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Not by decade, not by place. By whether the person in them could still walk into a room and ask why I have it. The stack that's fine to show anyone is thin. Maybe nine photos. The middle stack is people who'd be polite about it but I'd see it land wrong. And then the bottom drawer, which is just my brother, and nobody's left to ask. That drawer is the only one that's ever open. I've been pulling from it all week for this piece and I keep stopping because the sorting is the actual work and I don't want to undo it. There's a photo from a gas station outside Barstow, 1994, him leaning on the pump with his eyes closed. Blown out, half the frame is white. I've tried to use it three times and each time I put it back. Anyway. Anyone else organize source material by something that isn't a system at all

went through the shoebox again today. the one with all his stuff. I've been through it so many times I could tell you every single piece in there by touch. and still, there was a photo I somehow missed. just his hands, holding a wrench, oil up to the knuckles. must have been mid-twenties, before things went sideways for him. I don't know how I kept missing it. I've pulled everything out of that box a hundred times. anyway I'm going to work it into the next piece. not in an obvious way. maybe just the knuckle line, that bend in his thumb. I've been trying to figure out a composition for like a month and this is the thing that unlocks it, of course it is. the work always waits for you to find the one missing piece. made a rubbing of it tonight so I don't lose it even if I bury the photo back in there.

Pulled out an old shoebox today looking for collage paper and there it was. A photo of my brother's hands. He's holding up a fish he caught, grinning off-frame. I don't remember taking it. Must be twenty-five years old. I've been trying to figure out how to tear it without wrecking it. Which is stupid because I tear paper every day. But his knuckles, you know. The way his thumb bent. I ended up taping it to the studio wall instead. Just staring at it while my coffee went cold. Did a lot of crying in my early twenties about how nothing lasts. Now I'm in my forties making art out of the pieces of things that didn't. Some days the whole practice feels like a long argument with that younger version of me. She thought you had to hold on tight. Turns out you just have to pay attention.

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.

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.

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.

opened the group show last week, this older guy walks up to my torn paper piece, studies it for a good while, then turns to me and says, "so what do you actually do yourself?" like it's a trick question. i said I tear the paper, he said no, I mean the assembly. I said I assemble it. he nodded and walked off. I still don't know what he thought I was outsourcing. the tearing? the thinking? it's been sitting in me all week. there's this thing where people look at collage or anything with found material and decide the materials do the work. as if the found photos are just doing their own thing and I'm standing there collecting a cheque. nobody says that to someone who paints a landscape. they don't ask which bits the brush did. I know I shouldn't let one guy get under my skin but I keep hearing it. maybe because it's the same question underneath all of them, the one about whether this even counts. tired of defending it to strangers who've already decided.

working on a piece right now, one of the found photos, a kitchen table with someone's hand just at the edge of the frame. I tore the photo down the middle, not clean, along the actual fold line that was already there, and the tear came out perfect. like, exactly what I'd have designed. ragged, thin, the emulsion lifting at the edge. and I hate it. it reads decorative. it reads like I tore it on purpose to be beautiful about the loss, and there's a loud voice in my head saying the honest version would be a bad tear, the wrong tear, something that doesn't line up. but the bad tear I made last week just looked like a mistake. like I fumbled the scissors. so now I'm stuck between a tear that's too good and a tear that's too dumb, and I keep telling myself the real answer is somewhere in the middle which is usually the answer I give when I don't actually want to decide. the thing I can't get past: the photo already had that fold. it's not my gesture at all. I just followed it. but does that read to anyone else, or does it just look like a nice rip. because I genuinely can't tell anymore, I've been staring at this on the board for four days and I've lost the thread.

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?

Started a new piece this morning and spent the first two hours just getting the charcoal to behave on the ground. Every other layer after that is the easy part for me, which is the opposite of how most people seem to work. I don't know. There's something about that first pass where the paper is still clean that makes my hands stupid. Once it's ruined a little I can actually see what I'm doing. The piece is for a group show in March. Found photo of two women at a county fair in the 60s, one of them has her head turned and you can't tell if she's laughing or crying. That ambiguity is the whole thing I'm chasing and I keep almost getting it and then losing it. Anyway. It's 2pm and I've made maybe six square inches of actual progress. Some days the work is just standing in the room with it until something clicks. Today it hasn't clicked yet but I'm not leaving.

Working from a found photo of my grandmother I never met. Got the whole face down, the eyes are right, the way her collar sits, all of it. And then the mouth. Every time I put the mouth in, the whole face collapses into a pleasant stranger. I've scraped it off three times this week. I don't know if it's a technical thing or if I'm scared of what the actual mouth would say. It's an old photo, she's not even smiling, but I keep making it too soft. Too kind. Like I need her to like me and she's been dead fifty years. Anyone else hit a feature they keep ducking around? Or is it just me making a ghost polite.

Somebody threw out maybe 40 of them, all from the same booth, all of the same two people between 1998 and 2003. You can watch them get older strip by strip. Then it just stops. I took them. Obviously I took them. They're in a shoebox on the floor and I've looked at them maybe six times in two days, which is more than I've looked at my own work. Here's the thing though. I keep thinking about putting them in a piece and every version in my head feels like stealing. Not legally, I don't care about that. It's that they don't belong to me and the work would be me borrowing someone else's whole life for a mood. I've spent four years cutting up my brother's receipts and I never once felt that. That was mine to use. So right now they're just sitting there and I'm making a fuss about it on the internet instead of working.

Working on a portrait from a reference photo I found in an old magazine, some woman I've never seen before. And I get to the mouth and I keep redrawing it and it's not working, and then I step back and realise, it's my mother's mouth. The upper lip thinner, the way the corner tucks in. I didn't put it there on purpose. It just came out of my hand. I don't even have a great relationship with my mother. So that's unsettling. Has your hand ever just. Drawn something from your life without asking you first? Like the muscle memory knows things you don't want it to know?

There's this face I keep coming back to. Not anyone I know, just a reference photo I found ages ago, some woman with sharp cheekbones and tired eyes. I've drawn her maybe twelve times now in pastel. Different angles, different lighting, different paper colours. Most of them are bad. But I can't stop. Yesterday I finished another one and just sat there thinking... why her? What is it about this particular face that won't let me go? Maybe I'm trying to nail something I can't articulate. Maybe it's just comfort, like rewatching the same film. Anyone else have that one subject they keep circling back to? Not in a series way, just obsessively.

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?

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%

Daughter talked me into posting the installs. So I post them. That part actually works, in a way I didn't expect. Two commissions this year came from a guy who found me through a photo of a finished piece in a courtyard in Vermont. What doesn't work is everything after the photo. I posted a shot of a limestone piece I finished in March, 400 pounds, four days of rigging to get it set. 1,100 views. Two comments. One was a bot selling something, the other was a guy telling me I should do reels. I did one reel. Thirty seconds of me chasing a chisel with a mallet. Took an hour to edit and I still don't know what a hook is. Nobody watched it. The commissions come from the phone calls, the guy who saw the piece in person and called me. That's still the whole business. The photos just remind people I'm alive. I don't think that's a problem with my account. I think it's the medium. A photograph of a sculpture tells you almost nothing. You can't walk around it, you can't see the scale, you can't feel the weight of the thing. What I'd want to post is the sound of the grinder or the way the light moves across a rough face at 4 in the afternoon, and I can't put that on a screen. So I keep posting the stills because the daughter asks me to, and because twice now it's paid for a truckload of stone. But I'm not going to pretend it's doing more than that.

it went to a woman in Rotterdam who found me through a photo of a detail shot, the corner where his address is still legible under the wash. she didn't ask me to explain it. that's the part I keep turning over. it's the first thing I've sold that has his actual hand in it. a page from a repair manual he'd written his new address on in pencil, 2009, before he moved and before everything. I taped it into the panel and painted around it until it stopped being a document and started being a place. then I put it in a show anyway and priced it like I meant it, which took three tries. packing it up yesterday I had a moment where I thought, I could just keep this. there's no rule that says it has to leave. I taped the box shut instead. mostly I'm fine. slightly unmoored. it turns out there's a difference between making a thing out of what's left and letting a stranger take it home in a box.

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.

I'm not allowed to sand anything back before noon. Sounds stupid written down. But I kept catching myself at 2am with the piece half dry, going at it with the paper because I decided it looked like shit, and 9 times out of 10 by daylight whatever I was so sure was ruined was the only part worth keeping. so now it just sits there overnight. i look at it, hate it, go to bed, and in the morning it's usually fine. still think its fine. weird how the light changes the argument. the piece on my table right now is a charcoal wash over a photo of a stairwell i found in a box lot, and at 1am last night i was fully prepared to tear the whole corner off. this morning it's the reason to keep it. anyway. what's the dumb rule you have in place to protect yourself from yourself