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I set up at the little fall fair in town Saturday, which is mostly me and a woman selling goat milk soap and one guy with driftwood lamps. Sold two small ones, so a good day. But I hung everything together for the first time and standing back I could see that every single painting has the exact same green in it. That sap green straight from the tube. The tree line in the field piece, the pears in the still life, the grass, all the same note. Nobody said anything and honestly why would they, but now it's all I can see. I know the answer is mixing your own greens and I know I got lazy because it's a color that works and I have maybe two hours at night. But I don't know how to get out of it without making mud. Every time I try to mix a green from scratch it goes either olive drab or that fake minty blue-green that looks like toothpaste. Want to know the actual fix. Not a video. Like how many greens do you actually keep in rotation, and do you build them on the palette first or just mix as you paint. Also if anyone wants to tell me the goat soap lady's lavender bar is worth nine dollars, it is.

there's a specific green in my head that i've been chasing since like march. like a vinegar green, sort of sour, slightly dirty. cadmium yellow light + phthalo + a touch of raw umber got me close enough that i stopped noticing the difference, which honestly might be the goal and might also be cope. the thing that bugs me is that i know it's just sap green territory. i could've walked into the store and paid eleven dollars and had it in nine minutes. but every time i go to buy it my brain goes "no you need to earn it" and then i lose an afternoon. i think i've made peace with the fact that mixing IS the hobby and painting is what i do with the leftovers. also the leftover jar is now almost full of a green nobody asked for and i can't throw it out because that feels like admitting something.

I have been making mosaic 20 years and today I mixed the grout green. On purpose. It is a small panel of olive branches, 40 by 60, for a woman who lost her husband last spring and asked for something for her kitchen, nothing sad, she said, just something alive. I set the tesserae two weeks ago. Grey grout would have been correct. Grey grout is always correct, it lets the stone speak, I have said this to students like a prayer. But the olives are green smalti and the leaves are green and the background is a warm off white, and every time I looked at it I saw a cold grid pulled over the whole thing. So I sat with a bit of pigment and a yogurt cup for an hour like an idiot, testing on scrap, and then I grouted the real panel green. It looks like light coming through a canopy. I keep going into the studio just to look at it sideways. I have spent half my life learning the rules of this craft from people who were dead before I was born, and the craft is patient, it will wait for you to be ready. Today it felt like the waiting paid out. Twenty years to do a thing wrong on purpose. She collects it Friday. I have not told her. I am a little afraid she wanted grey.

Four days on a single Cercis siliquastrum pod. Scarlet runner beans, actually the pod of the Judas tree, but that's the specimen. It's a decent piece technically. The drawing is right, the shadow side reads, the paper is behaving. And the green is dead. Not muddy, not too cool or too warm, just dead, the way a photograph of a leaf is dead. I've tried the obvious corrections. Cooled it with a touch of phthalo, warmed it back with transparent yellow, dropped the value a step. All it did was move the corpse around. My suspicion is that I've been matching the local colour too faithfully and left out the thing that made me want to paint it, which was the way the light came through the thinner edge of the pod this morning, almost yellow, and the way the surface picked up a grey bloom over the top of it. Two different greens fighting, essentially. What I've painted is one green averaged out. I've done this before and I know the answer is usually to choose. But I keep reaching for the brush to fix the colour rather than to state the light, and I'm four days in and reluctant to lift it back to the paper. For anyone who works wet-in-wet on a large single form: do you build the two temperatures in from the start, or lay a proper base and then come over it? I've always done the latter and I'm beginning to wonder whether that's the whole problem with this one.

Every landscape I do ends up with at least one patch of green that looks like swamp sludge. I've been blaming cheap paint, but I was mixing ultramarine with yellow and just adding more yellow when it got ugly, like I could shovel my way out of it. Tonight I actually tried mixing in a touch of the burnt sienna I use for everything else and it just... worked. The green sits better and reads as distance instead of mossy soup. Twenty years of painting and I still do dumb things out of habit until someone says the obvious thing out loud. Anyway, try a pinch of your brown before you buy another tube of green. Wish someone had told me that in 2019.

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.

Today I ground my own green from the neem tree behind the house. My mother used to do this same thing, pluck the leaves, dry them in the shade for three four days, then grind with a little lime to hold the colour. The shade it gives is not bright, not like the market green from a tube. It is dull, dusty, like the underside of a leaf. But when you put it on the paper next to the vermilion it wakes up somehow. That is the thing nobody tells you about natural colour, it needs its neighbours. Alone it looks dead. Put it beside the red, beside the lampblack, and it starts to talk. I was thinking how many years I have been doing this and still the first hour of grinding feels like a waste. Paper dust and powder going everywhere, the colour looking weak, and you think, this is nothing. Then you mix it and you remember. Every single time the same doubt. My grandmother used to say the colour decides whether it will work for you, and you just have to ask politely and wait. She was right, I think. Maybe that is also the whole lesson of this art. You cannot rush the leaf.🙏

For thirty years I have been buying my green pigment from the same man in Darbhanga. He passed away last month. His son is there but the colour is not the same, too bright, like a plastic toy. So this morning I went out myself and picked neem leaves and some others I know, dried them in the sun, ground them with a little copper on the stone. Took me three hours to get a shade I would call right. My hands are green. My daughter was laughing at me. But when I put it on the paper it is the colour of the peacock's neck the way it should be, not that chemical thing. I know most people will just buy a tube. But this art was never about convenience. The colour has a memory when you make it yourself.

About four kilos of the stuff, in a canvas bag under the trestle. It came out of a hotel on Egnatia that got gutted years ago, I talked the foreman into letting me take the floor tiles before the skip arrived. Half of it is a green nobody would choose, that 1970s hospital green, and the pieces are too big and irregular to set nicely without recutting every one. I have used maybe a dozen of them in eight years. Every so often I tip the bag out on the floor and look at it for twenty minutes and put it back. My friend Eleni says throw it, and she is right in the practical sense, but the green is not a colour you can buy. It is a bad green and it is the only place in the world it exists now. Started a piece last week where I finally cut into a proper chunk of it. The dust smelled like a wet wall. Two days later it is still the wrong colour in the composition, but cutting it felt good, so it stays for now. Anyone else hoarding a material they know they will probably never finish using?

They arrived Tuesday, a Sennelier half stick set of greens. Thirty of them, all the way from the cold dark pine ones to a yellow green that is almost acid, and I keep opening the box and closing it again. The thing nobody tells you about pastel is that half the job is destroying it. You can't paint carefully with it, you have to break the sticks and grind them into the paper with your thumb, and every time I start a green I have this moment where I think, this one will be the muddy one, and then I do it anyway and it is muddy. I have a face I have been working on for three weeks. Toned grey paper, warm skin, and there is a shadow under the jaw that needs to be green or it goes dead. That is the whole reason I bought them. I know it, I have known it since the first week, and I still sat there tonight doing the ear again instead, which was already fine. It's such a stupid thing to be afraid of. Thirty sticks of pigment, and they cost more than my first box of everything. I'll ruin some of them and that's what they're for. Maybe tomorrow. Tomorrow I'm doing the jaw.

A neighbour across the street is gutting her bathroom and she called me before the skip arrived, so now I have four crates of 1980s seafoam green tile in my hallway. Glazed, chipped on the edges, and I have no idea what it is for yet. My partner in crime in these things says I am a hoarder with a title. Maybe. But I know what this tile is, it is the same colour as half the bathrooms in this city and it will not be made again. In thirty years there will be nothing left of it except in photographs. I have been turning over the idea of a floor piece with it, something where the chipped edges are part of the pattern and not a defect. It might be ugly. I will find out in about six weeks. Anyone else work with material they rescued and then had to justify keeping?

Spent three weeks on a tall handbuilt vessel, the neck leaning like it's listening to something. Textured with a wooden rib until my arm ached. Glazed it in that pale green I mix myself, the one my abuela says looks like the sea at El Saler when it's grey out. She named the piece, actually. Called it "la que escucha." The one that listens. Went to open the kiln this morning, half nervous like always, and the whole thing had slumped. Not cracked, not exploded. Just folded over on itself like it got tired of standing. Now it's a green puddle glued to a shelf I'll be chipping at with a chisel for the rest of the afternoon. The worst part is I know what I did wrong. Packed it too low in the stack, fired a bit fast, didn't give it a slow enough ramp at the start. Rookie stuff. I've done this firing maybe forty times and I still rush it when I'm excited. Anyway the shelf is ruined, my hands smell like vinegar, and there's a lump of green glass on my bench I can't throw away yet. Going to go sit outside with a coffee and pretend I'm fine about it.

Someone pulled out a 1960s bathroom three streets from me and I said yes to the tile before I saw it. Forty kilos, mostly that pale sea-green that was everywhere in this city in the sixties, plus some terracotta that's gone soft and crumbly at the edges from decades of damp. The good half cuts like a dream. Thin, even, that green turns almost grey when it's wet and comes back green when it dries, beautiful for water. The bad half is dust. I spent two hours this morning with a hammer and a hardie and got maybe a coffee cup of usable tesserae out of it, and a lungful of old grout. My problem is I can't throw it out. It came off a wall in my own neighbourhood. Somebody's grandmother picked that colour. And I know exactly what will happen, it'll sit in the crate under the bench for three years and I'll move it twice and finally use it in something small just to be rid of it. Anyway. That's the state of the studio today. Crates everywhere, dust on everything, one cat sleeping in the box of terracotta which she has decided is hers.

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?

ok so I quit the cafe job eight months ago and I'm supposed to be on a budget and last week I walked into the art store for ONE tube of titanium white and walked out with six tubes of gouache because they had that MaimeriBlu display up and the swatches were wet and I have no self control when paint is wet on paper. anyway. the one that's wrecking me is this weird dull green, kind of a swamp olive, and I've been mixing that exact green for MONTHS with pthalo and yellow ochre and never quite getting it, always too bright or too chalky, and now it's just THERE. in the tube. premixed. sitting on my palette like an insult. I've repainted the same corner of my window (the part where the light hits the sill around 4pm, there's a chip in the paint there and I keep painting the chip) probably eleven times this week. eleven. and it's closer than it's ever been and I want to cry a little bit about a green. the money thing is genuinely scary though. I did the math on what I actually spend on pigment versus what my partner spends on groceries and I put the receipt in a drawer face down which is a real coping strategy I have. does anyone else have a color that they finally just bought premixed after years of pretending they could mix it themselves, or am I the only one lying to myself about my own palette

ok so this is the thing that's been eating me all week and I need to say it somewhere. My cousin asked if I'd do a watercolor for her save-the-dates. Not a print, an ORIGINAL, one painting, and then she'd scan it and print however many she wanted. I said 40 dollars. Because she's family, because I panic-quote family, because I've been doing that since I was 19 and did my uncle's anniversary piece for a bottle of wine. It took me nine hours. TWO full evenings of layering washes so the olive branches didn't go muddy, plus the gouache accents on the lettering, plus two rounds of "can you make the green less green." Nine hours. Forty dollars. That's a bit under four and a half an hour, which, cool, great. And THEN. She posted it on facebook and told everyone her cousin does commissions "super cheap." And now my aunt is asking for one, and a friend of hers is asking for one, and I can feel the whole thing calcifying into my actual reputation. Like I've made myself into the discount. I set a number and now the number is me. The worst part is I can't even be mad at her, she was being sweet about it. I'm mad at myself. I have a real rate now, 38 an hour for commissions with a deposit up front, and I completely ignored it the second someone in my family asked. My partner says I need a flat number I say out loud instead of "oh whatever's fair" and I know they're right and I hate it. Anyway I'm painting the same window again this week because it doesn't ask me for a discount. Has anyone actually fixed this or do you just outlive it.

I've been chasing a pale celadon green for six weeks now, trying to get it to sit correctly on a Ranunculus study I'm finishing. The color kept blooming on me, spreading into the veins of the petal like it had opinions of its own. I tried different paper, different wetness, different layering order. Last night I finally worked out that it wasn't the pigment at all, it was my water. Too much residual mineral in my jar. I switched to distilled and it behaved like a completely different paint. Thirty years in and I'm still surprised when the answer to a stubborn painting is something that boring and basic. The sheet is done now, properly done, and the pale green sits exactly where I put it. It's a tiny victory but it's mine and I'll take it.

I've been painting the same rue stem for eleven days and I've only just got the underside of one leaf right. Rue is a difficult plant to love. The leaves are a blue-green that behaves nothing like a blue-green should, and the oil glands are translucent dots you can see straight through, which means every layer of wash underneath has to be correct before you even think about the top one. Get it wrong and the dots read as blemishes rather than glands. I have scraped and repainted that single leaf four times. The paper is beginning to show it. I keep a sheet of studies alongside the finished piece and the studies are, frankly, more interesting than anything I've produced this month. Eleven days of the same plant and the only thing I've learned for certain is that I was rushing the shadow under the midrib. Which I knew. I've taught it. I've said it out loud to students in that slightly smug way one does. There's a point somewhere past the tenth hour where accuracy stops being a technique and starts being a kind of attention, and I don't think it can be hurried into. I used to believe I could get there faster with better preparation. Better paper, better brushes, a stricter drawing. I have all of those now and it still takes eleven days. The stem itself is done, for what it's worth. It's the leaves that are the trouble.

My granddaughter ordered me labels. Woven ones, my name and the year, "Gloria Mae" on a little folded tag. I've been sewing near about sixty one years, since I was seven on my grandmother's porch, and I have never once signed a quilt. She said folks need to know whose hands it was. So this morning I sat down with a small quilt top I made out of my mother's church dresses, three of them, the navy and the gray and that green she wore every Easter until she couldn't anymore. I sewed the label on the back corner, down in the ditch so you'd have to look for it. Took me four tries to get it on straight. My hands don't do small work like they did. Then I just sat there with it in my lap a while. It felt like signing something I didn't write, if that makes any sense. My grandmother never signed hers either. Nobody asked her to. And I'm glad somebody wants to know, I truly am. But I kept thinking, baby it's already got her in it. The green's right there. I left it on. Went and made coffee. Still don't know if it's staying.

ok so I have this little porcelain palette that I've had since my first year of uni and the stains on it are basically a fossil record of every bad decision I've ever made with paint. There's this one spot where I mixed a truly foul muddy green during a very bad week and no amount of scrubbing has ever lifted it. I used to be so careful with it, like a ritual. Now I just look at it and go "ah yes, there's the week my scholarship almost fell through" and keep painting. also my partner gifted me a proper glass palette for christmas and it's sitting in the drawer untouched because I cannot bring myself to retire the stained one. is that weird?? like I know it's just an object but it's been through the whole thing with me you know. the good paintings AND the ones I had to turn face-down in the drying rack. am I the only one who forms attachments to tools like this. I still use the same brush for my greens specifically. that one brush. for five years. I think if it snapped I'd genuinely mourn.