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Got the go-ahead on a commission for a large landscape piece. It's a local scene, a rolling hill farm at sunset. I'm so excited but also a little nervous, it's bigger than anything I've done before. I've stretched a 30x40 canvas and now just have to actually put brush to it. Wish me luck! I'll need all the focus I can get with the kids home for the summer too. Maybe I'll hide out in the garage studio after bedtime.

Early days I almost signed with a gallery that wanted 60% commission and a 6-month exclusivity clause for my city. I was so desperate to be "in a gallery" I nearly said yes. My mom talked me out of it over the phone lol, she was like "honey that's not a partnership, that's a landlord." What's the worst gallery deal you were ever offered or saw someone else take? I feel like nobody talks enough about the predatory end of this, everyone's so focused on getting in that we forget some doors aren't worth walking through. What was your red-flag contract moment?

I've been with the same gallery since 2009. They sold my work. They took their cut. We didn't talk about it much. It worked. Got an email last week from their new director. Young guy. Said they're shifting focus to artists with "stronger direct engagement." Which means they want me to do their job for them online. I got a 400-pound granite piece in my studio right now that nobody's seen. I'm trying to figure out if I should drag it out and film myself grinding on it, or just keep working and see what happens. Neither option feels right. Anyone else getting this from their gallery lately? The "we love your work but also can you become a content creator" talk?

I've been spending so much time on short-form video lately, mainly Reels for Instagram. But I see so many people having huge success on YouTube Shorts and I'm wondering if I should pivot? It feels like a totally different beast. The content that does okay on Reels feels too polished for Shorts sometimes, if that makes sense? Has anyone found a good strategy for both, or do you focus on one platform? My engagement is okay on Reels, but nothing like what I see some people getting on Shorts. Maybe I'm just looking at the wrong creators. It's hard to tell what's real and what's just a lucky spike.

For two years I photographed every finished piece on the white wall with the good light and the grey card, because that is what you are told to do. Clean, neutral, correct. Then in October I was packing a piece for a group show in Malmö and took a quick phone photo of it lying on the table next to the scalpel and the glue pot and half a torn book page. Sent it to the gallery contact. She wrote back asking if she could use that one instead. Since then I have not shot on the wall once. Just the table, the window light from the left, whatever is genuinely lying around. Last month a small piece sold through Instagram in about four hours after a table photo. The wall version of the same piece had sat there for six weeks. I am not sure what the lesson is. Maybe that people are buying the studio, not the object. Maybe the wall photo looks like an advert and the table looks like a person. Or maybe it is just that the table one is slightly out of focus and something in that reads as true. I do not fully trust my own explanation. The annoying part is that it is less work. I used to spend an hour on the wall setup. Now it takes ninety seconds and does better.

A small gallery in the 6th asked to see my recent work in November. She came to the studio, spent an hour, was polite. Then she told me the paintings were "trop léchées", too finished. As if the finish were a failure of nerve. She said her clients like to feel the struggle, the doubt. I sat with that for the train home and I'm still not sure if it's an insult or a market fact. Because here's what I keep turning over. I spent four years learning to bring an edge into focus without it looking like I tried. Now the advice is to unlearn it, to leave the hand visible. And maybe she's right about the buyers, maybe the collector wants to see the artist thinking. But I painted a hand last month and I want it to look like a hand. The thinking is there, it's just not performing. I don't have a resolution to this. I have a stack of finished canvases and a nagging feeling that "finished" became a dirty word while I was teaching in my thirties and not paying attention. Voilà.

I don't fully understand this and I've stopped pretending I do. The piece was a panel, 24x30, layers of wash and charcoal over a page from my brother's address book. Gallerist shot it clean, whole, good light, hung on white. 41 likes. Nothing else. Then I snapped the back of the panel where the hanging wire had torn through the paper and I'd patched it with a strip of masking tape and a grocery receipt. Posted it sideways, no caption, bad light from the kitchen window. Two days later a woman in Portland emails asking if it's still available. She bought it. She said the tape was the part. So now I'm sitting here wondering if I should be shooting the damage instead of the work, and I hate that, because it feels like turning the thing I care about into content. But also it's the first real sale in five months. Has anyone else had this, where the piece of the piece outsells the piece. Side note, my phone camera will not focus on anything smaller than a thumbnail and I've given up trying to fix it. Whatever the Portland photo was, it was an accident.

A collector bought a piece this spring and when I asked what caught their eye they didn't mention the studio work, the process shots, the exhibition photos the gallery put out. They said it was a story I posted at nine in the morning of my coffee on the bench next to an unfinished canvas, mostly out of frame, half the image out of focus because the phone was still waking up. The painting was two years old by then. It had been in two group shows. Nobody bought it. And the thing that sold it was basically an accident, a photo I took without thinking so my wife would know I was still alive in the studio. I've spent twenty-five years learning how to make the work and maybe five learning how to show it. And the showing still defeats me, daily. But I notice the accidental stuff does more than the deliberate stuff, and I don't know what to do with that information. I can't manufacture accidents on purpose. I tried. It shows.

My daughter came into the studio the other day, looked at the still life I'm working on, and asked why I don't just take a photo and paint from that. Not even mocking, just genuinely curious. She's sixteen and the camera is a reflex, like breathing. I tried to explain that the eye doesn't see like a lens. The lens flattens everything to the same plane of focus, it fixes the light at one instant, it gives you a truth that isn't the truth you actually saw. When I look at a table with a dish and a cloth, my eye moves. It lands on the edge of the bowl, rests on the shadow under the rim, comes back to the highlights. There's a kind of negotiation happening that a photograph never has. The photograph already decided. I don't think she was convinced. She kept looking at my canvas like it was the slower version for people who hadn't heard about the shortcut. And maybe part of me was annoyed, but another part thought she has a point about speed, we just don't want the same thing from it. I did end up using a photo for the initial drawing of the pears, because they were about to bruise and rot. But then I threw the photo aside and painted the rest from the arrangement as it aged. The pears changed as I worked. They kept their own time. That's the whole thing, I think. A painting should have time in it. A photograph has a fraction of a second.

used to always have something on, podcasts, playlists, the same few albums on rotation. then about six months ago i just stopped. didn't plan it. one day i realized i'd been working in silence for a week straight. at first i thought something was wrong with me. like i couldn't focus. but turns out i was just hearing the work for the first time. the paper moving. the brush clicking against the jar. my own breathing. now when i try to put something on it feels like someone talking over a conversation i was already having. weird how long it took me to notice.

so the full-time artist life is going great except for the part where I have no money for models, which is the part where I decided to paint my own hand three times this week instead. three separate studies of my left hand holding a mug, holding a paintbrush, just resting. hands are SO hard. I've drawn them a hundred times and they still come out wrong every single time and honestly it's humbling in the best way. but here's the thing. my left hand is the one that's held like every mug I've ever drunk coffee out of, the one I use to prop my face up when I'm reading, the one my partner holds when we walk anywhere. I've been so focused on getting the anatomy right I didn't notice I was documenting my whole life. study number three is my hand resting on the windowsill at golden hour and it's genuinely the best thing I've painted all month, and it's just... my hand. my boring left hand that does nothing special. anyway I'm framing it. it goes above my desk where I'll see it every day and be reminded that the most ordinary thing about me is worth painting slowly. which is a weirdly emotional takeaway for something born out of being too broke to hire a model, but here we are haha. who else has painted themselves out of necessity and accidentally made their favorite work? I can't be the only one

tore the whole flat file apart looking for a photo of my grandmother's kitchen. the one with the bad linoleum and the pressure cooker in the corner. I was sure I had it, I could see it in my head. found it in the piece from 2021. I'd already cut it up and glued it down. didn't even recognize my own work as my own source. so now I'm sitting here with a half finished thing on the table and a stack of paper I just spent two hours unfolding for nothing. and the annoying part is the piece looks better with the photo in it than it would have with a fresh copy. can't make a copy anyway, it's a physical print, one of maybe three. I keep buying more found photos online and none of them have the right weight. too crisp. people posed. my family's photos are all slightly out of focus because nobody could hold still. anyway. back to unfolding.

I remember one studio visit early on. The artist's space was… a controlled chaos. Paintings everywhere, materials piled high, but there was a deep focus. It made me re-evaluate my own need for order. What was one studio visit that stuck with you, and why?

We've been trying to get more structured with our Instagram Reels. For ages, it felt like throwing spaghetti at the wall, you know? Lots of effort, not much to show for it. But this past week, we finally had a sequence of three Reels focusing on a step-by-step process for one of our smaller products just… take off. Like, double the engagement we usually get on any given post, and a noticeable bump in traffic to that product page too. It’s not a huge viral moment, but for us, it feels like a breakthrough after so much trial and error. Makes all the late evenings worth it, mostly! 🙂

I started timing my evening sessions and now I won't paint unless I've got at least a full 20 minutes, no exceptions. Sounds obvious but for years I'd sit down with like 12 minutes before I had to get the kids' lunches ready or whatever, and I'd just fight the whole time trying to warm up and make it count. Total waste. Now if I can't do 20 I don't even uncap the tubes, I just go to bed earlier and try again tomorrow. The difference in what comes out of those short focused blocks vs the frantic squeezed ones is night and day. Eleven year old asked what my superpower was and I said knowing when NOT to paint. She was not impressed.