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ngl, i've got a pile of canvases in the corner that are like, 80% done and just staring at me. i know the move is to just push through and finish them but honestly i've been spending more time scrolling pinterest for new ideas than actually committing to these existing ones. pretty sure i've only finished like, 3 paintings this entire year. anyone else get stuck in this loop? lol

I spent a full afternoon last month staging a still life, fighting with the light until it did what I wanted, photographed it six ways, wrote a caption I actually labored over. It did fine. Fine. Meanwhile the post that got me two commissions and a workshop enquiry was a photo of my palette at the end of the day, all the dirty mixes half-scraped off, with a caption like "today was a long one." No thought in it. I almost didn't post it at all. There's a lesson in there somewhere about people wanting the evidence of the work rather than the work itself, and I keep circling it. The polished thing reads as finished, and a finished thing doesn't invite anyone in. The mess does. Everyone can see themselves in a dirty palette. I still can't quite bring myself to lean into that deliberately. It feels like a trick the moment it's calculated. So I just post the leftovers now and let the careful posts be the rare ones. It's the reverse of every piece of marketing advice I've ever read, and it keeps working anyway. Bof.

I spent three weeks fighting this gouache piece of my apartment window in the rain, I genuinely could not stand it the entire time, kept almost scraping it off the paper and starting over. Posted the finished thing mostly out of spite and exhaustion. It's the most saved piece on my site this month and two people have asked about prints and one person messaged about commissioning something similar. Meanwhile the window painting I actually love, the one I finished and immediately wanted to frame myself, sits there with like 40 likes lol. I know the whole "the work you hate is the work they love" thing is basically a cliche at this point but it still gets me every time. I have no idea what makes one land and the other flop. Is it the colors? The mood? The fact that it's messier and more honest? I genuinely can't reverse engineer it, I'm just out here throwing paint and praying. Anyone else have a piece they lowkey despise that the audience latched onto?

i spent like three years trying to do instagram right. good lighting, process videos, consistent posting, the whole algorithm courtship. and it got me... some likes from other artists. nice, but nobody buying. then last winter i was in a total meltdown about a piece that wasn't working. snapped a picture of my studio floor covered in torn scraps and charcoal dust and coffee rings, wrote something like "well this isn't going anywhere" and posted it without thinking. that one post got more replies than anything i'd done that year. two people commissioned work from it. so now i just send the ugly stuff. the failed experiments, the half-finished things i'm unsure about, the mess. i think people want to see the struggle, not the finished product. they want proof you're actually in the trenches, not just curating a highlight reel. my engagement is down by every metric that matters to an algorithm and my actual sales are up. make it make sense.

Somewhere along the way I stopped showing finished pieces and started showing the torn paper pile on my studio floor. Rough edges, the ugly rejects, the stack of book pages I was deciding not to use. Not deliberate. I just got tired of curating. The emails I get now are from people who ask about the process, not the pieces. A collector in Oslo bought three things because she said she wanted to own the part I hadn't thrown away. Still small numbers, but the conversations are better. I think showing the finished thing invites people to judge it. Showing the mess invites them in. Two weeks ago I posted a photo of my hands covered in paste and got more genuine replies than anything I've put up in a year. No idea if this scales. But I'd rather have forty people who care than four hundred who scroll past.

A gallery in Berlin asked if they could document my studio as it is right now. Dust, the collapsed table, the half-finished thing from 2019 I keep meaning to throw out. I said yes so theyd stop asking, and now they want to show it as an installation. Somebody else's trash is art, your own is a mess. I worked decades to get out of rooms like this and now they want to put the room in a room. I should be flattered, probably. Instead I am thinking about which corner to clean and hating myself for thinking it.

Instagram keeps nudging me toward Reels. Like literally, the app is begging. But pastel portraits are slow, they take hours, there's nothing to film. I tried once, filming my hand smudging for 15 seconds, and it felt so fake. Like I was performing the process instead of doing it. Meanwhile the still photos of finished faces get a fraction of the reach they used to get, even two years ago. I know the algorithm wants engagement and watching a hand move gets more of it. But I don't want to become a person who makes content. I want to be a person who makes pictures and posts them when they're done. I keep going back and forth on it. Is this stubbornness going to cost me? Or is everyone else just exhausted and the boring photo accounts actually feel like a relief now? Curious what other slow-medium artists are doing about it, because the advice online is all "post 3 times a day" and I cannot imagine having that many finished things even in a month.

Someone on here mentioned process shots not moving the needle. Opposite for me. A couple weeks back I posted a rough shot of the workbench, half-carved piece still in the stone, dust everywhere, chisels out. Not staged. Just where I left it at the end of the day. That one brought more commission inquiries than any finished piece I've put up this year. Makes sense if I think about it. People don't buy a sculpture, they buy watching it get made. The finished thing is already decided. The messy middle leaves room for them to picture themselves in it. Funny part is I almost didn't post it. Looked like a mess to me. My daughter posted it for me while I was still grinding. She's the one who runs the account, I'm just the labor. Still feels backwards that the work no one was supposed to see does the best. But I'll take it over chasing trends.

The algorithm pushed my old Mysore palace sketch from 2019 to 40k people this week. Four hundred likes on a painting I did sitting on a park bench with wobbly perspective because I was too lazy to walk around to the other side. Meanwhile the piece I spent six weeks on, the one where I measured everything twice and worked the light properly, is sitting at 31 likes. Three. One. I know the answer is supposed to be "just post more, the algorithm is random, consistency consistency." But I've been doing this long enough to notice a pattern now. The stuff that lands is never the stuff I sweated over. It's the throwaway morning sketch, the wobbly bench one, the half-finished thing I almost didn't scan. I don't know what to do with that honestly. Do I keep painting for the craft and accept the algorithm doesn't care? Or do I get smart and start churning out the loose quick ones that perform, and keep the serious work for prints and shows where it actually gets seen properly? Right now I'm doing neither and it's making me a bit cranky. Anyone else found a way to hold both, the work you care about and the work that works?

went in today with a real plan. sat down. stared at the half-finished thing on the easel. opened instagram. twenty minutes later i was looking up whether you can powerwash a tabletop. i don't even own a powerwasher. the actual productive thing i did was reorganize the same shelf i already reorganized last week. so that was cool. three tubes of paint i forgot i had. they're probably fine. they're not fine. the irony is i work better when i'm avoiding something else. gave myself a real deadline yesterday and painted from 10pm to 3am without stopping. today i have nothing pressing and i've achieved nothing. make it make sense.

Spent two days carving a granite piece for a family memorial. The finished thing, the one that mattered, posted it and got maybe 60 likes. The 40-second clip of me roughing out the first cut, posted it because I was bored waiting for coffee, is sitting at 14,000 views and counting. I don't know what to do with that. I've been doing this thirty years and the product is the product. Nobody's ever hired me off a video of me picking up a tool. But apparently that's what people want to watch, so I'm told I should lean into it. Part of me wants to refuse on principle. The other part noticed my daughter's screen time and realized the world just works different now. Not sure there's a version of this that ends with me making content. But I'd be lying if I said 14,000 views didn't feel like something.

I spent three weeks on a 30cm still life of a split melon last month. Three weeks. I was chasing a particular green in the rind, that pale celadon just under the skin, and I couldn't land it. Every session I'd scrape it back and try again. My husband started giving me that look like maybe I needed a walk. Yesterday I walked past it in the studio and realized I don't hate it anymore. It's not perfect. The green still isn't what I was after. But there's something about the light on the cut face that I actually got right, and the seeds have this little accidental life to them that I couldn't plan if I tried. I don't know why I'm telling you this except that painting is mostly failure and I think we should say that out loud more. The three weeks of frustration are invisible in the finished thing but they're what it's made of. And that's fine. That's the work.

had a portrait sitting on the wall for two weeks that I kept walking past and hating but telling myself it was done, good enough, whatever. today I got fed up and just slopped a huge flat block of burnt sienna right over the whole face and rebuilt it in one sitting. the first version was technically fine. correct even. and completely dead. the second one has this anger in it that the first didn't. it's making me rethink the whole "know when to stop" thing. maybe I don't stop soon enough. maybe I stop way too early and then just defend the mediocre result out of sunk cost. anyone else ever killed a "finished" piece and had it come back better, or do I just have zero impulse control lol

Four months. I've been hunting for a specific red smalti, this particular Byzantine red, not too orange, not too brick, the one you see in the Ravenna churches and in bits of Hagia Sophia. My usual supplier in Venice stopped carrying it, the batch from the guy in Siena was wrong, too purple. I tried cutting my own from glass rods and it looked like cherry candy. Wrong wrong wrong. Yesterday I'm at a flea market in Ano Poli, not even looking, and there's an old guy selling boxes of tile scraps from a renovation. I'm rummaging because I can't help myself and there, at the very bottom, wrapped in newspaper from 2003, a kilo of exactly this red. Hand-cut, uneven, matt finish, the real thing. He charged me five euros. I came home and just laid a few pieces out on the bench and looked at them for a while like an idiot. People don't get it. But you probably do. That specific thing you need finding you when you stop hunting. Best feeling. 🙂

Everyone keeps posting these gorgeous studio photos and mine is literally a fold-out table wedged between the radiator and the window in the bedroom I share with my partner. The window I keep painting is the one right above the table. I have a box fan that sounds like a small plane taking off and honestly I've learned to hear it as white noise now, there's no going back. But here's the thing, I just finished the biggest commission I've ever had on that janky table and it went out today and I'm so proud of it I could cry a little. Eight months ago I was doing this on my lunch breaks at the café. Now I have a folding table that's mine all day. I keep catching myself staring at it like it's a whole room. I know someday I'll have a real studio with good light and a sink and I'll look back and miss this cramped little corner. It's got the paint flecks on the wall from when I flick my brush too hard and a cup of dirty water that's been sitting there for three days that I keep meaning to change. It's gross. It's perfect. What's your setup right now? Do I need to know there are studio sinks in my future or is the box fan just my life now

I have this one stick of willow charcoal I've kept for like four years, only ever use it for the same piece. It's down to a nub now, maybe two inches, and the thought of finishing it is weirdly paralyzing. Every time I pick it up I think this might be the last pass it's got in it. I know that's not rational. I could buy a hundred more for twelve bucks. But this specific one came from the first batch of supplies I bought when I actually started taking this seriously, right after my brother's stuff stopped being boxes and started being material. So it's got history in it, whatever that means. Anyway I used it today on the piece I'm working on, a portrait made from my father-in-law's old letters, torn up. And it's fine. It's just charcoal. But I keep having this conversation with myself about whether finishing it is a good thing or an ending, and I can't tell which. Do other people do this with a tool? Hold onto the last of something like it's going to vanish when it's gone?

Y'all I still have a flour sack my grandmother hemmed by hand. Just the one, bleached so many times it's gone thin as whisper. She'd save them up and cut them down for quilt backs in the winter when money was tight, and that particular sack she'd marked with a little thread X so she'd know it was hers. I pulled it out today, been thinking about the way she'd starch and press a seam like it mattered more than anything in the world. It does though. It does matter. Somebody sewing careful so the next body stays covered and warm. I don't know what to do with it. Can't cut it up, can't bear to. But I can't just leave it in a drawer neither. Been sitting here a good while just holding it. Some things you don't finish deciding in one afternoon.

I've got a cardboard box under my cutting table been sitting there maybe twelve years now. Every time I think about tossing it, I dig through it again and pull something out. Little triangles from my grandbaby's Easter dress from 2011. A strip of polyester from a blouse my sister wore to church before she passed. Even a piece of my own wedding dress, Lord, that's been forty years and some change. My grandmother called it "saving for the hard times", not money, but cloth. Said you never know when a scrap you kept will be the very thing you need to finish a quilt right. I thought she was just being old and sentimental. But here I am, same habit, same box. Tell me somebody else keeps a scrap graveyard from pieces that oughta be rags. Or am I just a hoarder with a sewing machine? 😂🙏

I was looking for a stretched canvas in the back of the storage space, the one under the stairs nobody wants to talk about, and there it was, half-finished, face to the wall. A little interior, my grandmother's kitchen table, that I started six years ago and just... stopped. I remember exactly why. The perspective was fighting me, the composition felt dead, and I was in a period where everything I touched turned to mud anyway. Brought it up to the studio. Looked at it for two days. And then I just saw it. Not some dramatic insight, just, oh, that's what was wrong. The table was too high, the light source was split, the whole thing was trying to do two different things. Scraped down the table, repainted it lower, unified the light, and three days later it was done. A painting I started in my late thirties finished at 44. I'm not the same painter and honestly that's the thing. The person who abandoned it couldn't have finished it. The person who finished it couldn't have started it. Don't throw out your dead canvases. Or do, but maybe let them sit for half a decade first.

glued a piece of my brother's old shirt into a frame this week. not the whole shirt, just a strip where the collar had frayed through. spent three days trying to make it sit flat and then gave up and let it wrinkle. and it's the first thing in months i've finished that doesn't feel dead. i keep doing this. i fight something for days, decide it's a failure, and then the failure is the part that works. but i can't shortcut it. i can't just decide day one to let it wrinkle, because then it's fake, it's a pose. it has to genuinely defeat me first. anyone else have this? the thing that only works when you actually lose to it?