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There's a glue stick that lives on top of the radiator in my studio. It's been there three winters now. I put it there one cold day to soften the adhesive and just never moved it back. Now it's part of the routine. I check it like a plant. If the heating's been on all night it's perfect, peels back smooth. If the room's cold it fights me and I get angry at a glue stick like it's a personal failing. My landlord is coming Thursday to look at a window and I'm honestly not sure how to explain the glue stick situation. It's not even a good glue stick. It's a cheap one from the hardware store with a red cap. I could buy a better one and I won't because the red cap has become load-bearing in my process somehow. Anyway the window's drafty so maybe I'll finally have to move it. Starting to think I should just accept that and mourn quietly.

Working on this collage for a group show in may and it just sat there for two weeks. Technically fine but completely inert. Kept thinking it was the composition, or the color balance, or I'd picked the wrong source material. Changed the glue. That was it. I was using this tacky roll-on adhesive and it left this weird slightly glossy residue on the paper that was killing the matte surface. Switched to a paste I've had forever and suddenly the paper sits right and the whole thing breathes. Never even thought about glue as a factor in how something reads. So dumb. But also kind of good to remember that sometimes the problem isn't the big choices, it's the material thing you stopped noticing.

She's fifteen, she knows. It was sitting there, she needed something "precise," and now there is a crust of PVA halfway up the belly of a Raphael 8404 I have had since my atelier years. I've been soaking it for two days. It is not coming back. The point is gone and the hairs have splayed out like a broom. The thing is I can't even shout properly because I remember being fifteen and doing exactly this to my father's things, and also because she was proud of the project, and also because a brush is a brush. But it is not only a brush. You break in a good brush over years. It learns your hand. That one knew mine. She offered me her pocket money. I said no and then went and sat in the studio for a while feeling stupid about how much it bothered me. Anyway. It's in the jar with the ruined ones now, the graveyard jar. If anyone has a trick for reviving a sable that has been abused with glue I will hear it, but I suspect I am just going to buy a new one and be sad about it for a week.

somebody asked me last week why i don't do reels of the "process" and i had to actually stop and think about it because i do film things, just not the pretty parts. no sweeping paint strokes or me looking contemplative at a window. the clip that got the most engagement this year was me picking dried glue off my fingers for like forty seconds while i talked about a piece that almost got thrown in the trash. it wasn't even a good angle. i think the algorithm wants the mess but everyone keeps serving it the moodboard version. the stuff that reads real is the stuff you'd never put in a portfolio.

I glue something down most mornings before I'm properly awake. yesterday it was a strip of wallpaper backing I'd peeled off in a house two streets over, the kind with the little blue flowers that went out of print in about 1974. still smells faintly of the wall it came off. I use bookbinder's paste, the kind you mix yourself, and it goes off in the pot in about 40 minutes. that's the whole clock. no timer, no playlist, I just work until the paste starts to turn and then I stop for the day whether the piece is anywhere or not. I used to think this was a stupid way to run a practice. apparently not. the paste has decided more of my work than I have. it's going sour right now, actually. so that's the morning done.

I've been sizing panels with the same batch of RSG for two years, same granules, same pot, same process. This morning I open the jar and it hit me, that exact sweet-sour ammonia smell of a horse stable I mucked out one summer when I was fifteen. Can't use it now. Sent myself right back to that concrete floor and the pitchfork and the rain coming in through the roof. I know old glue degrades. But it didn't change texture or tack. Just the smell flipped a switch and now I can't un-smell it. Anyone had a material suddenly become unusable for a reason that has nothing to do with how it performs?

third tube this month. they're all fine for like a day then whatever I stuck down just lifts off again. this one says "professional strength" on the side so maybe I'm the problem. got a pile of torn paper and a photograph of my grandmother's kitchen that I've been trying to anchor to a board for a week. it's just floating there. she'd probably laugh. she never threw anything away either, just kept taping it back together. what actually works for paper to wood without turning into a crinkly mess? I've tried mod podge, tacky glue, some spray thing that smelled like death. all disappointing.

I spent yesterday evening peeling a piece of 1950s bookplate off a backing board and it just tore. Not a clean lift, the whole inner corner shredded. My own mistake, wrong adhesive when I mounted it two years ago, and now the paper is gone with it. At conservation we'd call it a lesson in reversibility. At home it's just me being annoyed at myself. There's a strange thing though. That torn corner, that little loss, it's actually the most alive part of the collage now. The rest is too neat. I've been staring at it all morning trying to decide if I'm going to fix it or leave it as the best piece of the whole thing.

I keep a small pot of wheat starch paste going. Not the same batch, obviously, but the same pot, same jar, same setting on the hotplate, and I realised this week it has outlasted two of the jobs I've had since I bought it. It sits at about 60 degrees and never quite simmers. If it simmers it goes stringy and then it's useless for thin paper, so I watch it the way other people watch a kettle. The conservation studio uses a proper paste, cooked and sieved and chilled, and I bring some home sometimes. It's better paste. But the pot at home is what I actually work with, and I've started to think the difference is not the paste at all, it's the fact that I know exactly how it behaves at 60 degrees and my hands have stopped needing to check. Anyway. I had a sheet of 1940s Swedish schoolbook paper go translucent on me because I was too generous with it. It's drying under weight now. I'll know tomorrow whether I've ruined it.

This morning I made fresh gum from tamarind seeds for binding the colours. Soaking, peeling the thin brown skin, grinding the white kernel into paste. My mother used to do this and her mother before. When I was small I would sit and watch her, the slow grinding stone, the patience. Now my own hands do it and I think: this is the same gesture, passing down. We have readymade binder available in the market now, many artists use it. But for me the natural gum feels like part of the painting itself. The colour holds different. More alive maybe. Or maybe just I am old fashioned. 🙂 The kitchen smelled slightly sour this morning from the soaking. My wife said "again you are doing this Ramesh, the vessels will all get stained." But she knows. She left the mortar out for me. Anyone else here still make their own materials? Or am I the only one who cannot let go of these old ways.

ten years that thing held onto. i hate it. it's always half-clogged, spitting stringy bits everywhere, burns on my fingers i can't even trace back to specific moments. but it was my brother's so i kept it like a shrine or something, which is dumb because he barely used it either. new one is twenty bucks and heats up in like a minute. i used it today on a piece that's been sitting half-finished for months and it went so smooth i almost didn't trust it. still weird though. feels like i retired a little piece of him i didn't want to let go of. but the work's better for it.

So I ran out of gesso mid-priming a canvas tonight and instead of just going to bed like a normal person I read about making your own with rabbit skin glue and whiting. Which obviously I'm not doing because the thought of rendering animal glue in my kitchen makes me a little queasy AND my 8 year old would absolutely try to eat it. But I did mix some acrylic medium with plaster of Paris to see what happens and now there's a weird little test square drying on cardboard that I'll report back on like it matters. It probably won't be anything, but honestly the kitchen-table science is half the fun of this hobby. I've ruined two good wooden spoons and my husband has stopped asking questions. Anyone else ever actually bothered with homemade grounds or do we all just buy the tub?

The glue is still tacky in places. Someone's dead grandmother's floral dining room. I can see the ghost of the table it was behind, a lighter rectangle where the sun never hit. I'm not even sure what I'll do with it yet. Probably something with the layers. Pull it apart, let the backing show through. But right now it's sitting rolled in the corner of my studio and I have to step around it and I keep sneezing. Nobody tells you how much of this life is just hauling things. Finding them, moving them, storing them, figuring out why they matter to you when they still smell like someone else's house. The making part is almost smaller than the carrying.

A woman bought one of the small ones in November, 24x30, six pieces of torn paper and a lot of nothing. I asked 3,200 kronor. She paid without blinking. That is the part that stays with me. Not that she paid it. That it took her four seconds. I priced it by counting hours, which is the wrong way to price anything I make, because the hours are mostly me standing at the window deciding not to glue something down. Comes to maybe 700 an hour if I only count the cutting. If I count the thinking it is a joke. So now I have a number that works and I am afraid of it. Not afraid to say it again, afraid that it was luck, that the next person will look at the same size and hear the number and go quiet. And I have already caught myself, twice, drafting a lower figure for a piece that is actually harder. A 40x50 with hand-torn edges from a 1940s Swedish reader. I sat with the email open for an hour. The conservation work pays by the hour and nobody argues about it. Paper is paper. The art is the only thing I do where the price has to come out of me. Anyway. I raised the small ones to 3,600 this month. Nothing has sold since. I am not sorry yet but it has only been three weeks.

For two years I photographed every finished piece on the white wall with the good light and the grey card, because that is what you are told to do. Clean, neutral, correct. Then in October I was packing a piece for a group show in Malmö and took a quick phone photo of it lying on the table next to the scalpel and the glue pot and half a torn book page. Sent it to the gallery contact. She wrote back asking if she could use that one instead. Since then I have not shot on the wall once. Just the table, the window light from the left, whatever is genuinely lying around. Last month a small piece sold through Instagram in about four hours after a table photo. The wall version of the same piece had sat there for six weeks. I am not sure what the lesson is. Maybe that people are buying the studio, not the object. Maybe the wall photo looks like an advert and the table looks like a person. Or maybe it is just that the table one is slightly out of focus and something in that reads as true. I do not fully trust my own explanation. The annoying part is that it is less work. I used to spend an hour on the wall setup. Now it takes ninety seconds and does better.

bought a box of photos at an estate sale in some suburb off the highway, 40 bucks for maybe 200 of them, mostly blurry birthday parties. one has a note on the back in ballpoint, "lake, aug, don't forget the sandwiches." been sitting at the light table with a scalpel trying to lift that paper off without taking the emulsion with it. three hours. got about a half inch. the thing is i don't even know what i'm going to do with it yet. i just know i can't put it in the piece with the ink still on it, it'd read as a prop. and i can't scan and reprint it, that feels like lying. so i'm sitting here picking at paper like it's a scab. anyway the light table's been on since 8 and my back is wrecked and i'll probably just glue it down as is tomorrow.

Old bristle filbert, had it since 2016. The ferrule just gave up mid-stroke and the head flew off and hit the wall. I stared at it on the floor for a solid minute and then I just... laughed. It's weird how attached I get to specific tools. Like this brush had the exact right amount of fray and spring for pushing paint around a face. I know exactly what I'm going to replace it with and it's not going to be the same for months. Part of me is like, good. New tool, new energy. Stop relying on the same old crutch. Part of me wants to glue it back together and pretend it's fine. Anyone else get weirdly emotional about a dumb brush or is that just me being dramatic 😭

Pulled out a batch of test pieces from last winter, the ones where the paper buckled or the wash went muddy, and honestly. They're better than the finished stuff on the wall. There's one where the charcoal went down over wet glue and feathered out into this grey bloom, and I've been trying to reproduce it for 2 months with no luck. The accident knew something I didn't. Anyway. Stopped fighting it and started an actual pile, no fixing, just keeping them. Feels like cheating a little.

got the same email everyone gets. gallery "adores" the piece, three sentences of lovely, then: would I consider a version that fits a smaller wall. so you mean a different piece. you mean the one you like but cheaper. the thing is 19 by 24 and half of it is a torn photograph of my grandfather's shed that I only have one copy of. I can't scale that. it's not a design I can resize, it's a specific piece of paper with a specific stain on it. anyway I was mid-glue when it came in so now the bottom right corner has a wrinkle in it that I'll either fix or decide is "intentional" by tomorrow morning. and I know the correct answer is to just say no and move on. I know that. I'll probably say yes and hate myself for two weeks, which is a thing I'm aware of and do anyway.

My studio is basically a stack of things I've kept because the paper was good. A 1937 Swedish school atlas, a box of receipt stubs from a locksmith in Mölndal who closed in the eighties, a lot of endpapers from books too far gone to save at the conservation studio. Today I was working on a small piece, maybe 20 by 25 cm, mostly empty. I had a scrap of what I thought was a nice aged ledger paper pinned to the wall for two weeks, waiting for the right spot. Turned it over. It's the back of an envelope. Someone's address in pencil, half rubbed out. The good side is the envelope interior, which has a waxy coating, and it will not take paste. It just sits there on top of the glue like it's refusing. Two weeks of looking at it. I should have checked in the first minute. I keep things because the paper is good and then I don't look at the back, because looking at the back is admitting I might have been fooled by the front. I've kept it anyway. It's on the wall, wrong side out now. I don't have a plan for it.