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working on this big charcoal piece, torso and one arm reaching out, and the hand has eaten my entire day. three hours. redrawing the same four fingers because the knuckles kept coming out like sausages. i don't use reference for hands, which is either discipline or ego depending on who you ask, and today it was just ego. erased so hard the paper started pilling. my mother comes by, looks over my shoulder for a second, and goes "is that a hand?" then wanders off to make tea. i stood there holding a charcoal stick like an idiot. she's not wrong to ask. it looked like a glove full of wet clay. but here's the thing, the hand isn't the point, it's the reaching. nobody's gonna look at this and go wow what a hand. they're gonna feel the arm or they won't. and i KNOW that and i still spent three hours on knuckles because some gremlin in my head thinks if the hand isn't perfect the whole feeling falls apart. anyway i'm keeping it. pilled paper and sausage fingers and all. it's the most honest part of the piece right now.

so the full-time artist life is going great except for the part where I have no money for models, which is the part where I decided to paint my own hand three times this week instead. three separate studies of my left hand holding a mug, holding a paintbrush, just resting. hands are SO hard. I've drawn them a hundred times and they still come out wrong every single time and honestly it's humbling in the best way. but here's the thing. my left hand is the one that's held like every mug I've ever drunk coffee out of, the one I use to prop my face up when I'm reading, the one my partner holds when we walk anywhere. I've been so focused on getting the anatomy right I didn't notice I was documenting my whole life. study number three is my hand resting on the windowsill at golden hour and it's genuinely the best thing I've painted all month, and it's just... my hand. my boring left hand that does nothing special. anyway I'm framing it. it goes above my desk where I'll see it every day and be reminded that the most ordinary thing about me is worth painting slowly. which is a weirdly emotional takeaway for something born out of being too broke to hire a model, but here we are haha. who else has painted themselves out of necessity and accidentally made their favorite work? I can't be the only one

I've had this painting facing the wall since last spring. A half figure, seated, hands in her lap. The face went fine, the light through the window went fine, and then I got to the hands and froze, because hands are where a figure painter either knows the structure or doesn't, and I knew I was bluffing. Eighteen months. I'd turn it around some evenings, look at the four grey digits sitting there like something from a mannequin factory, turn it back. Today I wiped the whole hand down with a rag and turps and started again. Two hours, no drawing on top, just building the knuckle of the index and the tendon across the back of the hand, from life, my own left hand on the arm of the chair. And it's there. Not finished, but there. The paint told me immediately what was wrong before: I'd painted the fingers as tubes. Fingers are not tubes. The knuckle is a box with a rounded top and the light breaks on it in three planes. Writing it here because I need it said out loud. Eighteen months of avoidance for two hours of work. If you have a canvas turned to the wall, that thing you keep telling yourself you'll get to when you're better, turn it around this week.

Sitting in my studio with a small interior I've been working on since the start of the month, a woman at a table with morning light coming from a window behind her left shoulder. The whole thing is nearly done. The walls are right, the cloth on the table is right, the light reads the way I wanted it to. And her hand on the table is dead. It is the fourth time I've wiped it back and repainted it and each time it comes back a little more like a photograph of a hand and less like a hand. Here is the specific problem. I can build the form fine. Palm, knuckles, the taper of the fingers, all correct. What I can't find is the edge. The place where the light side meets the shadow side. I keep making it crisp because I know what the shape is, and a crisp edge says "I know what this is." I don't want her to know what it is. I want the light to have made it. One soft edge where the wrist turns into the shadow of the table, one lost edge where the fingers meet the cloth, and the whole thing would breathe. I know all this. I've taught it. And I still paint a hand like I'm describing it to a police sketch artist. I've been looking at Chardin all week, the little hands in the still lifes, the way he lets a knuckle just dissolve into the background and trusts you to finish it. It is a kind of confidence I don't have yet at this size. At a big scale I can be loose. Small and I get nervous and tidy. So I am going to let it dry and go at it once more with a bigger brush than it deserves. If it fails again I may paint her hand into her sleeve and call it a compositional choice. Not really. But it's been that kind of week.

Ok so I did this thing where I drew my own hand every night for thirty days. Same hand, same angle basically. Just to see if it would stay boring. Day 1 I wanted to throw the sketchbook across the room. My hands are ugly and I hated every line. Day 11 something shifted and I stopped trying to make it look like a hand and started trying to make it FEEL like the hand that's been doing every single thing for me. Day 30 I cried a little and I'm not even embarrassed about it. It stopped being a hand. It became all the damage and all the work and all the love I've ever done with it. Nobody tells you that drawing the same boring thing over and over turns into drawing your whole life. I'm not saying everyone should do this but I'm also not not saying it. If you try it tell me what day you break

Started a big piece this week, two figures, and I've redrawn the same left hand about fourteen times. Charcoal, oil wash, charcoal again. It's ANATOMICALLY fine, like the fingers are where they go and the proportion is right. But it's dead. It's a diagram. I can draw a face and get all the feeling I need but a hand just sits there like a glove on a table. I know a guy who went to art school who would say it's because I never learned the underlying structure, and honestly maybe that's true. But I don't want a technically perfect hand. I want the one that looks like it's mid-sentence. The one that's about to reach for something. Took a photo of my own hand holding a pencil this morning, just to stare at it, and the weird thing is the photo is boring too. The hand is boring. It's what the hand is DOING that has the life in it. Think I might just paint it wrong on purpose and see if that's closer to right. Worst case I burn it, I've done that before. 😤

Stopped mid-pose today and just stared at the model's hands. She wasn't doing anything, just sitting, hands resting on her knees. And I couldn't draw them. I kept putting charcoal down and erasing, down and erasing. Fifty minutes of that. Finally she asked if I needed a break and I said no, I'm fine, I just forgot how to see for a second. She laughed. The whole room laughing at my crisis. Then I turned the paper sideways and drew the hands as abstract shapes, not hands. Just dark masses and the light where the skin folded. It worked. It's the best drawing I've made in a month. I don't know why I keep needing to be reminded that the answer is almost always to stop naming what I'm looking at. The second I called them "hands" they became a problem. The second I called them "dark shapes against light" they were just true. Anyway. Tonight I'm in love with that drawing and tomorrow I might hate it. The usual.

so a friend looked at three of my paintings side by side yesterday and goes "why do they all have the same hands" and now i can't unsee it. not the same pose, the same literal construction. same two finger shapes, same knuckle placement, same way the thumb sits. i've been drawing the same hand for years and thought i was just consistent. tried to fix it today by doing studies from life photos and every single one came out looking like the same hand wearing a different sleeve. it's like my brain has one hand file and refuses to overwrite it. anyone else have the one body part they just... can't vary? i'm not sure if i should fight it or lean in and make it a thing. it's honestly a little freeing to know my one move is hands lol

Trying to finish the left hand of a seated figure, the one that rests on the knee, and I have wiped it out three mornings in a row. Not the whole painting, just that hand, probably four centimeters of canvas. This morning I got the thumb right and then spent two hours ruining the palm around it trying to get the light to turn across the knuckles. There is a particular flush you get across the back of a hand when it is resting on something, a red that goes almost purple where the skin is thin, and every time I mix it I get closer and then I lean in and it is suddenly a bruise. Wiped it out with a rag at noon, no regret. My model comes Thursday and she will sit with the same hand on the same knee and I will have nothing to show for it. Some days the craft is not the paint, it is just the willingness to start the same small thing again. Anyway. Back in there.

finally got my grandmother to sit still long enough to make a plaster mold of her hands. she's 82, her hands are doing that thing where the skin is thin and the veins show through and they just know so much, how to hold a spoon, how to pat your arm, how to roll a cigarette one-handed. she was so confused why I wanted to do it. "mateo, they're old hands, get a young model" but I kept telling her these are exactly the ones I want. she laughed the whole time the plaster was setting. said I looked more nervous than she was. pulled the mold off and it came out clean. no air bubbles, no cracks. I think she was a little proud even if she won't say it. now I have to figure out what to do with them, maybe cast in porcelain and let light come through thin. or maybe just leave them raw plaster for a while and look at them every day. felt like I caught something real today. not sure I've ever made anything that mattered this much.

I've had these old Wiss scissors since I was maybe twelve years old. They was my grandmother's before that, she used 'em to cut patterns and rip seams and trim threads for I don't know how many years. The handles was that old black rubber that gets sticky after a while, but they cut true right up till this morning. I was trimming the binding on a quilt I'm finishing and the little screw that holds 'em together just... gave out. Dropped right onto the floor. I sat there holding the two pieces like they was a little bird that died in my hand. You know how it is with a tool that's been with you that long. It ain't just the tool. It's her hands on it before mine. It's every quilt I made with these things, baby quilts for my children, my grandchildren, a wedding quilt for my niece, the one I made when my husband passed and I didn't know what else to do with my hands. All of it in those blades. I tried to see if I could get 'em fixed but the metal's worn thin where the screw goes through. They're done. I don't know if I'm more sad about losing the scissors or losing that little piece of her I still had in my hands every day. Gonna have to break in a new pair and hope they carry some of the same memory forward. That's the way of it, I suppose. Tools wear out. What they helped you make stays.🙏

I have this thing with hands. Couldn't draw them for years, they always came out like claws or weird sausages and I'd just crop the paintings at the wrist and pretend it was a creative choice. Ten years of that. Today I was working on this big charcoal piece, two bodies reaching for each other, and I didn't even think about it. Just drew the hands and they were THERE. Like actual hands. I sat back and just stared at them for a while. The whole piece is still unfinished and honestly might be garbage by morning, I know how I get, but right now I'm just sitting with this one small thing that finally clicked. All those bad drawings nobody saw. They were going somewhere. No big point here. Just wanted to say it out loud somewhere people would get it.

I was cutting strips yesterday for a baby quilt, just squares and rectangles, nothing fancy, and my hand just went on its own and started piecing a little wonky star block I hadn't made in forty years. My grandmother's star, is what we called it. She'd show me how to do it on scraps while she cooked Sunday dinner. I sat there looking at this little crooked star in my hands and couldn't tell you the last time it crossed my mind. But my fingers knew. Made me think about what else is in there that I don't know is there till it shows up. The body keeps more than the mind does sometimes. Y'all ever have your hands do something your brain didn't tell 'em to?

You know, I was looking at my hands the other day, all these little nicks and needle pricks from years of sewing. They remind me so much of my grandmother's hands, the ones that taught me how to cut fabric just so, how to guide a needle through a stubborn seam. I'm working on a prayer quilt for my cousin's new baby, and I'm just letting the fabric tell the story. No fancy patterns, just letting the colors and shapes fall where they may, like the Lord intended. It feels good to let go and let the spirit move through my hands. Sometimes the most beautiful things come when you stop trying so hard and just trust. MM-hmm. It's a good feeling.

I've had my grandmother's church dress folded in the cedar chest going on thirty years now. Navy, little covered buttons down the front, she wore it every first Sunday till the fabric got thin at the elbows. I've been telling people I'm going to put it in a quilt. Been telling myself that a long while. Finally laid it out on the table this week. Cut the back panel free and set it in the middle of a piece I'm building, that deep navy against some red I pulled from a housedress of hers too. It looks right. It looks like it was always supposed to be there. And I walked off from the table and left it sitting there two days. Can't make myself pick up the rotary cutter again. Here's the thing nobody tells you when they hand you a stack of somebody's clothes and call it material. The cloth still holds the shape of them. You can see where she wore it. And the minute that blade goes down, that's over with. Now it's a quilt. It's not her dress no more. I know that's the work. That's the whole tradition, taking what somebody left and carrying it forward in your hands. My grandmother did it with her mother's things, didn't blink, said cloth is for using. But I keep hearing her say it and I still got a dress sitting on my table half cut. Any of you ever worked with something that belonged to somebody? I'd like to know how you got your hands to move.

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.

I have been buying my painting paper from the same small place in Bhagalpur since I was a young man. My mother also used to get from them only. This paper is hand-made, khadi, you can feel the fibers with your fingers, the way it takes the natural color is different from anything machine made. For Mithila work this matters very much because the line work is everything, the paper must hold a fine line without bleeding, but also it must have some tooth, some roughness for the color to sit on. Last month I ordered my usual stack. And it came, and I thought maybe I received a bad batch. But I used it for three pieces now and it is not the same. The surface is smoother. Too smooth. The water-based colors are sliding instead of settling. The line is fine but the paper does not grip the pigment like before. I called the shop and the man told me their master craftsman retired and the new man is trying to "improve" the process. He said this like it is good news. I am sitting here with a half-finished fish motif on this new paper and the tail is not right. The color is not sitting where I put it. It is not the paper's fault maybe, it is my hand not trusting the surface. But how many years to learn a new paper when you already know one for twenty years. I do not want to start again. I want the old paper back. Has anyone else faced this with a material that changed without warning? Not a brand reformulation but the actual hands that made it, the knowledge that left. How do you decide whether to adapt or to find a new source altogether.

Today my niece came to the house with her friend, wanting to learn the double line work. She is sixteen, quite shy. I gave her the brush and she held it like it was a live bird, so afraid to spoil the paper. I remember that fear. My mother put the brush in my hand when I was not much older than that, and I also sat afraid for a full hour before she said, "The line will forgive you, the paper will not." She meant, do not be so tight, the hand must be loose. But I think about that sentence even now, forty years later. The line will forgive you. Where my teaching is concerned I have started to tell this to every new student. They all look at me like I am speaking in riddles. But they loosen their hands. Mithila painting is a patient art. The peacock does not appear in one stroke, it is many small decisions that you cannot take back. Yet somehow the mistakes also become part of the story. I am still learning this. Maybe that is the whole thing about being a painter, you carry the fear for a long time and then one day you hand the brush to someone else and you see the fear walk across their face. And you pray they loosen their hand sooner than you did. 🙏

The dry air from the heating has my hands in this state where I keep catching on the surface of thin Japanese paper. Tiny little tears where I just want a clean edge. I've tried lotion, I've tried washing less, nothing fixes it except waiting for the humidity to come back. So today I'm just handling cheap scrap paper instead and letting the good stuff sit. A whole day of making do because of dry hands. Smallest thing in the world but it's the kind of thing that decides how a day goes.

Ok so I've been trying to make this piece since maybe February. Small figure, just the hands really, cupped like she holds them when she's watching her telenovelas. Nothing fancy. My abuela's hands. The first one exploded in the bisque. Second one the fingers slumped into each other, looked like a paw. Third one I glazed too thick and it came out looking like it was wearing gloves, which is the opposite of the whole point. Opened the kiln this morning and there they were. Still a bit off, the left thumb is shorter than real life and I'm not touching it. But the position is right. The weight of them is right. I don't know why I'm posting this here except that I've been telling everyone for months that I "make figurative work" like it's a category on a form, and this is the first time I actually felt it. I called her and she said "bueno, y por qué lloras" like it was nothing, and then she stayed on the phone for 40 minutes. If you're 6 months into something and it keeps failing, it might just be a firing problem. Or it might be you have to make it 4 times.