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For years I posted only the prints that came out clean. The ones where the fern held its shape, where the wash went even, where the paper didn't buckle at the edge. Nice squares, no mess. Then in February I ruined a whole batch. Too much sun, I left them out maybe twenty minutes too long and the whole thing went flat, no depth left in the blue at all. I photographed the worst one anyway and put it up. Just the ruin. No caption saying look at my process, nothing like that. More people wrote to me about that one print than about a year of the good ones. One woman in Galway asked if she could buy it. A man asked what tide I'd pulled the net from, which felt like the right question to be asked. I think people are tired of being shown the result. They want to see the hand that is not sure. I don't want to turn that into a formula either, because then it becomes another performance. But it changed how I think about what is worth putting into the world. I have three ruined sheets on the studio wall now. I like them more than the ones that worked. Not sure yet if that is a good sign or just me getting older.

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.

Dropped a slab of bluestone off at a quarry supply yard this week to get it re-surfaced. Been using this same stone thirty years. Same yard, same guys, most of them know me by name. New kid behind the counter. Twenty-two maybe. Sees the work order, sees it's going to a sculptor, and launches into a lecture. Sandstone is softer, better for fine detail, you should really be using limestone if you want it to hold an edge. Talking at me like I just walked in off the street. I let him finish. Then I asked him when he last dressed a block with a point chisel, or even held a bushing hammer. He said he hadn't. I said the bluestone's fine, I've carved about four hundred tonnes of it, and my edge holds plenty. He's still mad about it. I paid and left. Young enough that being wrong in front of people still costs him something. I get that. But I've earned the right to not be schooled by a kid who's never swung a fretsaw. The worst part is I'll get older and do the same thing to someone else. That's what's coming for all of us.

I've been thinking about how etching forces you to accept that you don't fully control the outcome. You can prepare the plate perfectly, time the bite, measure the acid concentration, and still something happens in the bath that you didn't plan for. A tiny pinhole you missed, a breath of air that moved the mordant differently, the temperature changing because someone opened a window. I used to fight this. I wanted the plate to be exactly what I imagined. Now I think the whole point is that it never is. The acid has its own intelligence, or maybe it's just indifferent, either way, you're in conversation with something that doesn't care about your plans. My assistant asked me yesterday why I don't just work digitally if I want clean lines. And I couldn't explain that the imperfection is the content. That a line that's been bitten by acid is different from a line that's been drawn, it's been through something. Maybe I'm just getting older and learning to let things be what they are. Or maybe I'm rationalising a plate I ruined this morning. Both can be true.

Found a full ratchet set behind plaster in a wall I was tearing out of a 1930s flat in Žižkov. Chrome sockets, still greased, wrapped in a 1972 newspaper. Someone hid it there. Not from a thief, I think. From themselves. Or from whoever came after. I keep thinking about that. A whole functional tool someone decided mattered enough to hide behind a wall and then never came back for. I put it in the installation I'm building, but not cleaned up, not on a pedestal. Sitting on a crate like it's still waiting to be used. The older I get the more I think most of what I make is just me trying to say something about things that were kept safe and never claimed. Nobody ever came back for the ratchet. I'm not sure anyone ever comes back for most of what gets hidden. I used the 13mm socket to tighten a bolt in the frame yesterday and it fit perfect. Fifty years and it still does its job. That part almost made me put it back in the wall.

The older I get the more I think I've done this all wrong. When I was young and hungry I would walk into a gallery in Lyon with paintings under my arm, no appointment, nothing. Half the time nobody even looked at them. The other half I got a card and a promise that went nowhere. These days I send an email with three or four images, clean and simple, and I wait. It feels more respectful. But I also wonder if the walk-in shows something the email can't, audacity, nerve, that you actually exist in a body and your work has weight to it. I landed my first real gallery because the owner saw me set up painting the market on a Tuesday morning. Not the work, the process. She came over. So what do you do? Knock on the door with a portfolio, or fire off the email and hope? And has either actually worked for you, or is it all luck either way?

Took a piece in to get framed this week. Older guy, been doing it forty years, probably knows his stuff. He looks at the work for a long minute and goes "this is interesting, but why not just commit to canvas? you'd probably sell more." And I stood there going... what does that even mean. Commit. Like torn paper and acrylic washes and a few layers of charcoal is me chickening out. Like there's a correct material and everything else is me being indecisive. Didn't say much. Paid for the frame. It's a nice frame, he did good work. But I've been chewing on it for three days. There's this whole school of thought that if a thing isn't easily categorizable it's not finished. That mixed media is a phase before you find your real medium. Nobody says that to someone who only paints. They say "strong palette" or whatever. But the minute you're not pure, you're just... hedging. Ma'am I'm 45. I'm not hedging. I've been at this long enough to know exactly what I'm doing and it is not a compromise.

I landed my first real gallery show because an older sculptor I'd done fabrication for put my name in front of the owner. Didn't ask for it, barely even knew it happened until the call came. Never had to do the cold pitch. So I never learned how. Now I'm watching people grind out submissions and wondering if that even works anymore. Did anyone here get a gallery the hard way, actually going after it? Or did it mostly come through somebody's recommendation or just being around long enough? Tell me if I'm wrong, but I think the word-of-mouth route still beats the cold email every time.

People ask me where I get my green and I tell them, from the neem tree behind my house, and they think I am joking. But it is true. We boil the leaves since my mother's time, and before that my grandmother, to get the deep green for the leaves of the peacocks. The tree is older than me. Every year when the rains come I take my granddaughter out with the basket and we pick the young leaves together, and she asks why we do not just buy the bottle from the shop like everyone else. I say to her, because the tree gives it free, and it gives it the right colour, the colour that has been in our paintings for generations. The shop green is flat. This green moves. Yesterday I was grinding the indigo and I thought, I have spent my whole life making colours from what is around me. Mud, turmeric, the lamp black from the clay diya. Nothing is bought. And still sometimes a foreign collector pays more for a small painting than the whole month of my father's salary used to be. Strange world. The neem is flowering now. After the flowers the fruit comes, and then the young leaves again. I will not be here forever but the tree will still be giving its green to whoever asks for it.

The ear was for a portrait of my neighbour, an older woman with a red scarf, and the light off it was doing something I could not get right. Scraped it twice. Third pass held. I put it up because I liked it, not as a lesson or a "process" thing. Forty likes. Which is about what I get for a finished head, so I am not complaining. But the comments were all from other painters. The people who buy my work said nothing. Then a woman I have never met in Toulouse messaged asking if she could buy the ear. Just the ear. She wanted it as a small piece, cropped. I said yes and I am still not sure how I feel about it. It arrived in her flat last week and she sent a photo with her coffee cup next to it and I thought, fine, that is the painting doing its work. But it also makes me wonder if the full head is the wrong container for what I actually paint. If I have been making the frame too big for the light. Meanwhile the commissions that pay for the studio get one line of text and a request for a discount. I am not going to pretend I have solved this. Some weeks it is just the ear and the coffee cup and no clarity.

The museum down in Montgomery asked if I'd make a piece for their gift shop last fall. I was honored, genuinely. Then I sat down and counted the cloth and the hours and the thread and what I'd need to charge to make it worth my while, and the number I came to felt too big to say out loud. So I didn't say it. I said $400. Took me three weeks. By the time I'd bought good fabric and batting and the needle time, I figure I made about enough to buy a tank of gas and a nice lunch. My granddaughter about cried when I told her. She said, "Grandma, why'd you let them do you like that?" And I thought about it. And the truth is, the honor of it got me. That little piece with my name on it hanging in a museum shop, that's what I was really taking. But honor don't pay the light bill, and it set a number that's going to follow me. Now that shop thinks a Gloria Mae quilt costs $400. That's the price I gave them, so that's the price I get. I've made peace with it as a gift to the place. But I'm a little bit older and a little bit smarter now, and the next time somebody wants a piece, I'm going to say the hard number out loud and let them be the ones to flinch. It's what I tell the young ones starting out: you name your price like you mean it, or the world will name it for you, and it won't be kind.

Y'all, I finally broke down and let my granddaughter talk me into getting a brand new machine. The old Singer I been sewing on since I don't know when, it still works, but the tension's been fighting me something fierce for about two years now and I been cussing at it quiet so the Lord don't hear me too clear. New one came in the mail yesterday. Shiny. Got all these stitches I don't know what to do with. And you know what I did? Sat and looked at it for twenty minutes before I touched it. It felt wrong somehow, like I was cheating on a old friend. My grandmother's machine was treadle. Foot-powered. I ever tell y'all that? I learned on that thing, how fast you go is how fast your foot wants to pump. This new one don't even need me to guide the fabric straight, it's got a little arm that does it for you. I told my granddaughter that ain't sewing, that's supervising. But I used it this morning. Made a little test block, just scraps, nothing special. And I got to admit it sews real pretty. Real even. I still don't trust it though. Might keep the old Singer right there next to it for a while, just so it knows I ain't forgot where I come from.

I finally replaced my steel ruler after 15 years. Same brand, same size, looked identical out of the package. And then I measured a column of paper with both and they're off by almost a millimeter over 40 cm. I kept the old one. It's bent in a way I've learned to compensate for with my eye, so it's actually more accurate in my hands than the straight one will ever be. The new one sits in the drawer, brand new, useless to me. Some tools you don't own. You just get to know them well enough to work around their flaws. That's the real relationship.

I'm still thinking about this guy, must be sixty-five, works in oil paint only, big gestural abstracts. He watched me pulling proofs for a day and then at dinner he said it with this real pity in his voice: "It's a shame, because you clearly have the eye, but you're limiting yourself to crafts." I said printmaking has been central to contemporary art since, I don't know, Dürer? And he said Dürer was a painter who also did prints. Like printmaking is just a side thing painters do when they're between ideas. The thing that gets me is the hierarchy. Oil painting = serious. Etching, screenprint, anything that involves a process and a press = decorative. It's so nineteenth century. And I didn't fight him properly because I was tired and my hands hurt from scraping, but I've been composing the argument in my head for three days now. You know when the perfect retort arrives too late?

ok so I'm at the art supply store today picking out watercolor paper, like actually taking my time because this stuff is expensive and I have a specific feel I'm going for for this piece I'm doing, and this older guy who works there comes up and goes "that stuff's overrated, you should try this" and hands me this cheap cold press that buckles if you breathe on it wrong. I said "oh thanks, I'm looking for the hot press actually" and he goes "no no, cold press is better for beginners, you'll get better results." like sir. I have a BFA. I have been painting with watercolor for eight years. I paint literally every single day. I did not ask for your opinion on my paper. and I just stood there holding my paper and being like "okay thanks" because I'm 26 and I still default to being polite and then I walked away and fumed about it the whole drive home. why do men do this. why is it always at the art store. I have never once had a woman employee at an art store assume I don't know what I'm doing. not once. anyway I bought the hot press and it's beautiful and I'm going to paint something really good on it out of spite. that's the plan.

did the math today while mixing and my burnt umber is now older than some of the apps i use. 2020, lockdown, i panic-bought the gallon jug because the small tubes kept running out and i was convinced the world was ending and i'd never get another one. the world did not end. i have used maybe a fifth of it. anyway it's the only color i've never had to think about. everything else i'm scraping the bottom of the tube like a raccoon, but the umber just sits there, enormous, smug, will outlive me. i pour it out on the palette like i'm feeding a horse. ngl there's something nice about one material being a non-issue. one whole thing in the studio with zero anxiety attached. the rest of the shelf is a graveyard of dried-out caps and regret. what's the supply you overbought in a panic and now have a weird relationship with

Was sketching this old Raj-era guesthouse off MG Road last week, the one they're pulling down next month. Owner came out, older fellow, stood behind me for a while not saying anything. I braced for the usual "why are you drawing my building, is something wrong." Instead he said, "Take your time. Take two hours. I'll get you chai." And then he just left me alone with the whole front verandah, the arches, the bougainvillea gone wild over the gate. Two hours of no one asking anything of me. He came back with a steel tumbler of chai and asked if he could keep the painting when I was done. I said I'd frame it for him. He got a bit quiet. "My grandfather built that place," he said. "Nobody's asked me a single question about it in forty years." Finished it yesterday and walked it over. He wasn't there, his daughter took it, said she'd hang it in the hall. I don't know why that's stuck with me more than any sale. Maybe because half the time I wonder if anyone actually cares what I'm documenting. Turns out the ones who lived it do. They just don't say so until you sit down with a brush in front of their house.

I got a pair of sewing scissors that belonged to my grandmother, she carried them in her apron pocket my whole childhood and I'd watch her snip thread and cut fabric and trim little corners off pieced blocks, never setting them down, just keeping them right there at her hip like they was part of her. She passed in '84 and I got those scissors and honey they are dull as all get out and I don't care one bit. I could get them sharpened, I know I could. But it feels wrong somehow, like I'd be erasing the wear she put in them. Every little nick and gap in the blade is from her hand. My daughter bought me a nice new pair for Christmas two years ago and they sit in the drawer. I use them when I have to. But when I'm really working, when I'm piecing something that feels like it matters, I reach for Mamie's scissors every time. They pull at the fabric more than they cut it sometimes. And that's alright with me. Anybody else got a tool they keep using past when they should? Or am I just being sentimental?

Been at the same studio for twenty-two years. My DeWalt angle grinder dates back to the first month. Replaced the brushes three times, new cord once, dropped it off a ladder onto concrete and it barely chipped. The shop supervisor at the fabrication place I apprenticed under always said you buy a good tool once and it outlasts every relationship you'll have. He wasn't wrong. Finally had to retire it today. The armature's gone, I can smell it, and no amount of new brushes fixes that. Put it on the shelf instead of in the bin. Can't bring myself to toss it. Which is ridiculous, it's a tool, tools get used up. That's the point of them. My kid asked why I kept it and I didn't have an answer. I think I just wanted one thing to outlast the work, not the other way around.

Spent half an hour at the supplier's table today holding the sample plate up to the window, then under the desk lamp, then back to the window, then outside on the pavement like an idiot. Kept saying to the man the blue is too green. He kept saying it is the same blue as last time. It was not the same blue as last time. Ordered a kilo anyway because he had it in the older batch and once that batch is gone it's gone. The piece I'm making is the sea wall down at the old port, the bit where the concrete is patched with three different greys and the winter storms have eaten the mortar out. I have been collecting blues for it since March. There is a blue in the early morning there, maybe ten minutes of it before the light turns hard, that is not teal and not grey and I cannot describe it without sounding like a poet, so instead I am buying kilos of glass and losing my mind. Everyone thinks this job is about patience. Actually it is mostly about this. Standing in a shop arguing about whether a colour exists. Anyway. The kilo cost more than I'll get for the panel. I know. Don't.