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I have a grey squirrel tail in a jam jar in the freezer, waiting for me to find the courage to paint it. It came off the road at the end of the lane, and my husband has been remarkably patient about the whole business, though he did ask whether it might live somewhere other than beside the peas. The difficulty is the fur. Fur is the one subject where botanical training lets me down, because a petal has an edge you can commit to and fur does not, or rather it does but the edge is made of a thousand separate decisions. I have done three drawings on tracing paper and none of them convince me. I keep treating it as a silhouette instead of a structure. I suspect the answer is to stop drawing the tail as a shape and start drawing the hairs as individual strokes, in order, from the tip backward, the way you would build a seed head. It will take an appalling length of time and I am not entirely sure it will work. There is a real possibility this squirrel ends up back in the hedge with nothing to show for it. Anyone here paint animal specimens as well as plants. I would like to be told I am overthinking the fur, or else told plainly that I am not.

So I took a commission last month, a gouache portrait of this woman's dog, small, maybe 5x7, and I quoted her 320 and I felt SO confident about it in the message. Sent it, she said yes immediately, and I was like ok cool I'm a professional. Then it took me eleven days. Not eleven days of work, obviously, but eleven days of the thing sitting on my desk while I redid the left ear four times because the fur kept going muddy, which is a gouache problem I created for myself by underpainting too warm. Plus two full sessions just on the background because she wanted "the same green as her sofa" and I had one blurry phone photo of the sofa. And the framing, which I did myself because I'm cheap, and I chipped the corner and had to start the frame over. My partner asked, very gently, like genuinely curious, "so what's that work out to an hour" and I literally said "oh I don't really think about it that way" and went to go water a plant that does not need water. I do think about it that way. I think about it constantly. I've just decided that the number I'd get if I actually divided it is a number I'm not ready to see yet, and there's something kind of insane about that, right? Like I'll happily tell a stranger 320 with my whole chest but I won't do one division problem in my own kitchen. Anyway she loves it, she sent me a photo of it on the wall next to the actual dog, and I'm not saying I regret the price. I'm saying I quoted the version of me who paints fast and it got done by the version of me who repaints an ear four times. Still working out which one of those people should be setting prices.

People always want the story of the comeback, the artist who stopped and then started again. Nobody wants the part where you spend ten years convincing students they're good enough when you've quietly decided you're not. That's what the fallow decade was for me. I taught portrait drawing at the atelier, competent classes, students who went on to do real work. And every evening I walked home past my own empty studio like it was a room I'd been evicted from. The strangest part is I wasn't blocked. I was just... finished. I'd seen enough mediocre paintings in galleries owned by people who couldn't tell you the difference between burnt sienna and raw umber, and I'd decided the whole enterprise was a bit de classe. What brought me back wasn't inspiration or a muse or any of that nonsense. It was my daughter, aged nine, asking me to paint her hamster that had died. I said no, I don't do pets. She cried. I painted the hamster. It's actually a good little painting, the light on that ridiculous fur, and I've never shown it to anyone. I don't have a lesson in this. Some of us just need a dead hamster to get back to work.

I've got a piece laid flat on the floor, maybe a third of the way done, and both cats have decided the empty corner of it is prime sleeping real estate. Not the concrete, not the old rug. The corner where I haven't set tesserae yet. Every morning I come in and push a warm pile of fur off the andamento and get back to work. By noon they're back. I used to fight it. Shoo them off, shut the door, the whole thing. Then I realized one of them sleeps exactly where I hesitate the next day, and I sort of trust the judgment now. It's like a tiny furry second opinion on the composition. Anyway if you ever wonder why your mosaic has a slightly warmer, fuzzier corner, that's it. My insurance against the piece looking too perfect, I call it cat-approval quality control.

I made black pigment in November, from lamp soot and the gum, the way my mother used to do it. Kept it in a glass jar with the cloth tied on top. Today I opened it and there is white fur on the surface, a thin layer. First time this has happened to me in so many years. My mother never had this problem. But she made small quantity, enough for one or two paintings, and it was finished before anything could sit. I made a big batch because a cooperative order was coming and then the order went slow. So the jar is sitting since four months and now this. Some people will say just throw it. I am not able to throw it, that soot took me three evenings to collect properly, sitting with the diya and the tin plate. I have scraped the top layer off. Underneath it looks fine, black as it should be. But I am hesitating to use it on the order, because if it comes off later on the paper then my name only will be spoiled, not the mould's. There is an old practice of putting a little neem leaf in the jar. My aunt used to do it. I did not do it this time because I was in a hurry, which is its own kind of foolishness. Anyone here working with natural pigment, does the spoilage go all the way through or only skin deep. I would like to know before I ruin good handmade paper.

So the big hare block, the one I've been carving the last three weeks, has a hairline crack running out from the ear about an inch and a half. Been there a few days I think. I noticed it Tuesday and my honest reaction was to turn the lamp a bit and keep going, which tells you everything about where the head is at. It's a 300x400 piece of lino, grey hessian-backed, and I've gone too deep along the ear hollow, that's what did it. Thin floor, pressure from the gouge, and she split. Should have known, I knew it at the time, there's a sound it makes when you're cutting too fine and I heard it and carried on. Now the question is do I keep pulling from it and just accept the crack will show up as a faint line in the print, or do I stop and do the whole thing again. I did four proofs off it Saturday and honestly the line barely reads, it looks like a bit of texture in the fur. But it'll get worse. Every pull opens it a bit more. My wife says put a bit of tape on the back and stop fussing. The tape trick does work, I've done it before on smaller blocks, but this one's for an edition of 40 and I don't want to be standing in the market in six months explaining a seam. Anyway. I've a bit of fresh lino in the rack and I'm half-committed to starting again and half-committed to pretending this one is grand. Sitting here with a mug of tea gone cold looking at it like it might heal itself. 🙂