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Working on this piece built around a found photograph from the 70s, this woman standing in a doorway, someone's aunt probably. I tore the paper around her and layered it onto a board with charcoal and acrylic. But there's this one hinge point where the photograph meets the torn paper and it just won't sit right. I keep adjusting the collage thinking the composition is off, then yesterday I realized the piece works fine everywhere except exactly where those two papers meet. The problem is the junction itself, not what's around it. Every fix I try makes it worse. I pulled a strip of paper off and now there's a gap, so I'm just staring at this torn edge like it's going to solve itself. Anyone else ever had a piece where one seam is the whole problem? Where you keep blaming the surrounding work and it turns out to be the one physical joint you chose?

Found a photo of my grandfather's workshop tucked in a box of stuff my mom finally gave up. Grainy, probably 1960s, the bench is covered in things I can't identify. Tools, jars, something that might be a clamp. I've built three separate pieces around that photo now and every single one has a different kind of light in it. The original has none at all, it's just flat flash shadow. My brain keeps inventing light that isn't there because I want the room to feel a certain way. The last version is maybe the worst. Technically fine. Dead. I think I'm overworking the sentiment. I want the viewer to feel something I can't actually name, so I keep piling on. Wondering if the honest move is to just reproduce the photo flat and let it be flat. Let the sadness be the boring shadow version instead of the cinematic one. Anyone ever hit this, where you keep romanticizing a source image and the work gets worse for it?

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.

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 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.

I noticed last week that I only actually start working once the radiator starts ticking. Same time every morning, that knocking-into-rhythm thing they do. Before that I'm just moving paper around the table, pretending. And now I've started timing things to it. Which is insane. I'm not a person who counts, I've never counted anything in my life, and suddenly I'm laying down charcoal on the off-beat because the radiator told me to. My brother used to tap his pen on everything, dining table, steering wheel, my shoulder in the car. Annoying as hell. I didn't realize until this week that I'd been working in the quiet for years and it never sat right. Anyway the piece is getting worse before it gets better, which I keep telling myself is what always happens. It's a photograph of a doorway I found in a box lot at an estate sale on Vitosha, water damage ate the top left corner, and I'm building the wash around the damage instead of over it. Half the studio floor is scraped-off grey at this point, I gave up sweeping. Not sure the radiator thing is a habit or a symptom.

there's a torn piece from a 1978 Sears catalog in the bottom corner of the piece on my table. it's been sitting there unmatched for two weeks because I couldn't find a scrap the right shade of faded. today I found one. spent 40 minutes trimming it to fit. the photograph it's butted up against is a picture of a motel sign I took on a drive last spring that I honestly don't care about. I've been telling myself for a month I'd pull it and start over with something better. so I just spent 40 minutes serving a photograph I'm going to throw away. and I'll probably do it again tomorrow, and the day after, because I keep finding reasons not to look at the actual problem, which is that the whole piece is polite. it's nice. it's fine. nothing in it is fighting anything. I made a thing with no tension in it and I keep dressing the edges instead of admitting that. anyway the paper matches beautifully.

went out to a mall that's been half empty since 2009. security guy found me crouched in the food court taking close-ups of the carpet. he wanted to know if i was with the demolition crew. i wasn't. i just wanted the carpet. 1970s orange and brown, that pattern that pretends to be geometric but is really just chaos with a ruler. it's worn down to nothing along the path people walked to the old Sears. you can literally read the foot traffic from 40 years ago in it. nobody designed that. it just happened. he let me stay. sat on a bench and watched me for a while and then said his wife used to work at the Orange Julius there. i got maybe 30 usable frames. most of it's garbage, the light was flat and the place smells like wet carpet and nothing. but two of them are the actual thing. the good stuff is almost never in the interesting place. it's in the hallway you walk past.

A consultant they hired said my feed lacked "curatorial coherence." Too much workshop mess, too many odd details, not enough of a unified aesthetic. So I posted a photo of a pigeon I found in my studio courtyard. Dead. Beautiful grey feathers, one wing slightly open, eye still clear. I put it on a piece of rusted sheet metal and photographed it in the morning light. Caption: "Studio assistant quit." It got more engagement than anything I'd posted in six months. The gallery was not amused. But two collectors messaged me asking if it was available as a print. I don't know what the moral is. Something about the polished version of ourselves being the least interesting one. Or that dead birds sell. One of those.

so i killed my instagram in february. 11k followers, three years of posting almost daily. the reach had gone to shit anyway, i was getting maybe 200 views on a reel that took me an afternoon, and i kept catching myself making work that would photograph well instead of work i wanted to make. that's the part that got me. i made a piece in january specifically because i knew the process video would do numbers. it did. i hated the piece. anyway i deleted it. no announcement, nothing, just gone. what i did instead: went back to emailing. actual emails to about 40 people, buyers from the last two years plus a few gallerists and one curator who'd been nice to me once. no newsletter platform, no funnel, just me at the kitchen table with the names in a spreadsheet. one email every four or five weeks with a photo of whatever's on the wall and one line about what i'm doing. sold four pieces since february. which is more than i sold in the previous eight months of posting. i don't fully understand it. maybe it's that email feels like a person and the feed feels like a shop. maybe i just got better at asking. either way i'm not going back and i feel slightly stupid for the three years i spent chasing views that never turned into anything. the thing i can't decide is whether this only works because i already had the followers to begin with. like if i were starting from zero tomorrow would i have to do the whole dance again. i think probably yes and i don't like that answer

cleaning out my drives tonight because the external is at 94% and I can't afford a new one this month. and I found it. the photo of my brother on a folding chair outside a motel, the one I've been building the whole series around. it was in a folder called "misc 2." I named it wrong in 2019. that's it. that's the whole thing. I spent two years telling people I'd lost the original scan and I could only work from the print. sitting here kind of sick about it honestly. how much of the searching is just bad filing. how many things I've given up on that were one folder over. anyway the external is still at 94%

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.

my brother was not good at photography. like, genuinely bad. half the frames are his thumb. the other half are blurry pictures of things he was excited about, usually food or our cousin's dog. but I found the box of negatives last week, tucked behind some tax paperwork in a closet I'd been avoiding. spent the whole weekend making contact sheets in the darkroom at the community center, just to see what was on them. there's this one where he's trying to photograph the ocean and instead got like, a wall of beige blur. and I can't stop looking at it. it's so incompetent. it's so him. I've been staring at it like it's the most profound thing I've ever seen. I'm going to try to work with these somehow. torn paper collages from the contact sheets maybe, or cyanotypes of his worst frames. not sure yet. but I've been sitting with the fact that he put all this energy into documenting his life and most of it is just... bad. and that's the whole point somehow. anyway. if anyone has experience working with found negatives that are mostly garbage, I'd love to hear how you approached it without making it sentimental garbage yourself.

got the same email everyone gets. gallery "adores" the piece, three sentences of lovely, then: would I consider a version that fits a smaller wall. so you mean a different piece. you mean the one you like but cheaper. the thing is 19 by 24 and half of it is a torn photograph of my grandfather's shed that I only have one copy of. I can't scale that. it's not a design I can resize, it's a specific piece of paper with a specific stain on it. anyway I was mid-glue when it came in so now the bottom right corner has a wrinkle in it that I'll either fix or decide is "intentional" by tomorrow morning. and I know the correct answer is to just say no and move on. I know that. I'll probably say yes and hate myself for two weeks, which is a thing I'm aware of and do anyway.

So I did the math for the first time last week. Actually did it, not the vague "eh, it's fine" version. Took one of my 9x12 gouache pieces, the window one with the morning light through the fire escape, the one I actually like. Tracking time honestly: sketches, the failed first pass I scraped off, the three days of staring at it deciding if the shadow was too purple. Fourteen hours. It sells for $280. That's $20/hr before I've bought a single tube of paint. Before the framing. Before the 40 minutes I spent photographing it because my phone kept making the greens look radioactive. I told my partner and they went quiet in that specific way and I immediately wished I hadn't said it out loud haha. The thing is I KNEW this, kind of. Everyone knows this. But there's a difference between knowing it and writing 14 on a sticky note and dividing. And now every time someone says "oh I could never afford that" I have this new number sitting in my head and I don't know what to do with it. I'm not raising prices to $1200, nobody in my life is paying that, my whole audience is people who found me through a $45 print. But I also can't un-know it. Curious if anyone else has actually done the math and then what you did after. Or if you deliberately haven't, which honestly I respect more.

Now listen, I want to hear how y'all do it, because I still can't decide what's polite. My first gallery, I didn't do either one properly. My granddaughter found the place, and I mailed them a letter with two polaroids of a quilt folded over the porch rail. Took five weeks to hear back and I had about given up. Turns out one of the ladies who worked there took the pictures home to her mama. Her mama said bring that woman in. So I walked in with a quilt on my arm and that was that. Not a plan. Just the Lord and a folded quilt. Now I've got a new one I'd like to approach, and I keep going back and forth. Part of me says send the email first, be respectful of their time. Other part says a quilt is a thing you have to touch. A photograph of a quilt is not a quilt. So which is it for you? Email first and wait? Or walk in and hope somebody's there who'll look? And I especially want to hear from anybody who walked in unannounced, because I think there's more of us than folks admit.

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.

For twenty years my portfolio was a PDF. Sixty pages, properly photographed, the works shot in good light, the lot. I sent it to maybe four hundred people over the years. Response rate near zero, and I never thought to ask why. Earlier this autumn a curator in Brno asked to see my work and I was tired, so I sent a link to one page. Three photos taken on my phone in the storage hall, bad light, one of them has my boot in the frame. Four lines of text. Where the work has been, what it is made of, what I need to build the next one. Two serious enquiries that week. One is now a real commission for next year. I think the sixty-page PDF was doing the opposite of what I wanted. It was proving I was serious. It was not showing anyone a door. A curator has eleven minutes and forty other artists. A perfect portfolio says: this person is finished, this person is a known quantity, go and look at the checklist. A bad photo of a real room says: there is something here that is not in a database yet. I am not saying make ugly documentation. I am saying I had confused thoroughness with invitation. Thoroughness is for your own archive. Nobody walks into your archive. Now the part I am less sure about. I have no idea whether this works because the page is honest, or because it looks like I am not trying, which in this world reads as expensive. Possibly both. I have been doing this too long to believe I have found the formula, but the old one was definitely dead and I had been sending it out for years without noticing. Still keeping the PDF. For grants. Grants love a PDF.

Listed a piece I nearly didn't photograph because I thought it was too raw. Charcoal smeared where I meant it to stay clean, torn photo edges showing, the whole thing kind of falling apart the way I usually try to hide. Put it up anyway last Tuesday with a caption that was basically "this one fought me." Sold in under 24 hours to someone who sent a message about their own mother's handwriting being the same as the one in the found photo. I didn't even notice the handwriting matched anything. I just pulled the photo because the dress in it looked like one my brother's first girlfriend wore. Every time I try to predict what lands, I'm wrong. The polished landscape pieces I actually thought would go sit there for months. This one, the one that felt like letting someone see the workbench mid-mess, gone like that. Makes me wonder how much of my process is just me tidying things that people would've liked fine as they were.

Found a painting of someone's dachshund from 1983 yesterday. Terrible painting. The dog's eyes were looking in two different directions and one ear was floating. Frame was trashed, matting was that pilled velvet stuff. Bought it anyway. Took the painting out, put it in a drawer. I don't know why I do this. I have a stack of bad pet portraits now and no use for them. But throwing someone's dog away felt wrong. Same thing happens with photographs. Estate sales, flea markets. I've got a shoebox full of people I don't know. Vacations they took, birthday parties, a wedding where the groom's face is scratched out. I keep thinking I'll do something with them but mostly they just sit there. Maybe it's just cheaper than therapy. Or a different kind of hoarding.