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There's a pattern in my classes I've never found a way to explain. A student hits a wall around the six month mark, gets frustrated, stops coming. No goodbye, just gone. And then a month or two later they walk back in half apologising, and their work is suddenly, inexplicably, better. Not in a small way. A leap. I used to take it personally. Thought they'd found another teacher, or given up and gone to something easier. Now I think the wall was the point. They had to stop trying so hard, stop gripping the brush like it owed them something, and just live for a while without the painting. The eye keeps working in the background. Anyway, one of them came back today. Didn't say a word about where she'd been, just handed me a drawing. I nearly told her I was proud, which would have embarrassed us both. So I said "good" and walked away. She knows what that means. We have a code. 🙂

Spent three weeks on a portrait of an old woman holding a cup of tea, every strand of hair, the reflection in the glaze, really proud of it honestly. Posted it, 140 likes. Then yesterday I threw up a 20 minute sketch of just a hand, not even finished, thumb still muddy, and it hit 12k. I don't understand this platform at all. The frustrating thing is I know exactly why. People see a sketch and they feel like they're peeking at the process, the honest part. The finished piece is intimidating, it's closed. The sketch is open. But I can't bring myself to feed the machine the unfinished stuff on purpose, it feels like performing. Yet here I am, thinking about how to sketch more just so the real work gets seen at all. Is everyone else doing this dance where the thing that gets attention is the thing you'd never have chosen to show?

I've been doing the whole "wake up, post a nice finished piece, tag materials, use hashtags, be consistent" thing for months and it's been working okay but like... okay. Then last week I was in a really bad mood about a painting I'd been fighting with for three days, the wash was drying wrong, everything was lifting when I went back in, and I just filmed myself scraping the whole thing off with a palette knife and going "well, that's going in the bin" and posted it on a whim. No caption strategy. Just pure frustration. That stupid, messy, nothing video has more saves and shares than anything I've posted in the last two months. And it's not even a good video, it's just real. I've had four commissions come through from it, including one from someone who said "I don't know anything about art but I felt that." I keep hearing we're supposed to "provide value" and "educate" and I'm not against that but I think maybe the value is just... letting people see you fail? In real time? Without making it a tidy lesson? I don't know, I'm still trying to figure out if I can be that messy on purpose or if it only works when it's genuine. Anybody else finding that the stuff you almost didn't post is the stuff that works?

Seriously. Had my phone plugged in and everything, then BAM. Black screen. No warning. Tried everything, it's just dead. We were talking numbers too, like, actual numbers. I'm hoping they'll call back or email but honestly, I feel like such an idiot. This never happens to me. Now I'm just staring at this blank screen wondering if I should just go paint something angry. Anyone else ever have tech betray them at the worst possible moment? So frustrated right now.

My daughter set up this account for me last spring. I told her nobody wants to watch an old man carve stone, but she insisted, said it was "market research" or something. Fine. Here's what I actually notice. People will watch a forty-second clip of me roughing out a block with a point chisel. Just the tool hitting rock, no talking, no music, no caption except what the stone is. And the ones who comment have real questions. What kind of stone. What's the hardness. How do you stop a crack from running. That part I don't mind. That's actual conversation. But the post I spent two days fussing over, the one where I tried to explain the concept behind a piece, the thinking that went into it. Crickets. Two likes, one of them my daughter. I should have known better. You can't explain work you already made in a way that means anything to someone who just wants to see the process happen. I was raised to think if the work is good you don't have to talk about it. That's not how the internet works, and I'm too old to pretend otherwise. So now I just post the ugly middle parts and save the explaining for when someone actually asks. The frustrating part is my daughter was right and I hate that.

So I was brutalizing a canvas at 1am, the one that wasn't working, and I filmed 20 seconds of myself just slashing at it out of pure frustration, no plan, no caption strategy, phone propped on a paint can. Posted it the way you post something you don't care about because you're too tired to care. 106k views. My best planned post this month did 800. I've been sitting here trying to reverse engineer what the hell happened. Was it the rawness? The fact that I didn't look "on", I looked like a person actually struggling with the thing, not a person performing struggling with the thing? The lighting was garbage. I had no ring light. I genuinely look like a raccoon in it. It's making me question every polished thing I've put out. Like do people smell the production the way dogs smell fear. The comment section was full of people just... being honest about their own blocked creative work. Nobody even asked about the painting. It wasn't about the art. It was about watching someone not be okay for a second and keep going anyway. Anyway now everything I post feels fake in comparison and I hate that. But also maybe that's the answer and I just need to accept my content strategy is "genuinely losing it, filmed badly." 😭

Funny thing happened last month. I was mid-stretch of a new canvas, fighting with a stubborn corner, and I photographed the back of the frame out of pure frustration to send to a painter friend. Bare wood, the wedges, my crappy handwritten label where I always date the work. Posted it by accident to my story before I caught myself. That image sold the painting before I ever showed the front. A collector I'd been going back and forth with for weeks wrote within the hour. Said he liked seeing the bones of it. I don't know what to do with that information. That the accidental, half-finished, unglamorous behind-the-scenes carries more weight than the months of careful work. I resent it a little. But I'm also not stupid. So now I'm trying to figure out how much of my process to show without turning the studio into a circus. There's a line between letting people in and performing the work instead of doing it. I keep showing the mess and it keeps working, and I'm not sure I like that it does.

People keep asking me how I sell paintings, and they seem disappointed when I tell them it's not the social accounts. I run a modest Instagram for the studio, maybe 4,000 followers, and it's pleasant enough. But the collectors who have actually commissioned work from me over the past few years nearly all came from my newsletter. The plain text one. No templates, no design, just a note every month or two about what's on the easel and which pieces are about to be released. I started it back in 2016 out of frustration, because I was tired of watching a carefully composed post disappear into the feed after an hour. Today it has 700 subscribers. Last year three commissions and two gallery introductions came directly from those emails. That's a better conversion rate than every platform I'm on combined, by a wide margin. The social accounts are fine for visibility and for students finding my classes. But if you want someone to spend real money, you want their inbox, not their feed. The feed is a hallway. The inbox is a sitting room. I'd rather sit with seven hundred people than wave at four thousand.

A woman in my Wednesday evening class pulled me aside before we started and asked, very earnestly, whether she could trace the outline from a photograph she'd printed and then just do the watercolor over it. She said she already knew how to paint, she just didn't want to "waste time" on drawing. I told her, as patiently as I could manage, that the drawing isn't a chore you do before the real work. It is the real work. The brushwork is where you execute; the drawing is where you decide what you're actually looking at. Trace a photograph and you learn nothing about how that leaf attaches to the stem, or where the light actually falls versus where your memory says it falls. She seemed genuinely puzzled, not defensive. I think she genuinely believes the outline is scaffolding you're supposed to remove, like painter's tape. I asked her to keep the photo in her bag for one evening and just draw the leaf first. She did. Three hours later she told me she'd never noticed how the veins curve. She was a bit annoyed about it, actually, which I took as a good sign. The frustrating part is how widespread this attitude has become. Everyone wants the shortcut, and the shortcut teaches you to copy other people's seeing instead of doing your own. There is no shortcut. There never was.

I spent years putting only the final work online. Perfect lighting, good photo, the painting resolved. Crickets, mostly. A few likes from other painters. A few months ago I was frustrated with a figure painting, the hand was wrong for the fourth time, the whole thing looked a mess, and I took a photo of it on the easel with my palette旁边, just to vent to a painter friend. I put it on Instagram almost without thinking. That post got more comments than anything I'd put up in six months. People like to see the struggle. They like to see that you also don't know what you're doing for a while. I think for a long time I thought showing process would somehow diminish the finished work, like revealing the trick. But most people aren't painters. They have no idea what goes into it, and watching something get ugly and then get pulled back out of the ugly, that's the part they actually want to see. I'm still not comfortable with it. I was trained to show only the resolved thing. But I can't argue with the numbers, and more to the point I can't argue with the fact that the conversations are better. People ask real questions instead of just saying "beautiful." Wondering if anyone else has found that the unfinished, uncertain thing gets more traction than the polished final version.

My apologies ji, but today the natural pigment for the blue colour is just not listening to me. I am mixing and mixing, using the same process my mother and grandmother taught me, but it is coming out dull, not the vibrant indigo it should be. This is the colour for the peacock's neck, you see, and it must be just so. Perhaps the humidity is too high in Madhubani today? It is frustrating when the materials themselves seem to have a mind of their own.

Like, I'll get a video of me just doing a really simple wash technique, something I thought was pretty straightforward and maybe helpful, and it'll get like, 100 views total. Then I'll post a sped-up video of me painting my cat, Bartholomew, looking super derpy, and it blows up to 10k. Bartholomew, of all things! haha. I'm not saying cats aren't great, but it's so hard to tell what the platforms actually want or if they're just messing with us. It makes me wonder if all the effort I put into explaining the pigment mixing or the paper buckling is just… wasted on them? It’s frustrating because I want to share the skill of it, you know? Omg, anyone else feel like they're just throwing paint at a wall and hoping something sticks with the algorithm gods lately?

I've been tracking the analytics for a client's Instagram account, and we've seen a peculiar drop in engagement over the past quarter. Likes and comments are down about 15%, and reach has plateaued despite consistent posting. The content itself hasn't changed drastically – still high-quality photography and relevant captions. My suspicion is that the algorithm is simply prioritizing different types of content now, perhaps Reels or Stories, and our static posts are being de-prioritized. It's frustrating when established tactics start to falter without a clear reason. Has anyone else observed a similar shift recently?

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.

A man at the garden centre watched me inspect three identical sedum plants for several minutes and felt moved to inform me that they were, in fact, all the same variety. I thanked him and explained I was checking the leaf colour against a specific hue. He told me I was overthinking it. The leaves were green, he said, and that was that. I held up two leaves side by side and pointed out that one had a distinctly bluer cast, which would matter for the study I'm preparing. He looked at me blankly and repeated that they were the same, and I should just buy one. I did not buy any of them. I bought nothing at all, in part out of principle and in part because I no longer trusted my own judgement in that aisle. The frustrating part is not the man himself. He was harmless, if tedious. It's that I let him make me doubt my own eyes for a full two minutes afterward. At 47, after a scientific career and two decades of painting, I still second-guess a perfectly accurate observation because a stranger decides it's fussiness. I should know better by now. I keep telling myself I will stand firmer next time, and then I don't.

I've been mixing the same terre verte and lead white for three days trying to get a shadow on a white tablecloth right. This morning I scraped the whole thing off in frustration and started again. The palette ends up this mess of grey-greens and dirty creams, paint built up at the edges, turps everywhere. My husband came in and said "are you okay in here" like he was checking on a hostage situation. But the thing is, when the palette looks like that, when it's genuinely ugly and you don't care because you're inside the problem, that's when the painting starts to come right. The nice tidy palettes are for people who haven't started yet.

I bought a hydrangea from the bodega on Monday because it was the exact blue of something I couldn't stop thinking about, and I've been painting it over and over trying to chase that color down. The first three were disasters, too muddy, too flat, I kept killing the translucency by overworking it. Last night I was so fed up I almost scraped the paper clean and gave up. But I sat with it for a minute and just looked at the actual flower instead of my painting of it, and I realized I was trying to paint what I remembered the color to be instead of what was actually in front of me. So I started over, fresh paper, wet the whole thing fast, dropped the pigment in and barely touched it after. And it just… worked. The light caught it and I actually gasped. I sat there crying on my studio floor at 11pm holding a wet painting of a flower and my partner came in and was like "are you okay" and I just held it up and they hugged me lol. Anyway that's the whole thing. I love this dumb frustrating medium so much. Has something ever come together for you in a way that made you emotional?? I want to hear about it.

ok so i KNOW this is gonna sound ridiculous but i cannot start painting unless i've done the exact same stupid ritual first, i have to make a cup of tea, i have to light this one specific candle my partner got me, and i have to put on the same playlist i've been using for like three years now. it's not even a good playlist, it's just a shuffled mess of stuff i added when i was 19. there's some owl city on there still. owl city!!! and if i skip any of these steps i will literally just sit there staring at my paper for 20 minutes like a malfunctioning robot. i keep trying to break out of it because it feels so silly and precious but honestly??? every time i've tried to just "go for it" without the ritual i've messed up the first wash within minutes and gotten frustrated and quit. so maybe the ritual is actually functional and i should stop being embarrassed about it? or maybe i need to finally delete owl city from the playlist. one of those. does anyone else have a weird little thing you HAVE to do before you can work or am i uniquely insane here

Okay so I've been trying to get this one soft grey-blue sky wash right for like three mornings now. Kept wetting the paper, laying it down, lifting a little, and every single time it dries with this hard edge right in the middle where I didn't mean one to be. I finally looked at the block and realized the paper I grabbed is the cheap cotton I bought in a panic when I first went full time, not the stuff I usually use. And now I'm sitting here wondering how much of this week's frustration was actually me being rusty versus me fighting paper that just doesn't want to behave. Which I think is kind of the trap, right? You get used to blaming yourself when a piece fights back and sometimes the material really is the problem. But I also can't tell if I'm making an excuse for myself because the wash is genuinely not good. Anyone else ever hit a wall and then realized it was the paper/brush/pigment all along, and did it make you feel better or worse?