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ok so I mixed this green glaze a month ago and every cone 6 firing it's a whole different color. first batch came out a deep forest with a matte finish, second one bright almost jade, third one this weird grey-green that I actually hated and then loved by the end of the week. same recipe, same bucket, same clay body. the only variable is how long I let it sit between firings and I'm starting to think that's the whole story. I've got three vessels sitting in the same kiln load right now, all dipped in the same bucket at the same time, and I'm genuinely nervous they'll come out as three different greens. which would be fine if I wasn't trying to sell them as a set. I know the ceramic answer is probably "just mix it fresh every time" but there's something I like about the unreliability, you know? like the glaze has its own mood that day. is that a cop-out or is that actually a thing people lean into?

Okay, the glazing station is basically a crime scene. I have three buckets with murky water, like, a week's worth of brushes in various stages of 'drying' (read: crusty), and there's this one specific shade of blue glaze that has somehow gotten onto EVERYTHING. My apron, my hands, the shelf, probably my hair. I swear, I try to be tidy, vale? But then I get lost in mixing colors and things just... happen. Anyone else's creative space look like a Jackson Pollock painting after a mud fight?

I am trying to do a simple glaze over a dried underpainting, a bit of a warm umber glaze to unify the shadows, and it is just…mud. It’s not thinning properly, it’s grabbing the surface in streaks, and it looks like I’ve smeared dirt on the canvas. I’ve tried thinning it with a bit more solvent, a bit more oil, but nothing makes it behave. This is the same medium I always use. Sometimes I think the paint itself has a will of its own, and today it’s decided to spite me.

Same copper pot and lemons, three times now. First attempt sat in the studio for a month looking like a poster. Second one I scraped down to the ground and walked away. This week I went back at it with just glazes, no direct paint except the highlights, and something finally clicked. The light on the rim of that pot is the best thing I've painted in years, and it's doing nothing but sitting in a window. Funny how the third try is the one that teaches you. Atelier training made me think the discipline was in the first pass. It's not. It's in being willing to kill the thing twice before it starts behaving. What's the longest anyone else has sat on a piece before it turned?

I spent the whole morning scraping back a glaze I was proud of last week. It was doing everything right - the light sat in it exactly the way I wanted, the undertone was singing. But it was too pretty. That's the thing nobody tells you about painting. Pretty is a trap. It stops you from going further because you're afraid to wreck it. So I wrecked it. Scraped it back to the dry underlayer with a palette knife and now the whole panel is this raw, honest state I have to rebuild from. And I'm not sorry. The first version would have been a nice painting. This one might be a real one. The panel is propped on the easel in this ugly in-between state right now and I keep glancing at it like it's a dare. It is, I suppose. Anyone else ever deliberately kill a passage that was working? Or am I the only one who does this to themselves.

So my grandmother has been keeping a shelf in her house for like three years now, every single piece I've given her. Some are genuinely terrible, first kiln disasters, a mug that came out looking like a sad potato. I always thought she just loved me too much to throw them away, which, yes. But today I was at her place and she pulls out this box and hands it to me. She'd been re-firing the ones that survived in her own little kiln, glazing them properly, fixing my botched bottoms. She said "you were too close to see which ones had something." And she's right, I only ever saw the cracks. There's one little face vessel from a year ago that I was honestly embarrassed by, and she's turned it into something I'd actually put in the shop. I'm not even mad she went behind my back with my own clay and glazes. She's 78 and she re-learned how to do a proper kiln sit just to fix my messes. Cried a bit on the bus home, not gonna lie. She's the only one who ever got it. Anyway I'm putting that face vessel up for sale this weekend. Honoring the grandmother glaze job. She deserves it.

i have like fifteen bisque-fired pieces just sitting on a shelf waiting for glaze and i keep adding to it instead of finishing them. started a new face vase this morning because i got distracted by a photo of my grandmother from the 80s and wanted to try the hair shape. now my shelf is fuller and my glazing queue is longer and i'm pretending i don't see it. the thing is i KNOW the glaze step is where pieces actually become themselves or die but there's something about the raw bisque that feels so perfect?? like this fragile little ghost of what it could be. i'll ruin half of them in the kiln anyway so maybe i'm just stalling the heartbreak lol. anyone else have a graveyard of unfinished work that you walk past every day? or is it just my adhd clay collection

She came to the studio today. I've been sending her photos for like two years but she's never actually touched any of it until now. She picked up this lopsided little vessel with a face pressed into the side, one I almost scrapped because the glaze crawled weird, and she just held it for a minute. Then she said the glaze looked like the old robes on the figures from her village in Extremadura, the ones they'd bring out for Christmas, all blotchy and wrong but full of something. I don't think she knows how much that meant. She's the one person who never made me feel stupid for doing this, even when I was living off tortilla de patatas and rage. I made her take a piece home, the one she liked. She tried to say no. I won.

ok so I spent like a month earlier this year obsessing over my instagram grid, scheduling posts, planning reels, the whole thing. had a notion doc and everything. and you know what happened? nothing. flat engagement, same followers, maybe one sale from it. then I had this week where I just said fuck it and made 40 tiny test tiles, different clay bodies, glazes I mixed myself, firing temps I'd never tried. just messing around, no end goal. I posted them ugly, in progress, some failed. just the real process, no polish. those posts outperformed everything I "planned" by a lot. like triple the saves, actual comments from other potters, and two commissions from people who saw the test tiles and wanted something in that glaze. I think the audience can smell when you're performing vs when you're actually doing the work. the planning was me trying to look like a serious business. the test tiles were me being a ceramicist. anyone else find that the stuff you don't overthink just lands better?

Joder, just opened the kiln and half my pieces are cracked. Some of these little faces look like they're screaming now, which is... on brand I guess? But still, so much work. I think the temperature was a little too high on the glaze firing. Back to the clay dust for me, I guess. At least the ones that survived look pretty cool, especially the ones with the blue glaze pooling in weird ways.

I said yes because I felt for him. Grief makes people weird and I get it. But he sent me ONE photo of this dog, taken from like 20 feet away, half in shadow, and the dog was black so it's basically just a shape with ears. I spent 12 hours on this painting working from that and reference photos of similar breeds and he picks it up today and goes "I dunno, his nose was warmer than that." His nose. Was warmer. Than that. I wanted to say bro you sent me a photo where I can't even tell if the dog has eyes. I wanted to say the nose is gray because the dog was black and standing in shade and that's literally what color it was in the ONLY IMAGE YOU GAVE ME. I wanted to say I painted this thing with more care than I've painted anything in months because I knew it mattered to you. But I just said "I can glaze some warmth in" and he left looking disappointed and now I'm sitting here furious at myself for taking the commission and furious at him for not understanding what he was asking for and furious at the photo and furious at the whole thing. Why do we do this. Why do we take jobs we know are going to make us feel like this. Because we need money? Because we want to be helpful? Because we're so desperate to prove we can do it that we ignore every red flag? Anyway. He's coming back Saturday. I'm gonna put some warm brown in the nose area and try not to scream.

My sixteen-year-old came into the studio yesterday without knocking, which she never does, and stood behind me for maybe a full minute while I was working. Then she said, "Maman, your paintings look less sad now." I wanted to be defensive at first. But she's right. I didn't even see it until she said it. For years my palette was all terre verte and raw umber and bone black, everything in that low grey northern light. I think I was painting the inside of my own head without realising it. The fallow years I had, the disappointment, it was all there in the colour, every time. Now there's more warmth. Not bright, not cheerful, just... alive. A little Naples yellow in the shadows. A red glaze where I would have left it dead. Kids see things. She doesn't know about the decade I lost, she only knows what she sees on the easel. And she saw it.

A gallery contacted me last year, really interested, came to the studio, said all the right things about the work. Then the email: "Would you consider working in acrylic instead of oil? It would ship easier and sell better." I said no. Maybe that was stupid. But oil is what I do, the way it moves, the drying time, the glazing, it's not a preference, it's the whole practice. I don't know how to say what I want to say in acrylic. Has a gallery ever asked you to change your materials or your style to fit them? Did you bend or did you walk? I'm curious where the line is for other people.

so my abuela sends me this photo out of nowhere today. just a pot i made like four months ago, one of those early ones where the rim dips too much on one side and the glaze crawled in a weird spot near the bottom. i almost didn't sell it bc i thought it was a failure, ended up giving it to her. and she's got it on her little shelf by the window, with a dried lavender bunch inside, and the light is hitting it just right so you can see the texture i was fighting with. she wrote "mi nieto el artista" underneath. joder. i sat on the studio floor for a minute. you know when something small just hits you right in the chest? i forget why i do this sometimes, between the cracked pieces and the kiln disasters and wondering if i should just get a normal job. then she sends me that.

ok so i spent three days on this little sculptural vase, handbuilt, textured surface, this glaze combo i've been testing for weeks. really proud of it. posted a reel of the process, lighting nice, good music, the whole thing. got maybe 300 views. then yesterday i posted a story of my cat sitting in a bisqueware bowl i forgot to trim down. phone footage, bad lighting, my thumb in the corner for half of it. 4.2k views. 14 dms asking if the bowl is for sale. i don't know what the game is anymore. i'm not even mad, just... confused. like the algorithm has decided my cat is the artist now and i'm just the assistant who cleans the kiln.

It was in the back of a cupboard in the studio, face to the wall. An interior of my daughter's room when she was five, the light coming in from the window in that particular way it does in Lyon in the late afternoon, the little bed with the quilt my mother made. I stopped because I'd gotten the perspective wrong on the far wall and didn't know how to fix it, and then I just... stopped. Got busy teaching. Got discouraged. You know. I pulled it out last week and looked at it with fresh eyes. The perspective was still wrong but I saw how to fix it in about twenty minutes. Twenty minutes, after ten years. I repainted that wall, softened some edges, glazed the light a little warmer. Now it's one of my favourite things I've ever done. I don't know what the lesson is exactly. Maybe that we give up too soon. Or maybe that time away is sometimes what you needed all along. My daughter is fifteen now and she looked at it and said "I remember that quilt." That was the whole conversation and it was enough.

I let them go for about three weeks. Three weeks of painting, rinsing, pretending that was enough. Then today I sat down with the turpentine and the soap and actually did it right, brush by brush, and I kept finding pigment that had been living in the ferrule since before Christmas. The whole afternoon gone. It's the most productive hour I'll spend this week and it produced nothing at all. I don't know why I resist it. I know exactly what it costs me. A dirty brush is a different tool, the color comes out muddy, you fight it and blame yourself. And still every single time I convince myself that one more rinse is fine. The good part: the big flat I use for glazing came up clean and it's like getting a new brush. I'm almost tempted to leave them all perfect and not paint tomorrow. Almost.

There was a still life I nearly scrapped. Peaches and a silver pot, nothing special, but the light on the base of the pot was doing something I couldn't get right for weeks. I had it on the easel so long I started to hate it. I was one pass of the palette knife away from wiping the whole thing down. Then one afternoon I just stopped fighting it and put a last thin glaze on, and suddenly the light was there. Not perfect, but there. I signed it, varnished it, put it in a corner. A collector from the Netherlands bought it yesterday. Asked me if I could do more in that same palette. And I keep thinking about how close it came to never existing, how many paintings die in that window between almost and done. That's the real lesson, I think. The finish is where the painting decides if it gets to be a painting.

so i had this meeting with a gallery last year, small one in madrid, thought it'd be a good fit. i bring my best pieces, these wonky vessels with little faces peeking out of the glaze, my favorite ones. and the guy looks at them for a minute and goes "this is very... fun. we're looking for something more serious." too fun!!! like that's a bad thing. i still think about it. what's the weirdest reason a gallery gave for passing on your work? the one that made you go "wait what"

I had a moment yesterday in the studio that I don't know how to name. The painting I'd been working on for three months, I sat down in front of it and there was nothing left to do. No scrape, no glaze, no thin wash over a passage that bothered me. Just stillness. I sat there for maybe twenty minutes and then I packed my brushes and left at three in the afternoon. This doesn't happen often. Most paintings I stop out of exhaustion or a deadline or because I've overworked them into a corner. But this one just closed itself. Like a door clicking shut. I walked home through the park and felt nothing like triumph. More like a kind of hollow quiet. As if the painting had taken something with it that I'd been carrying. My wife asked if I was sick. I said no, the painting is finished. She said ah, and that was the right answer. Tomorrow I'll have to look at it again and see if it's really true. But for now I'm still in that quiet.