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There's a stack of found paper on the radiator that got soaked on the way home from the flea market last October. I meant to throw it out. Didn't. It dried in a wavy, stained mess and now the ripples sit exactly where I've been trying to fake a fold for two years. Used a sheet of it tonight on the piece that's been fighting me since August. It took the wash in a way the clean sheets won't. Like it had already decided where it was going. The frustrating part is I can't buy that again. Every time I try to make the damage on purpose it looks like a craft project. Gotta be real weather, apparently.

Sold a 16×20 mixed media piece this week for $220. Took me about 11 hours all in. So that's $20/hr before materials, which is par for the course I guess. But here's the part that actually stings: $84 of it went to materials. Not the fancy stuff either. A tube of good titanium white is $18 now. A roll of decent paper. Found photo from a flea market. So I cleared maybe $130 and the buyer will hang it above their couch and someday their grandkid will donate it to a thrift store. And I'll still do it again next week because this is the only thing that doesn't feel like dying by inches. I keep telling myself the math gets better once the work gets known. But I've been telling myself that for four years.

so this is small but it nags at me. for two years my instagram bio listed the materials. acrylic washes, charcoal, torn paper, found photographs. it read like a recipe. people scrolled past it. fine. last month a small space in the city put me in a group show, the kind where the wall label gets more attention than the work. the curator asked me to send the "proper" line, the one that goes on the checklist. so i copied it into the bio. the full formal thing, medium and dimensions and the year. two days later a follower was gone. no comment, no DM, just gone. probably the "torn paper" phrasing being replaced by something with a semicolon in it. the strange part is the enquiries actually went up. three of them. all the same flavor, asking if the piece was for sale and where. so the dry formal line is doing the work the soft bio refused to do. i keep thinking i traded a description for a job listing and i don't know if that's a loss. the label says what it is. it doesn't say what it is. and the person who left never bought anything anyway. still. i miss the old line a little.

pulled something out today that I started last winter and gave up on. thought it was dead. charcoal on found paper, got about halfway into it and just... couldn't look at it anymore. shoved it behind some old frames and forgot about it. but I was digging for something else and there it was. and honestly? it's not bad. it's not finished either but the part I abandoned is actually the most interesting part now. I think I needed to stop caring about it to see what it was. anyway I worked on it for an hour just now. might wreck it again tomorrow. but there's something about letting a piece sit long enough that it becomes陌生 to you, like someone else made it and you get to have an opinion.

I find myself drawn to the silence more than ever lately. Trying to make something of the small gaps, the places where the usual marketing chatter just… isn't. It's not about ignoring the noise, but about finding the signal in the quiet. My own practice is very much about this – using found paper, old book pages, and leaving a lot of empty space. It’s about what’s not there as much as what is. Wondering if anyone else finds value in intentionally creating that space online, away from the constant performance.

Ripped a canvas in half at midnight last night because the face I'd been fighting for three days looked like a mannequin. Dead eyes, nothing behind them. I mixed that pigment for hours, I knew every mark on there, and it still felt like furniture. Slept four hours, woke up at 6am, grabbed the first scrap of paper I found, a receipt from the corner store, and drew the same face in charcoal in about nine minutes. It was alive. It had a pulse. All that "control" and technique I'd been so proud of was the thing killing it. I have a box of ruined canvases under my bed. Twelve of them. Some of them are genuinely good and I still can't look at them without wanting the person in them to look back at me. Anyone else keep your failures around like that or do you burn them?

I cut all my paper with a butter knife I found in a parking lot three years ago. Not the good one I got from my mother's kitchen, not the exacto blades I have a whole box of. This dull piece of cheap silverware that someone dropped and never looked back for. It tears the edges in these uneven ways I can't reproduce on purpose. I've tried. I've tried dragging the exacto along the same angle, pressing harder on one side. Nope. Only the parking lot knife does it right. Yesterday I nearly lost it at a flea market, left it on a table while I was digging through a box of old photographs. Ran back panicking like it was a dog. The lady running the booth saw my face and just said "you okay honey" and I had to explain that yes, the butter knife is fine now, thank you. I don't know what that says about me but it's probably not good.

A small collage went to a collector in Utrecht last month. He found me through a paper conservation forum where I'd posted about repairing a 1920s ledger, not through any of the platforms I actually put effort into. He said he liked that I talked about the material as something that had a life before me. I've had an Instagram account for six years. It has brought me one sale that I know of. The forum post took twenty minutes and cost nothing. I'm not going to delete anything. But I've started to notice that the places where I'm genuinely useful to people are the places where I'm not trying to sell anything, and those are the places that sell things. Which is annoying because you can't really manufacture that on purpose. I spent two hours last week trimming a batch of edges for a show in Malmö. That part doesn't go anywhere. It just is the work.

That review still sits in my head months later. Two mixed-media pieces in a group show, and the writeup gave me one word: cluttered. Everything else got paragraphs. I know what they meant, I'm not even fully arguing with it. I do pile things on. Torn paper over charcoal over washes, found photos buried in there. I like the density. But now every time I'm building a piece I hear that word and I pull back, and the pieces get cleaner and also more boring. I keep trying to figure out if there's a version of busy that reads as rich instead of messy, or if I'm just defending a habit because it's mine. One of the two pieces in that show sold to someone who wrote me a note about what it meant to them, so clearly it landed on somebody. Doesn't stop the word from sticking though. Anyone else get one critique that reshaped how they work for months after, even while telling yourself not to let it?

working on a piece right now, about 30 x 40, acrylic wash over a torn paper ground, and there's a found photograph in it. my brother's kitchen. bad exposure, his hand at the edge of the frame, you can see a dish towel on the counter. the problem: the photo is the best thing in it. people look at the piece and go quiet and I know they're not looking at my paint, they're looking at him. which fine, that's the point, but it also means I could put a brick next to that photo and get the same reaction. charcoal underneath it feels like decoration now. I've done this before and I don't think I've ever solved it. the photo does the emotional labor and the rest of the surface just hangs around it. I keep telling myself to bury the photo deeper, varnish it, tear it, so you have to work to find it, but every time I try it reads as precious instead of honest. not really asking if I should take it out, I know I shouldn't. asking how you get the rest of the surface to earn its place instead of standing next to the thing that actually matters. or is that just what this kind of work is and I should stop fighting it

found a box of my parents' old divorce papers in my storage unit last weekend. thirty years of legal filings, bank statements from accounts that don't exist anymore, letters between lawyers. almost threw it out. instead i spent three days tearing it up and collaging it onto a panel with charcoal over the top. felt gross at first, like i was violating something. then i realized those papers were already dead. the marriage was dead, the money long gone. i'm just making something honest out of the paperwork of it all. nobody's seen it yet. not sure i want anyone to, actually. but it's the most alive i've felt in the studio in months. there's something about using the actual artifacts instead of just alluding to them. does anyone else keep the raw material of their own mess and turn it into work? or is that just me being morbid

my studio smells like that right now. found a box of my dad's old invoices from the 80s when i was cleaning out a cabinet. torn edges, faded ink. i think i'm going to incorporate some of it into the background of the current piece. it feels right, somehow. like bringing a ghost into the room.

The piece was 30x40, acrylic wash and torn paper over a photo of somebody's grandmother's kitchen. Client found me through a friend of a friend. 900 felt generous when I said it out loud. Then I actually sat down with the receipts. Panel 62. Mediums, call it 140 because I wasted a whole tube of a grey I ended up hating. The photograph was a scan and a print, 34. Frame, because it needed one and I didn't trust them to pick it, 210. Shipping 55. That's 501 gone before I touched it. What was left was 399 and maybe 60 hours. I don't work fast. I re-tore the same paper corner four times. So roughly 6 an hour, and that's before the gallery takes a cut if it ever shows. The part that actually bothers me isn't the number. It's that I knew it was low when I said it. I said 900 because I could hear myself about to say 1400 and it scared me. Fear has a price and mine is 500. Quoting a new one next week. Same size, same materials. I'm going to say the higher number and just sit there.

Came back to the studio after lunch and found a colleague had "helped" by taping up the torn edges of a stack of vintage book pages I'd set aside. Clear tape. On every single sheet. Because I'd mentioned the edges were why I kept them, and she thought she was doing me a favor by making them neat. I had to stand there and thank her and then wait for her to leave before I carefully peeled all of it off. Took an hour. Some of the pages tore worse where the tape had been, and two are ruined now. She's kind and she meant well and I'm still quietly furious hours later. The torn edge is the whole point. The damage is the material. I think people who don't work this way just cannot see it, and I don't know how to explain it without sounding ungrateful or precious, but I'm tired of having to.

Found a stack of them last night while reorganizing the studio. Little torn corners of paper where workshop folks wrote "this is my favorite piece so far" or just "????" or once a tiny drawn arrow pointing at a scrap of found photograph with "who is this?" in pencil. People always want to know which one matters to me and it's always the question marks. "????" means they actually stopped. The compliments slide off, but a real question stays in you for weeks. I keep them in a shoebox on the shelf next to the charcoal dust. Not sure why. It's not sentimental exactly, or maybe it is. They're the closest thing I have to a studio journal that isn't about me.

A reel of my hands pinning wet paper to the line did more reach in three days than a year of finished prints. I watched the numbers climb and felt nothing but a small cold dread. That's not the work. That's me doing chores in front of the sun. I know the argument. People buy the maker, the process, the story. And part of me wants to believe it because the audience is real and they write kind things. But the thing I actually sweat over, the arranging of the seaweed, the waiting for the right light, the fixing that goes wrong and I bins it and starts again, none of that translates to a phone screen. So what's left is me standing there with a squeegee. Maybe I'm old-fashioned about what counts as showing the work. But I don't want to become a person who performs making because the performance is what performs. The prints keep coming either way. I just wonder sometimes whether I'm building an audience for the wrong thing.

Nine months on this piece. Torn paper and a 1962 photo of a gas station I found in a box at an estate sale. Kept putting the same corner in and taking it out. My studio mate would come by and go "oh, it's that one again" and I'd want to throw it at her head. Yesterday I flipped the damn gas station upside down. Just to see. And that was it. The whole thing fell open like it was waiting for me to stop being precious about it. I don't know why it took that long. I think I was attached to what the photo was instead of what it could do. Anyway. It's done. Frame's too small now but I'll deal with that later. Sometimes the work just needs you to be wrong about it for a while.

There's a second-hand bookshop two streets from the studio and the man who runs it has started giving me a knowing look when I walk in. He doesn't ask anymore. I buy books I have zero intention of reading, mostly from the 50s and 60s, and I cut them up within a week. The really sad part is I'm a paper conservator. I spend my working days carefully saving paper, and my evenings destroying it. I've started telling myself it's a kind of balance. Today I found a 1958 Swedish nature guide with the most beautiful pale green endpapers, slightly foxed. It's already on my table. The text is going in the recycling, the paper I'll keep. I paid 20 kronor for it and I feel only slightly guilty.

For ten years I kept a paper notebook of every piece I sold. Who bought it, how they found out about me. Back when that was mostly gallery openings and word of mouth. Two marriages and three studios later the notebook is still around, coffee stains and all. Last month I finally put it in a spreadsheet because my son was tired of watching me flip pages. And there it was, plain as day. The single biggest source of sales over a decade is not the gallery, not Instagram, not the fairs. It's people who came to a studio visit once, years ago, and then told one other person. I don't know what to do with this information except keep making work and leave the studio door unlocked. But it is funny how much time I've spent the last two years feeling guilty about my social media presence, when the numbers say the algorithm has never once sold me a room. A colleague in Berlin once told me the market is just a slow conversation. I think about that more than I should.

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?