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I've had this thing leaning against the studio wall for close to a year. Torn paper over an old photo of a stairwell, charcoal, a wash that went muddy and I kept anyway. Never hung it because hanging it felt like deciding it was done, and it isn't, it's just... not going to get better. Anyway I hung it in the hallway. Where I have to walk past it about twenty times a day. Not for anyone else, there's nobody to see it there. And it's different in there. The light comes in low off the landing around four and the torn edges stop reading as torn. Whole thing goes soft, like the stairwell is breathing. A year against the wall and I only actually looked at it because I moved it four feet. Feels a bit stupid to call that a win. But I've made peace with the muddy part now, which I couldn't do in the studio. The studio is where I fix things. The hallway is where I just live with them. Anyone else have a spot in their place that does this? Or am I just going to end up hanging everything in the hallway.

The only wall in my house with decent natural light is the hallway between the kitchen and the bedrooms. So that's where my easel lives. I get maybe 45 minutes of good light in the late afternoon before it shifts and everything I'm mixing starts to look wrong. I've gotten weirdly good at working fast in that window. Lay down the big shapes first, save the fine detail for the evening under the overhead light even if the colors are off, because I know from experience they'll read fine by morning. The kids step over the drop cloth like it's always been there. My husband hung a towel over the window on the bathroom door once and I nearly cried with gratitude. I tell myself someday I'll have a real studio but honestly I'd probably just end up painting in a different hallway.

Small thing, but it took me three weeks to do it. There is a canvas from last winter, 40 by 50, nothing special on paper, the kind I usually stack against the wall and forget. I put it up in the hallway between the kitchen and the studio, no frame, just two nails. Nobody sees it there except me, and I see it maybe twenty times a day now, at bad angles, in bad light. It looks worse than I remembered. Also better. Both at once, which I take as a good sign, because the pieces I am sure about at first glance are usually the ones that turn out thin. For years I would not have done this. Work that goes to the gallery gets photographed and discussed and then it is gone, and work that stays gets hidden in the rack. A painting that lives with you is a different kind of test, and I had been avoiding it. Naja. Now it is up there being difficult and I have to look at it while the kettle boils.

So I've been working on this little still life for three weeks. Copper pot, two lemons, a dish towel. Nothing fancy, I just wanted to practice reflective surfaces. Finished it Saturday and hung it in the hallway. Sunday morning in daylight the lemons are basically neon yellow-green. Like highlighter. In my kitchen at night they looked perfect and mellow and now I'm standing in the hallway going, huh. Two of my bulbs are 2700k because that's what was in the house when we moved in, and I never thought about it once in nine years. Now I'm pricing daylight bulbs like it's a home renovation. I know the answer is probably a lamp and not new overheads. But I'm genuinely annoyed at how long I've been mixing color under a light that's lying to me. Eleven year old asked why I was standing in the hallway holding the painting up to the window and I didn't have a good answer.

I've been fighting this piece since March. Charcoal on paper, 40x60, my mother at 29, which is two years younger than I am now. I used a photo I hadn't looked at in probably a decade, one where she's laughing with her whole face and you can't tell anything was wrong yet. Drew it four times. Burned the second one, actually put it in the fire pit out back, which felt dramatic and then felt correct. The thing that finally did it was stopping trying to make her look like the photo and just drawing the mouth from memory. Her real mouth, the one she got when she was tired. Not the smile. I cried a little, which is embarrassing to type but there it is. It's hanging now. Cheap black frame from the craft store, nothing fancy. And every night I get up around 3 to pee and walk right past her face in the dark and I still don't know if it's good. But it's UP. It's on a wall, in my house, where people will see it. Some work you make to show people and some work you make to put something down. This one was the second kind and I'm only now figuring out that counts as a win too.

Someone messaged me last week about a piece in the group show. Not the painting, a photo I'd printed small and hung low, out of the way, because it's of my brother's jacket on the back of a chair and honestly I almost didn't include it. She offered 900. Cash, no fuss, said it was "exactly the mood she wanted for her hallway." I said no. Then I sat with the email for two days wondering if that was stupid. Here's the thing I keep circling. If she'd said anything about the jacket, about the wear on the cuff, about the fact that it's still got a thread hanging off it because I never fixed it, I probably would've said yes. She didn't. She said hallway. I don't know if that makes me precious or if it means I'm finally drawing a line somewhere. My friend K thinks I should've taken it, money is money, and she's not wrong either. She sells to hotels and sleeps fine. Anyway the photo's still on my wall. Slightly crooked. It's the only piece I've made that I actually look at.

A woman at the Saturday fair picked up one of my pieces, held it up to the light, and told me it was a bit too blue for her hallway. Could I do one more blue? I said it is already as blue as the process goes, and she said, yes, but more like the sea. I have been doing this for eleven years now and I still stood there with my mouth open. Then I tried to explain that the blue is not a colour I chose. It is the iron, the sun, the water on the paper. It comes out the way it comes out. Her hallway was beige, I think that was the real problem. Anyway I sold nothing all day and then bought a bag of figs from the man at the end, so the day was not a total loss.

A woman came to the studio on Saturday, spent maybe twenty minutes in front of the biggest cyanotype I have, the 70x100 with the net dragged across it, and then said she wanted it for her hallway. I wrapped it in the paper I always use and she carried it out herself. Then I sat in the car for a while before I could drive. Not sadness exactly. That piece was on the wall behind me for eleven months, through two winters, and I had got used to turning round and finding it there. Now there is a pale rectangle where it hung, and the wall looks undressed. I have sold work before. This one was different, I think because I had almost stopped believing it was any good. It came out of a morning when nothing worked, the solution was old, the sun went in, and I nearly rinsed the paper and started again. I did not. I hung it up to dry out of habit and it was the best thing I made all year. Anyway. The car park behind the studio smells of diesel and there was a man loading tiles into a van beside me, and I just sat there with the empty tube on the passenger seat.

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?

Six weeks ago I started posting the failures. Not the poetic ones, the actual duds: a smalti panel where I got the andamento wrong on a face and the nose reads like a shelf, a batch of tile I cut too thin that shattered the moment I pressed it in. Numbers, since this channel likes numbers. Reach went up maybe 40%. Comments dropped by half. And the DMs changed completely. Before, I got "how much for this" from people who never once converted. Now I get "I have my grandmother's broken marble table, could it become something" and three of those turned into paid commissions in six weeks. One from a woman in Kalamaria whose table is now a hallway panel and she cried when she picked it up. The "how much" crowd was never going to buy. They liked the finished photo, that is all. The people who write to you about the wreckage are the ones who understand you actually make the thing with your hands and want a piece of that. Also, small confession, I sleep better. Nobody claps for a shattered tile. Feels closer to the work.

Someone asked me at the Feira da Vandoma last month what a cyanotype costs, and I heard myself say "it depends on the paper," which is true and also a way of not answering. Here is the real thing. A 30x40 print on Arches, seawater-developed, sun for however long it takes that day, I ask 120. It could be three hours of work or it could be four days of waiting for the right light and starting over. I don't count. If I counted I would have to charge something nobody in that market is going to pay, and I am not sure I would want to charge it either. So the price is a kind of average of the good days and the ruined ones. It works out. It is also the reason I have never said a number out loud here, and why I felt a small shame writing 120 just now. What I keep circling is this. The friends who ask me to make them something, "just a small one for the hallway," I say yes and then it is not small and it is not free and I have spent a fortnight on it, and I cannot find the door out of that conversation. Not asking anyone to solve it. I think I just wanted to write the number down somewhere.

Right, I'll go first because I'm still not over it. Years back I had a small gallery take a run of my linocuts, the hare ones, the big black one mid-leap. Grand, delighted with myself entirely. Then the woman rings me up a week before the show and asks, very gently, would I consider giving the hare "a bit more of a smile about him." Said he looked fierce. He's a hare. He's supposed to look like he's about to fight you. I said no, obviously, and she hung up fairly sharpish. Still sold three of them on the night so who's laughing. But it got me thinking about all the small asks people get handed. Not the big obvious ones like the 40% or the "would you mind paying to hang." The wee ones. The "could you make it a bit smaller," the "any chance of a brighter one, it's for a hallway," the "the customer wants it in blue." So what's the strangest thing a gallery has asked you to change? Not the worst, the oddest. The one where you stood there going, sorry, what now. Tell me yours. I want to feel less alone in this.

Now I want to tell y'all something and I hope it don't come out wrong. My granddaughter set me up on here back in 2019. She said "Mama, folks need to see these quilts." I didn't believe her. I've been sewing since I was nine years old and for most of that time the only people who saw my work were people who came to the house, or the church, or a funeral. That was enough. I wasn't looking for anybody to clap. Then a woman in Oregon bought one of my quilts off the internet and sent me a letter. A letter. Handwritten. She said it hung in her hallway and her grandbaby liked to touch the red pieces. That did something to me, I won't lie to you. But here's what I can't get right. I'll spend three weeks on a quilt and post it and get eleven likes from my cousins. Then I'll post a scrap of fabric on the ironing board with the steam still coming up off it and that thing goes everywhere. People want to see the work being worked. They don't want the finished picture on the wall. I don't understand it but I've stopped arguing with it. What I'm asking is this. Does anybody else feel like the thing you're actually good at and the thing the internet wants from you are two different things? Because I'm 63 and I've decided I'd rather be a little overlooked than start sewing for the algorithm. But I'd like to hear from somebody further along than me.

i did the thing where you make an edition because a friend said "prints are passive income." 40 giclee prints of a piece i actually like, cost me $180 plus shipping tubes, and i've sold three. two of those were to people i know. here's the part that bugs me. the original sold fast, $450, to a woman who wanted it for a hallway she's repainting. the print, same image, $45, sat. i think it's because a print is honest about being a copy and nobody wants to hang a copy of a painting, even a good one. or maybe my print is just bad, that's also possible. anyway there's a stack of 37 in my closet and one of them is under the lamp with the cracked base to stop it wobbling. i'm not mad about it exactly. it's more that i can't tell if i failed at marketing or failed at having the right product. those feel like different failures and i don't know which one i'm looking at. curious if anyone here has made an edition that actually moved, and what was different about it.

Had a gallery interested once. They loved the work. Then the conversation went to "could you do it in a smaller format, more affordable, maybe something people can hang in a hallway." And I knew, they wanted my work but not really. They wanted something that looked like my work but cost less and took up less wall. I said no. Probably lost the chance. Don't regret it. Anyone else had the "we love it but can you make it..." conversation? Where did you draw the line?

walked into a gallery opening last week, guy comes up, says he's been watching my stuff online. my heart's pounding because holy shit someone noticed. then he says "your work has so much raw energy but you'd sell three times as much if you just... pulled it back a little. make it more accessible." i stood there holding my wine and wanted to cry and punch him at the same time. accessible. like what i'm doing is too MUCH. like the whole point is to make people comfortable. i spent years learning how to stop making polite art. i grew up in a house where we didn't talk about what was actually happening and i painted that way for so long, safe, quiet, looking good on the surface. i taught myself to tear that open and now someone wants me to smooth it back down so it matches their couch. i told him no and he gave me this little pity smile like i'd made a business mistake. maybe i did. don't care. art that doesn't cost you anything isn't worth looking at. i'll keep painting the ugly honest stuff even if it hangs in my hallway forever 🔥

I do open studio stuff now, which is a nice way of saying I leave the door to my studio open and hope someone wanders in. Last month a guy came in because he thought it was a garage and stayed 40 minutes. Bought a small oil head study for €180, cash, and told me it was because it looked "unfinished in a way that felt honest." Then he posted it on his own account. Not mine. His. In his hallway with a lamp I would have told him to move. That post did more for me than the last six months of my own grid. I have no idea what to do with that information. I've been trying to build this tidy little funnel of print sales and reels and it turns out what actually moves the needle is standing next to a wet canvas smelling like turpentine while someone talks themselves into it. Which is not scalable and I can't put it in a caption and honestly it makes me want to delete everything and just paint with the door open and stop pretending I understand the internet. Do any of you sell in person and just... not bother with the rest? Or am I about to talk myself out of something that's quietly working

I finally did it. I got the big window piece (the morning one, third attempt, the one with the actual shadow on the sill instead of the polite version) mounted and drove it to the framer's myself because I was too scared to let it out of my sight in a car trunk. Sat it flat on the passenger seat with a towel under it and drove 20 mph the whole way like a grandmother. Somebody honked at me at the light on 5th and I genuinely did not care. It's floating in a pale oak frame now, no mat, and I picked it up today and just stood in the shop holding it and my hands were shaking a little. I've been staring at this thing for six weeks and I had convinced myself the whole lower left corner was muddy and ruined. In a frame, with the glass on, it isn't. It reads like water. That's the thing I keep forgetting, that you have to get the work away from your own nose for it to look like a finished thing and not a list of your mistakes. Anyway it goes into a small group show on Friday, first time I've had work on a wall that isn't my mom's hallway or a café, and I am so nervous I could throw up. I keep telling myself it's just a window. It is not just a window, haha. Also the framer charged me less than the quote because she said it was "a nice little painting" and now I don't know if that's a compliment or if I've been undercharging for a year 😭

there's a chair in my studio that has held a stack of failed canvases for like four months now. i keep meaning to move them to the corner and i keep not doing it because the corner is where the good light is and i don't want to look at them in the good light. the chair itself is fine. it's from ikea, it's the one everyone has. i have never once sat in it. today i moved the stack to the hallway and immediately put a wet panel on the seat. so i guess the chair is for drying now. it's been a chair for two hours and it already has a job that isn't sitting in it. weirdly this is the most useful piece of furniture i own.

I've had a pastel portrait of my sister sitting face-down on the shelf for about four months. Toned grey paper, a bit of Sennelier on the cheekbone that actually worked. I kept telling myself I'd fix the ear first. The ear was fine. I just couldn't stand looking at the rest of it next to the ear. She came over Sunday for coffee and I forgot it was out. She picked it up, turned it over, and said "oh, that's me," in this normal voice, not the polite gallery voice. Then she asked if she could have it. So I bought a frame today, 40x50, cheap one from the place on Karmelicka, and it's hanging in her hallway now. It is not my best work. The jaw is too heavy and I know exactly which stroke I should have left alone. But it's on a wall. In a house. Someone wanted it there. I don't think I've ever let a piece leave the room before without apologizing for it first, and this time I just said thank you, which took me a second to manage. Still strange to me that the ones I want to hide are sometimes the ones people see themselves in.