came. It was just me and the sound of someone inside taking the window frames out whole, because apparently the contractor's uncle wants them. I've posted maybe forty finished paintings this year. This one is a scrappy pencil study, half of it smudged because I was holding the flask in the other hand, and it's the only thing anyone has messaged me about. Four people asked which house it was. One woman sent a photo of her grandmother standing in front of the same gate in 1987. I don't fully know what to do with that. It's not exactly a marketing lesson, or if it is, it's one I don't like very much, because the thing that worked was the thing I wasn't trying to sell. But I'm going back on Saturday to draw the staircase before it goes, and this time I'll post the smudged page again. Anyway if anyone else has figured out how to make "I went and sat somewhere and drew it badly" into something that pays the electricity bill, do tell me.

Small thing I don't quite know how to hold. There was a little art fair on ul. Józefa yesterday, mostly ceramics and prints, one table with my pastels because a friend pushed me into it and I said yes mostly to stop talking about it. I priced them low. I was sure nobody buys a pastel in a plastic sleeve anyway. A woman in her sixties stood at my table for a long time and kept coming back to one head study, an old man on grey toned paper that took me three tries because the first two had no life in them. She asked who he was. I told her nobody, just someone I invented to practice the jaw on. She laughed and said that's the one, and paid me in cash and wanted the receipt signed, which I've never done before and my hand was not steady. It's the money, sure, but it's more that a stranger walked around for ten minutes and chose the face. My partner came home and I told him and then I cried in the kitchen, over a pastel. Ridiculous. I keep going between feeling proud and feeling like she made a mistake and will figure it out. Anyway. Does it get less strange, the first time someone you don't know takes a piece home?

There's a still life on my easel I've repainted the same fold of cloth on six times since February. Terracotta pot, two pears going brown, a white bowl with a chip in the rim. Nothing worth anything to anyone. A woman came Thursday to see the big interior I've been struggling with. She looked at it for maybe ninety seconds, polite, and then turned around and pointed at the small study of the pot and asked if it was for sale. I said yes before I'd decided anything. She paid what I asked without blinking, which told me I asked too little, and I don't care. She came back Saturday with her husband to collect it and told me she'd been looking for a painting of a kitchen for eleven years. Eleven years. The whole time I was teaching figure drawing to people who didn't want to learn it, painting almost nothing, this woman was walking around looking for my pot. I didn't sleep well that night. Not from the money. From something else, harder to name. Ten years of telling myself the work was fine sitting in the studio, and then one stranger's hand hovering over the surface, not quite touching, and I understood I'd been lying to myself a little. Anyway. She's hanging it in her kitchen where the pot will get afternoon light, which is where it belonged all along.

I began a Magnolia grandiflora study in the second week of March. It is now the last week of June and it is not finished. I mention this because a student asked me on Saturday how long a botanical plate "should" take, and I gave her the honest answer, which is that it depends on whether you intend to be correct. The flower has opened, browned, and dropped since I started. I am working from a pressed specimen and thirty-one photographs taken over four days, because the bloom lasts roughly that long and I did not want to guess at the petal reflex. The tepals alone have four glazes. I have repainted the staminal column twice. Most of what I have done this month is not painting. It is looking, and waiting for the paper to be properly dry, and deciding I was wrong about the indumentum on the underside of the leaf. When I was still in the lab I once spent a fortnight on a single figure because the axis label was not quite true. Nobody noticed but me. I do not think that was wasted time either. I would rather have one plate that a botanist cannot fault in ten years than twelve that are merely pretty. I do not expect everyone to agree with that, and I have made my peace with the fact that it is a slow way to earn a living.

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

Working from the mirror again, which I should know better than to do at 44 because the model keeps sighing and wanting lunch. The problem is the left hand. It's resting on the chair back, half in shadow, and it is correct. Proportion fine, values fine, edges where they should be. It looks like a hand carved out of soap. There is no blood in it. I've repainted it four times now, each time a little more carefully, which is exactly the wrong instinct. Careful is what killed it. The rest of the figure has some looseness in it, the shoulder especially, and this hand sits there like a piece of taxidermy glued on. I think the trouble is I painted it from the shape instead of from the light. I was drawing a hand, not looking at what the shadow was doing to the knuckle. So tomorrow I'm going to take a big brush and a lot of medium and destroy it, and hope the destruction leaves something alive behind. Voilà the plan. It has worked before and it has failed before. If anyone has a reliable trick for the moment when a passage is technically right and completely without life, I'll take it. Otherwise I'll report back from the ruins.