Search

I spent thirteen days building up a surface. Cold wax and oil, maybe nine layers, a grey-green that had been getting somewhere around the middle of last week. Then Monday it went heavy and dead, the way it does when I have kept adding instead of stopping. So this morning I took the palette knife and scraped the whole thing back to the ground. Two by two meters. It took an hour. The ground was still there underneath, patient, the way it always is. What I keep noticing: the scraped-back version has something the worked version never had. The ghost of all those layers is in it. I know this. Every painter knows this. And still I build it up past the point again and again, because stopping early feels like giving up and the market wants a finished object and I want to be a person who finishes things. The part I actually want to ask about. Do you have a rule for when a surface is done with you? Not done, done with you. I used to think I could feel it. Lately I think I only feel it two days too late, after I have already ruined the good part.

Not on purpose. I left the little glass dish there Saturday after cleaning brushes, forgot it, and found it Monday soft as butter, almost dripping off the palette knife. Ground it warm and it went onto the canvas differently than the tube ever does. Covers three times faster, and the transparency, voilà, that's the thing I've been chasing for a month on this drapery and couldn't get with medium. So now I'm warming pigment on a radiator like an idiot. I have a small ceramic bowl, I put the lumps in it in the morning, and by two o'clock it's workable. The tube stuff seems dead to me this week. I keep a thermometer near the window because the studio drops to 15 in the morning and I want to know when I've crossed into the good range. Downside: I left one batch too long Thursday, came back and it had skinned. Forty grams gone. My daughter asked why the studio smells like a bakery and honestly I don't know what to tell her. Somebody here must grind their own with a muller. Do you warm the slab or just accept it cold? I'm half a step from buying a heating pad for this and I'd rather hear I'm not the only one before I do.

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.🙏

I bought a little slab and muller during my atelier years because the old masters did it and I was insufferable. Ground up some vermilion from pigment powder. It's beautiful, obviously, that weight, that warmth, nothing else like it. But the powder gets everywhere. You breathe it. You're dusted in it. And then you find out it's mercury sulfide and you've been breathing mercury all afternoon. I still have the slab. I use it maybe once a year for a specific warm note I can't mix. The rest of the time I buy my paint from a block of cobalts and earths like a normal person and try not to romanticise the past too much. Some things were better left to the apprentices.

I've got a Millermatic that's older than my son. Someone asks me why I don't upgrade, I say because it starts. That's the whole reason. It starts, it feeds wire smooth, and I know what it's going to do at the end of a seam. New machines don't teach you anything, they just hide your mistakes better. Real reason I'm typing this: my ground clamp has a bad spring. Been bad for two years. I've been wrapping a C-clamp on it and telling myself I'll order a new one. Yesterday it slipped mid-pass on a 3/8 plate and I chased the arc across the whole joint, made a mess I had to grind out and redo. Two hours gone for a part that costs nine dollars. Ordered the clamp this morning. Took me three minutes. Two years of C-clamps to avoid three minutes. I do this with everything. The respirator I complain about. The hose that's got a kink I work around. There's a whole list of small fixes I've been outsmarting instead of just doing. My old man was the same way, ran a table saw with the guard off for thirty years and called it skill. I welded the new clamp on this afternoon. Ugly bead, worked fine.

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.

Cut into a piece this morning and found a weld from last week that I'd decided was good enough. It wasn't. Porosity all through it. So I spent two hours gouging it back out with the grinder when I could have spent ten minutes doing it right the first time. I know better. That's the annoying part. I looked at it Tuesday, told myself it would hold, and moved on because I wanted to get to the top section. My old boss used to say the piece remembers everything you did to it. He wasn't being mystical. He meant exactly this. Anyway. Back out to the shop.

Quarry let me come pick through their reject pile last month. Brought home a chunk of Barre granite that had a crack running through it, so they'd written it off. Spent three weeks just looking at it, trying to figure out if the crack was a problem or the whole point. Today I finally started cutting. The crack is still there. I think it stays. Feels different working stone you had to wrestle into your truck yourself. Like you already owe it something before you even start.

Working on a steel piece for a client in the suburbs, a low horizontal thing about two meters wide. I welded it Monday, went back today, and the seam had pulled. Not much, maybe a millimeter and a half of warp over the length, but you can see it against a straightedge and that's all I need. So I cut the weld out and did it again with a different sequence. Backstep, short runs, let it cool between. Took most of the afternoon. The part that bothers me isn't the rework. It's that I knew better on Monday. I was tired and I wanted it to be done, so I ran it hot and fast like a younger man. Thirty five years and I still do that. The metal always wins.

Patching a seam on a steel piece this morning, a piece I built in 2014, and the client wants the weld dressed back to nothing. Fair enough, it's their money. But here's the thing that's been nagging me. Of everything on that sculpture, the one part people stop and touch is a weld I never bothered to hide, up on the shoulder of the thing. Ran it too hot, got a nice even stack of dimes, left it. I was young and in a hurry, honestly. Now I've spent a decade learning to make joints disappear and the one that shows is the one that reads as handmade. Grinding a bead flush takes twice as long as laying a good one and it buys you nothing but a smooth surface nobody notices. Not going to pretend I've solved this. I still dress my welds. I just don't believe the reason anymore.

Six years at 2,200 euros for a half-length portrait in oil, one figure, plain ground. I did the math in January: the sitting, the photographs, the drawing, the underpainting, the glazes, the drying time between each one. On a good one, a bit over 14 euros an hour, and that is before the linen and the lead white, which are not getting cheaper. So I wrote 3,000 to five people waiting on the list. Three said yes without a word about it. Two went quiet, and one of them told a friend I had become expensive. I have been turning that over all week, more than I should. What I notice is the 2,200 was not a price, it was an apology. I had set it in 2018 when I was coming out of the years where I barely painted, and I never went back to look at it. The people who left were not paying for the painting. They were paying for the feeling of a good deal. The three who stayed are the ones who actually sit for me and come to the studio and ask questions about the ground. Voilà. I should have done it three years ago and I am still slightly ashamed that I did not. If you raised your prices recently, how much did you raise, and did anyone come back later anyway? I am curious if the quiet ones ever do.

Six years ago I did a course at the Fondation where we had to do a copy of a Dutch still life using period grounds. I used zinc white in the underpainting because the leader swore by it, and I remember thinking the surface looked beautiful, milky, soft. I've kept that painting hanging in my studio ever since. I looked at it this morning and the whole thing has gone chalky. Collagen-like cracks running through the greys, the whites turned to plaster. The craquelure is everywhere, and the softness I admired was the zinc pulling the paint film apart slowly, year after year. It's not drying, it's delaminating. The thing that gets me is I knew better. I teach this. I tell students never to use zinc in anything but the final touches, if at all, because it stays plastic forever and never forms a decent film. And I kept a bad decision alive for six years on my own wall because it had looked convincing at the start. I'm going to scrape it down and do it again on a good lead white ground. Actually I feel lighter about it. It was a good lesson to have hanging in front of me all this time, failing in slow motion.

There's a layer of charcoal dust down there, thick enough that if you step wrong you slide. My friend came by Saturday, took one look, and started to sweep. I yelled. Actually yelled, like she was about to throw out a box of my mail. She doesn't get it. That dust is the whole week. Every time I dropped a stick, ground one down to nothing trying to find the edge of a jaw, that's a mark on the floor. I work kneeled down half the time, big sheets on the ground, and the charcoal just rains off. There's a gray ghost of a shoulder smeared into the concrete that I've stepped over for three days without thinking. Swept studio = nothing happened in it. That's my rule and I know it's a dumb rule. Anyway I've been on this one face since Tuesday and I keep losing the mouth. Six hours today and the mouth is still wrong. It's the kind of wrong you can't see till you stand up and walk away, and by then the light's gone. Gonna go stand really far back from it now with a cigarette I'm not supposed to be smoking anymore.

Not the painting's fault. Mine. I finished the big one, 190 by 160, three weeks of layering cold wax and burnt umber on top of a grey ground that had finally, finally settled into the right weight. Left it on the studio table to cure. Came in this morning and there is a fine white bloom across the whole top half. Not the wax itself. The varnish I mixed myself, too much turpentine, and it has gone milky in the cold. I know the rule. I know it. Test on a scrap, wait a day, and I have told students this same thing and watched them ignore me. So now the palette knife and the rags come out and I scrape down to the ground and start the layers again. Three weeks gone by lunchtime. The strange part is I am not angry. There is something almost restful in it. The second version is usually better anyway, that is the joke I tell myself. But my hands still smell of solvent and I have a gallery call on Thursday and nothing on the wall. Cold studio, milky varnish. If you have done this, you know. If you have not, do not start.

For the black in the paintings I do not buy anything. Lamp soot collected on a piece of tin over the diya, then that soot mixed with a little gum from the neem tree, and it is ground on a flat black stone with a small round stone in the hand. That stone was my mother's. She used it for maybe forty years, and before that I think her mother's sister used it, I am not fully certain. It is getting thin in the middle now. When I press, I can feel the dip where her hand went round and round. Some days I think I should keep it aside and buy a new one from the market in Darbhanga for the daily work, and save this one. But then what will I grind on? A stone sitting in a cloth on the shelf is not a stone any more, it is only a memory. My mother would have laughed at me for keeping it unused. She ground her kajal on it till the last year of her life and never once said this is precious, keep it safe. My son says I should photograph it and put the photo online so people understand the work. I do not know. A photo of a stone does not tell you anything about how the arm gets tired. The thing I am actually worried about is the dip. One day the stone will break through in the middle and then forty years of somebody's hand will just be two pieces on the floor. Any of you who work with old family tools, kindly tell me. Do you retire them or do you keep using till the end?

I'm printing a four-plate etching this week, hard ground line over aquatint, Charbonnel black, on this Somerset that's been in the drawer since a residency in 2021 and has gone slightly cockled at the edges. I pulled twelve proofs Sunday. On the first nine the ink flaked off the shoulder of the plate where the ground got scratched too thin, a little starburst of grey dust sitting on top of the image like ash. By proof ten the plate had worn in and it stopped. Clean. So I have nine with the flake and three without, and I've spent two days now trying to decide which one the edition is. The obvious answer is the clean one, that's what the plate does when it's properly bitten and properly inked. But the flake is the only mark in the whole thing that isn't mine. It's the part that happened. There's a thing I keep coming back to, that a print is supposed to be the same every time, that's the promise. And here is a small accident that makes nine of them not the same, and my first instinct was to call the nine the real ones and the three the mistakes, which is backwards and also feels true. I know somebody is going to tell me to just re-bite the plate and print it properly. I probably will. But I wanted to say it out loud first, because the moment I fix it, the version I care about stops existing, and I'm not sure I've decided that's fine. Anyway. If anyone has a rule for this, like a cutoff for how much unplanned mark you're willing to certify as the print, I want to hear it. Mine keeps moving.

I have a half-figure on the easel, a woman turned slightly away, one hand resting on the back of a chair. Almost nothing else decided yet. The hand is the problem. First pass I painted it thin, straight into the wet ground, no drawing underneath worth keeping. It was loose and a little clumsy and it read. Then I decided to take it seriously. Redrew it properly, measured it against the head, corrected the knuckle, gave it a real structure. Dead. Third time I chased that structure and overworked it worse. Fourth I wiped back to the ground and did it again fast, and it came out almost exactly like the first. What I keep circling: I know the anatomy, I know why the first one worked (the edge of the forearm got lost in the shadow, so the eye finished the shape), and I still could not paint it that way on purpose. The knowledge gets in front of the seeing. So the question I have no answer for, and I'd like yours: when you finally see what the good version was, do you paint it again clean, or do you scrape the whole thing and let it happen once? Also, for the record, I am not wiping the hand a fifth time. That is what I told myself this morning and I have already caught myself looking at the rag.

ok so for two months i've been fighting a 30x40 canvas. burnt orange ground, this big flat black shape that was supposed to sit like a shadow with weight. it just sat there like a dead sticker. repainted the black four times. my studio is basically a paint graveyard now, i have like six ruined rags that used to be promising. today i scraped the whole black back down to the raw ochre with a palette knife and just left it. and it works. the thing i was chasing for 8 weeks was the absence of the thing i kept adding. anyway i'm not gonna pretend this is a metaphor or whatever. i'm just glad it's off the easel. what's the longest you've fought a single piece before it gave up

I have been painting the same Rosa canina sprig for four days, which is longer than it warrants, and this afternoon I discovered I had cut the sheet from the wrong side. The felt mark runs underneath and the sizing is subtly different. You would not see it in the finished painting, but I can feel it. The washes sit a fraction differently and I have been quietly blaming my own handling since Monday. I am going to finish it. Throwing away four days of work over a mis-cut sheet would be a poor sort of discipline, and the specimen itself is a good one. But I have written the correct side in pencil on the pad cover now, which I should have done years ago and did not because I was certain I would remember. Does anyone else keep making the same small, entirely avoidable mistake on the grounds that they are too experienced to need a note?

Spent three hours this morning stretching a canvas and the frame was out of square by maybe four millimetres. I knew it in my hands the minute I picked the thing up. Set it aside, stretched the canvas anyway, because I'd already mixed the ground and I didn't want to waste the afternoon. Now it's sitting in the studio leaning against the wall and I can't stop looking at the corner. Four millimetres. Nobody will ever see it. I will absolutely see it every day until I take the canvas off and do it again, which I will do tomorrow morning instead of just getting on with it, because I've never once in thirty years left a bad frame under a good painting. The thing is I knew. That's what galls me. I had the information, I made the choice, and now I get to pay for it twice. There's a whole philosophy in there about small dishonesties compounding, but right now it's mostly just a Tuesday and I'm out a morning.