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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.

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'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.

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.

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 😭

i've been staring at this one collage for six months convinced it was dead. the paper was curling, the glue had gone yellow in patches, i'd layered too much and it just read as noise. nearly threw it out twice. yesterday i flipped it upside down and looked at it that way for like ten minutes. i don't know why that changes things but it does. turned it back and suddenly i could see what it was supposed to be. one piece of tape removed, one charcoal line added, and it just clicked. it's not going in any gallery. nobody will ever see it. but i slept better last night than i have in weeks. sometimes the win is just the thing stops fighting you.

woke up at 6am to check on a piece i've been building for like two weeks. spent all yesterday afternoon wet-mounting the final layer onto a board. did everything right, ph-neutral glue, even pressure, let it cure slow. came in this morning and there's this fucking ripple running right through the middle where the humidity changed overnight. not even a dramatic change, just a normal spring shift. i know how to fix it i just don't want to. i want to be done with this piece. it was already fighting me the whole way. the worst part is nobody who sees it framed will notice. but i'll know. and i'll look at it every time and think about the night it rained and my paper curled like a dying bug.

After twenty-some years of pretending I preferred the "proper" surface, I bought a roll of cotton duck last week and I'm embarrassed how much better I feel. The tooth is different, the absorbency, the way the first thin wash sinks in instead of skating. I was fighting my own surface for years because someone told me linen was what serious painters use. I stretched it myself, three coats of rabbit skin glue, two of oil primer sanded between each. The same preparation I've always done. But the fabric underneath changes everything. I don't know who needed to hear this but if you hate your surface, change it. The materials police are not coming for you.

Not a metaphor. I mean actually glued. Cyanoacrylate, which is of course the one that sets before you can blink. Thumb, index finger, and a good solid square of tabletop bonded together like we were meant to be. I sat there for maybe forty seconds just looking at it. Not panicking. Just thinking, alright, this is where I am now. This is the situation. I have committed to this table in a way I hadn't planned. The acetone was three meters away in the other room. I could have rocked and reached. Instead I just sat. Sometimes you make a decision and the decision is: wait. Eventually I peeled myself off. Left a good bit of skin behind. The table doesn't seem to mind. I mention this only because so much of the talk about studio practice is about discipline and flow states and intention. And sometimes it's just, you glue yourself to your own table and you sit there like an idiot for a minute because that's what the moment requires.

So I'm at this group show, standing maybe a meter from a piece of mine, and this guy walks up to the person next to him and starts explaining how mosaic is done. "They take the stones, see, and they grind them down to fit, and then they glue them onto a backing, it's very time-consuming." He's right next to me. I'm wearing the same jacket I was wearing when I was cutting that smalti at 11pm two nights before. Still have grout under my nails. And he's explaining it to someone like I'm not there, like the person who made it couldn't possibly be in the room. I said "it's actually easier than it looks" and walked away. Couldn't decide if I wanted to laugh or toss a handful of tesserae at his head. So I just went and found the wine. Does this happen to anyone else or is there a sign on my forehead that says "please explain my own job to me"?

I spent this morning walking around a space I was offered for a show in April. Big clean white box. Good light. Totally dead to me. Couldn't feel a thing. I need a room that already smells like something. Dust, damp, machine oil, old wood, whatever. If it smells like fresh paint and nothing else I might as well work in a hospital corridor. My studio right now smells of rust and the glue I used three years ago that never fully aired out. That's what gets me going. I turned the white box down. Found an old engine hall instead. Smells like grease and 1987. I can work there.

Six canvases. Six. I thought I was saving time, buying them already stretched by people who supposedly know what they're doing. Every single one has a little depression right in the middle, like someone pressed a fist into it before the glue dried. I sized them anyway, hoping it would tighten up. It didn't. Now I've got to either strip them and re-stretch myself or paint around a soft spot for the next three months. I know the answer is "do it yourself." I do. But sometimes you just want to buy a thing and have it be the thing you bought, non? I'm too old to be surprised by this and yet here I am, surprised.

Started three canvases this week and killed all three by Thursday. Overworked, muddy, the cold wax turning to glue because I wouldn't stop pushing. You know that feeling when you can feel yourself making it worse and you keep going anyway. This morning I scraped one of them down to the linen with a palette knife. Just a ghost of yellow ochre left in the weave. I thought, good, now it's a fresh surface and I've got nothing. Sat with it for an hour. Then I took a tube of Prussian blue and a rag and just wiped it across, thin, no plan, no composition. Let it dry forty minutes. Came back and put one mark on it, a single stroke, cadmium orange, right through the middle. Stood there. That was it. That was the whole painting. It's small. 60 x 80. But it has something the other three didn't have. It knows when to stop. I don't learn that lesson, I relearn it every time.

just realized I've been letting my good sable brushes dry with the ferrule facing down this whole time. like ten years. water runs into the glue, wood swells, hairs start splaying. I've been blaming the cheap paint. my grandfather did the same thing with his chisels, left them in a coffee can of water overnight. I used to laugh at him for it. now I'm him. switched to a drying rack today, feels like a betrayal of every brush I've already destroyed. anyway if you're the type who hides your brushes from yourself so you don't have to admit you treat them badly, this is your sign.