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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.

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.

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.

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.

Started posting the shop floor last month. Chips on the ground, the jig I built to hold a 400-pound slab while I cut it, the hours of grinding nobody sees. Figured process content was the honest version of what everyone else does with their reels. Engagement dropped by about a third. The finished pieces still pull the likes. People want the clean picture of the thing, not the dirty work underneath it. The thing is, the people who did stick around are the ones asking real questions. About joints, about stone density, about how you keep a weld from cracking when the piece moves. That's worth more to me than the numbers I lost. But I won't pretend it didn't sting watching the count go down. I'm a grown man and I checked the likes on a Tuesday like it mattered. It doesn't. It still got me.

Had a structural weld fail inspection last week on a big commission. Client's engineer flagged porosity in a joint I'd been confident in. Had to grind it out, redo it, pay for the re-test out of my own pocket. Thing is, I've been doing this thirty years and I still missed it. Looked fine on the surface. I knew better and I rushed it because the deadline was pressing. Redid it slow, checked the root pass before I laid the cap over it. Passed first try. Nobody posts the failed weld. But that's the one with the actual lesson in it. The ones that pass teach you nothing. The one that fails, you remember it for the next thirty years. Re-ground a scrap piece from that job and left it on my bench as a reminder. Check the root, not the shine.

A gallery in Switzerland was interested in my interiors but said everything was too large for their space. Could I paint smaller, like 40x40cm max. I said no, I work at the scale I see the scene, I can't just shrink it and keep the same feeling. They moved on. Now I wonder if I was stubborn. Smaller paintings sell easier, more people can hang them, maybe I'd have sold more. But it felt like saying yes to something that wasn't my work anymore. Has a gallery asked you to change the size or format? Did you adapt or hold your ground, and did it work out?

My son asked me yesterday why I don't just buy the ready made colours from the market, saves so much time he says. I tried to explain but maybe I did not say it properly. You see, when I grind the stone and the vegetable dye myself, I am not only making paint. I am doing what my mother did, and her mother before her. The motion of the stone on the stone, it is like a prayer. The smell of the turmeric, the red from the beetle nut leaf, it brings the whole room into the old time. The ready bottles are fine, they are convenient, I do not judge anyone. But my grandmother used to say the colour carries the hands that made it. A fish painted with a colour you ground yourself, it has a life in it. Also there is a practical thing. The store colours fade fast in our sun. The natural ones, they deepen with age. I have a painting from my mother that is forty years old and the peacock blue is richer now than the day she finished it. You cannot buy that in a bottle. Maybe I am old fashioned. But I think some things are worth the extra hour.

Myself Ramesh. I paint Mithila, as my mother and her mother taught me. Natural colours only, turmeric yellow, indigo blue, vermilion, so on. A gallery in Delhi some years back said they liked my work very much but could I please use "more contemporary palette" they said. I was confused ji. These colours are the tradition. They carry meaning. I cannot change simply because somebody wants something else. I said no. And they moved on. Now I wonder, has any gallery asked you to change something fundamental about your work? The colours, the subject, the size, the medium. And did you do it, or did you hold your ground? I am curious to know. 🙏

I spent six hours on a plate of a tulip last week, drew it from a specimen, got the venation right, the petal overlap, the sheen. Then yesterday I was rinsing brushes and glanced at it and saw the thing has six stamens per flower. Tulips have six, so that part was fine. The problem is the leaves. I painted the leaves as if they clasp the stem neatly at ground level, which is what everyone draws, and it's wrong. A tulip's leaves wrap high up the stem, one cupping the flower itself. I have painted dozens of tulips in my life and never once got this right because the convention is so strong that you stop seeing the plant. Nobody has said anything. That's the part that bothers me. I'd honestly rather someone had caught it. It means the people looking at it are looking at tulips-from-memory, not at the actual flower, and that's the whole point of what this discipline is for. If we all keep reproducing the same comfortable mistake, we might as well be painting from our heads and saving ourselves the greenhouse fees.

ok so I finally worked up the nerve to approach a gallery I've been following for ages, sent them my portfolio, got an actual reply, felt like I was floating. then they asked if I could "mute my palette a little" to fit their space better. my whole thing is color!! I paint the same window in my apartment over and over partly because I love watching how the light changes the color. they wanted me to basically be a different painter. I said no obviously but I'm still second-guessing myself like was that stupid, should I have compromised?? I feel like the right gallery will want what I actually make but also maybe I'm being precious about it idk anyone else had a gallery ask you to change your work? did you bend or hold your ground? I need to know I'm not alone here lol

found this landscape at goodwill for $4. someone painted it carefully, every tree has individual leaves, the sky is blended smooth. i bought it because i wanted to collage over it, use the sky as a ground for something else. but now i can't bring myself to touch it. it's not good, technically, but you can feel the time in it. someone sat with this for hours. maybe it was a gift. maybe it hung in someone's kitchen for thirty years. i keep pulling it out of the stack and putting it back. i've had it for three months. i know the rational thing is to just work on something else. but this is the one i keep circling. anyone else get stuck on a piece of source material like it's a person you owe something to?

I had a gallery once, small, nice enough people, and after looking at my portfolio they sat me down and said, very gently, "you know what sells here, na? Lighter colours. More cheerful subjects. Maybe try that." I understood what they meant. My work is all old Bangalore houses and morning shadows, and I know it's not exactly commercial. But I also couldn't shake the feeling that I'd be painting someone else's idea of what I should make. I didn't go back. Still wonder sometimes if I was too precious about it. Maybe a compromise isn't the end of the world. Anyone else been told to tweak their work for a gallery? Did you adjust, or hold your ground, and do you regret it either way?

I realised this today while staring at a zinc plate I'd already degreased and just couldn't bring myself to touch. With etching you have all these steps before you actually commit, polishing, degreasing, grounding, smoking, and I love that. It's a ritual that delays the moment of actually having to decide something. Painting friends of mine talk about the terror of the white canvas and I kind of don't relate. But I think what I actually can't handle is the single object. The one painting, the one drawing, the one definitive version. Printmaking lets me hide inside the idea of the multiple, if this print fails, there are 49 more chances, and also it's just one of an edition so it doesn't carry the whole weight. I wonder how much of our medium choice is just a sophisticated way of managing anxiety about finality. What's your medium's built-in escape route from commitment?

I had a gallery once, reputable, good space, who after agreeing to take my work called me and said they thought my prices should be 30% higher. I'd spent months arriving at those numbers. I said no, they pushed, I held. They sold nothing. I've never been sure if the prices were the problem or if that was a sign of something worse. How do you handle it when a gallery wants to change your pricing? Do you trust they know their market, or do you hold your ground? I'm curious where people land on this.

Had someone message me about a commission back in February. Wanted a small piece, maybe 40x40cm, in mostly smalti. We went back and forth for two weeks, she wanted a discount, wanted free shipping, wanted me to throw in a smaller piece "as a gesture." I held my ground, said the price is the price, and eventually she went quiet. I figured she'd moved on. Three weeks later the full amount shows up in my bank account with a one-line email: "Same dimensions as discussed, please proceed." No apology, no explanation. Just the money. I made the piece, shipped it, never heard from her again. Not even a photo of it on a wall. I still don't know what to make of that interaction. Part of me thinks she tested me and I passed. Part of me thinks she just got tired of negotiating and decided to pay. Either way, the lesson I keep landing on is: if you're confident the work is worth what you're asking, the haggling either resolves itself or it doesn't, and either outcome is fine. You don't have to win every conversation. Just don't be the one who folds first.

My studio floor is permanently dusty with stone grit and tiny bits of broken tile. I sweep it three times a week and it looks like I haven't touched it in a year within an hour. I've given up pretending otherwise. There's this thing people don't talk about with mosaic, you work on the floor. Not at a table, not at an easel, on the floor. On your knees, leaning over, getting up stiff. I've got a piece of old carpet I sit on and a cushion my yiayia made that's basically flat now. The floor is where the andamento happens, where you see the whole thing at once and your back starts complaining. I had a younger artist visit last week, works in digital, and she looked at my setup and said "you actually sit on the ground?" like I was doing something exotic. No, I said, I'm just a mosaicist, this is just how it's been done since before we had chairs. Anyway. I'm about to sweep again. It'll be dusty by tomorrow.

I had a gallery once that liked my work but wanted me to switch to acrylic, paint bigger, and make everything "more abstract." Basically be a different artist. I said no, then spent three months wondering if I was stupid for it. Anyone else get the "we love it but can you change everything" talk? Did you bend or stand your ground?

A 180 x 140, stretched it myself in early March, and then it just sat there on the easel like an accusation every time I crossed the studio. Not blocked, exactly. Not afraid, either. Just nothing rising. Some canvases wait for a feeling and I kept trying to force one in. Today I stopped trying. Mixed a cold wax ground with a little raw umber until it was the colour of wet pavement and just pushed it on with a drywall knife, no plan, no sketch, no idea what happens next. Took maybe twenty minutes and the whole weight of the month went out of the room. I don't know what will come after. That's the honest part. But the white is gone and I can work again. Sometimes the first layer is just permission. People overestimate inspiration and underestimate how much of painting is lowering your own bar far enough to start.