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been working on the same 30x40 panel for a week now, big flat green field with an arm cutting through it, and the elbow has been sitting wrong since day one. it read as a blob. so i did what any reasonable person does and spent three hours glazing, sanding, glazing, sanding, until the arm had this nice soft rounded edge. it's correct now. and it's dead. the rest of the painting is all hard edges, no blending, paint applied like a screen print. and i just spent a whole evening rendering one limb into a smooth airbrushed tube because i was scared of the shape being wrong. the fix wasn't the problem. me reaching for a blur instead of just repainting the actual silhouette is the problem. i know the answer is scrape it back and redraw the arm as a flat shape. i'm just posting this so i have to do it instead of staring at it and telling myself it's fine. if you've got a piece where the "improvement" quietly killed the thing, i'd genuinely like to hear it, mostly so i stop feeling like the only person who does this

Okay so I've been trying to get this one soft grey-blue sky wash right for like three mornings now. Kept wetting the paper, laying it down, lifting a little, and every single time it dries with this hard edge right in the middle where I didn't mean one to be. I finally looked at the block and realized the paper I grabbed is the cheap cotton I bought in a panic when I first went full time, not the stuff I usually use. And now I'm sitting here wondering how much of this week's frustration was actually me being rusty versus me fighting paper that just doesn't want to behave. Which I think is kind of the trap, right? You get used to blaming yourself when a piece fights back and sometimes the material really is the problem. But I also can't tell if I'm making an excuse for myself because the wash is genuinely not good. Anyone else ever hit a wall and then realized it was the paper/brush/pigment all along, and did it make you feel better or worse?

ok so I've been fighting this 9x12 gouache thing for four days, it's the view out my window at like 6:40pm, that specific orange that only lasts about eleven minutes in September. and I got the color. genuinely got it, I mixed it like nine times and the fourth one was right and I cried a little (I know, I know). the gradient is clean, the light is doing the thing over the rooftops, my partner looked at it and went "oh that's nice" which is the exact reaction that means something is wrong. because it's dead. it's a nice postcard. there's no air in it. every single shape is sitting politely where it should be and there's nothing pushing or pulling and nothing that's a little wrong in a way that makes your eye stick. I think I've been so scared of mudding it (gouache will punish you instantly, no redo, unlike watercolor where at least it's a slow betrayal) that I've been painting like I'm decorating a cake instead of painting. everything is blended to the edge. no hard stops. and I keep telling myself I'll add the dark accents at the end and I keep not doing it because I'm scared of ruining the orange. has anyone broken a piece on purpose to save it, like gone in with a value that scares you and just accepted you might wreck it? I need someone to tell me to put a real dark in there or talk me off the ledge, I genuinely can't tell which one I need

It has taken me four sheets and most of a week to get the silver marbling on a single Cyclamen hederifolium leaf correct, and I finished it this morning. The difficulty is not the pattern. Anyone can trace a pattern. The difficulty is that the silver is not a color laid on top of the green. It sits in the leaf and shifts with the light, and if you paint it as a flat grey wash you get something that looks like a print of the leaf rather than the leaf. I tried masking fluid on the second attempt and it left a hard, dead edge I could see from across the room. Third attempt I overworked it and the paper went to wool. This one is four thin washes of a very weak viridian and French ultramarine, with the silver left as bare paper and only the faintest cool shadow dropped in at the margins of the marking. I did nothing to it for two days in between and that was the trick, as it usually is. It is one leaf on a half sheet. My husband asked what I had been doing all week and I showed him and he said, "that's one leaf." He is not wrong, and he is also not a botanical painter. I have five more to do for the plate. Some weeks this work is entirely humbling and I would not trade it.

Yesterday I was working on a study of a single branch of Amelanchier canadensis, and I spent the better part of three hours painting and then re-painting one leaf. The first attempt was technically fine -- the proportions were right, the color was in the right range -- but it was dead. It had no life in it. The edge was too hard, the transition from the green to the reddish tip was abrupt, and I knew I would see it every time I looked at the painting. I painted it out, let it dry, and started again. Better, but the veins were too heavy. Painted it out again. Third time I got it right, and I cannot tell you why the third one worked when the first two didn't. The difference is maybe half a shade in the wetness of the brush, a fraction of a second in the timing of a lift. But you can feel it. My husband came in and asked how my day was. I said good, I finished one leaf. He is used to this by now.

Someone at an open studio yesterday looked at a big interior I've been working on for two months and said, with real admiration, "wow, it looks just like a photograph." I smiled and thanked her because what else do you do. But inside I was thinking, I spent two months fighting the light in that room, scraping back a passage three times because the edge was too hard, because a photograph would never have that softness in the shadow side. I am not trying to make a photograph. If I wanted a photograph I would take one in three seconds. The funny thing is people think it's the highest praise. It tells me they don't see anything I'm actually doing. The paint, the color temperature shifting across a form, the decisions. It reduces it to likeness, which is the least interesting thing about a painting. I know I should be grateful people look at all. Some days I am. Yesterday I was not.

There is a bucket by the door that I use for the final rinse, and I stopped emptying it at some point in June. Maybe July. The water has gone a strange pale blue, almost grey, and there is a smell now, salt and something older underneath. It started because I was lazy. Then I noticed the prints that came out of it were softer at the edges, the blue less hard, and I told myself that was a reason to keep it. I'm not sure that's true. I think I just like that it is there, holding all the hours I spent over it, and pouring it away feels like throwing out a day. My partner asked this morning if it was going to live there forever. I said probably not. We both knew I was lying. Does anyone else keep something in the studio that has stopped being useful and you keep it anyway? Or is it only me who hoards the water.

For years my habit when a wash went wrong in front of students was to stop, put the board face down, and start a fresh sheet. Clean, decisive, and I realise now it taught them absolutely nothing except that mistakes are terminal. This past Saturday I was demonstrating a leaf of Berberis, and the first wash of sap green went down too fast. It pooled along one edge and left a hard tide line where I lifted the brush a beat too soon. Nine people watched me do it. I left it there. Then I went back in with a barely damp brush and worked the tideline outward while the paper was still at that stage where it will forgive you, which is a window of perhaps forty seconds and no longer. It dried flat. Not invisible, but honest. The leaf still reads as a leaf. I told them what I was doing while I was doing it, which I have never done before, and one woman at the back said she had assumed that once a wash was down you simply lived with it. She has been painting for eleven years. The correction is now the part of the class people ask about. I have mixed feelings about that, since a demonstration of doing it right the first time would have been more useful, but it was the truer thing to show.

I need to say this out loud to people who will understand. There is a shoulder in the interior I am working on, a woman seated at a table with a window behind her, and I have repainted that shoulder four times since Monday. The problem is not the shape. The shape has been right since the second pass. The problem is that in getting it right I kept softening the edge against the wall behind it, wet into wet, because every time it looked a half millimetre too hard I reached for the brush instead of leaving the room. Now the paint there is about a centimetre thick in places and the edge has gone to mud. It reads as fuzzy, which is worse than hard. Hard is at least a decision. Classical training gives you a lot of beautiful words for edges and none of them help when your hand is nervous. So tonight I am scraping that shoulder back to the ground with a palette knife, which will take two days to dry properly, and then I will paint it once. One pass. Then I put the brushes down and go and eat something. Anyone else have a place on a canvas where the number of attempts has become the actual subject?

ok so the water heater in my building died on Tuesday and I'm painting with kettle water now and I swear it's changed my whole setup?? I have this tiny electric kettle that takes like four minutes to boil and I've started boiling it first thing when I walk in, before I even take my coat off, and then I just stand there waiting for it like an idiot and honestly those four minutes have turned into my actual warmup. I used to just run the tap room temp and go. Now I'm waiting and looking at the paper and thinking about the drawing before I even touch a brush and my first washes this week have been so much more decisive?? which is stupid, it should not take a dead water heater to make me slow down and think for three minutes. but also it's a real problem because the kettle only holds a liter and a half and I'm doing a big 22x30 sheet of the window (the one with the fire escape, I've painted it like nine times now) and I keep having to stop mid wash to go boil more and the paper starts drying at the edges and I get those hard lines I don't want and then I panic and try to lift them and gouge the surface. did that yesterday, tore a hole the size of a dime in the sky. almost cried. actually did a little. anyway. does anyone else have a setup that's held together by one stupid appliance? because I'm now weirdly attached to the kettle and considering buying a second one so I can have backup hot water and I need someone to tell me if that's insane or if this is just what studio life is

I pulled an old still life out of the rack this week. Pears on a copper pot, I painted it around 2015, and it always bothered me that the far edge of the pot went dead. Hard line, no atmosphere. So I set up to retouch it, scraped just that passage down, and repainted it. Now the problem is the mark itself. The new paint is confident, it turns, it sits in the light the way it should. But next to the older paint it looks young. You can feel the ten years in the difference. My hand is not the same hand. The retouch is technically better and it does not belong to the painting. I know there are ways to age a surface, varnish layers, glazes. But that's cosmesis. The real question is whether you can put a new mark into an old painting and have it be honest, or whether it always stays a transplant. I left it half done. Not sure I want to finish.

I have this one flat brush, a no-name synthetic I picked up at a craft store for maybe $4 five years ago. The ferrule is a little loose and the bristles have a slight curve to them now. I own brushes that cost ten times as much and are objectively better in every way. And yet almost every painting I finish has that brush somewhere in the process. I think at this point it's muscle memory. I know exactly how much paint it holds, how it lays down a wash, how hard to press to get the exact edge I want. A new brush would be sharper and cleaner and probably better. But I don't want to break in another one. My husband doesn't get it. He keeps saying just buy a new one, it's four dollars. But it's not about the money. It's about the fact that this specific brush has been in my hand for every painting I've made since I came back to this. I'm not sentimental about much but I guess I am about this.

So the auld roller finally gave up last week, splitting right along the edge, and I went and got a proper one. Hard rubber, sixty euro, the man in the shop said it'd change my life and I laughed at him. It has, in the wrong direction. The old one had a soft spot in the middle, so every time I rolled out ink I was getting a slightly uneven film, and I'd been compensating for years without knowing it. Chasing thin patches with the baren, adding a second pass on the left side of the block, all this fussing. Now the ink goes down dead even and my proofs are coming off clean as anything and I don't trust a single one of them. All that fizzing I did on the hare's ear last month? Not the carving at all. It was the roller. Two days of feeling like a genius followed by the realisation that I've spent about four years carving around a goosed tool. The hare looks the same, like. The hare always looks the same, that's the whole problem. Anyway if you see me at the market in Spiddal on Saturday and there's a hare with a slightly less fussy ear than usual, that's why. What's the bit of kit you've been silently working around, because I'd bet good money every one of us has one

Spent most of this week on two large ones, 190 x 150, and for once the grey held. That sounds small. It is not small. Grey is the thing that eats me alive in the studio. Mixed warm it turns to mud, mixed cool it turns to dishwater, and after three days of layering and scraping back you look at it and feel nothing. This time I took the cold wax down hard, more than I usually dare, and kept the pigment lean. It dried matte, slightly chalky, and the colour underneath keeps showing through at the edges where I dragged the scraper. Two days ago I stood in front of it and did not want to fix anything. That almost never happens. Usually I want to fix everything. The other canvas is still fighting me. Same mix, same hand, and it sits there like wet cardboard. I keep telling myself the good one only looks good because the bad one is next to it, which is probably true and also useless as advice. I have a show in the spring, so the timing is good. The market can do what it does. Right now I am mostly relieved that a colour I have been chasing since about 2019 finally stood still for a minute.

so I've been doing these flat color fields where the tape edge is meant to disappear. wet tape off while the paint's still tacky, hard line, no bleed. clean. that's the whole trick. except on the current one (36x48, cadmium red ground) the tape pulled up a strip of the red underneath and left this ragged little shoreline. and the worst part is it's better. the red underneath is slightly different because I mixed two batches and didn't match them properly, so now there's a visible seam where the two reds meet and it reads like the painting has a history or something. a mistake is doing my composition for me. problem: I can't tell if I like it because it's genuinely good or because it's mine and I've been staring at it for nine days. also if I "reproduce" this on purpose on the next one it'll look like a gimmick and I'll hate it. which probably answers my own question. anyway. tape edges. do you chase the clean line or let the tape leave teeth.

back leg snapped clean off, someone had tried to fix it with a wood screw and made it worse. i gave the woman two dollars and she looked at me like i'd done her a favor which, i guess, i had. it's sitting on my work table under a lamp right now. i keep not drawing it. that's the whole problem lately, everything i start comes out too neat, too resolved, like i'm illustrating the thing instead of looking at it. the chair doesn't resolve. it just sits there being broken and specific, the splintered end of the leg still pale where it snapped, the screw hole gone black at the edges. i've been photographing it from underneath for a week, which is a weird angle nobody would choose, which is probably why it's working. three of them are pinned up over the sink. my friend said they look like a crime scene. she's not wrong. anyway. making work about damage is easy to say and hard to actually do without turning the damage into a prop. this chair is teaching me the difference.

The gallery opening Tuesday, a man stands in front of my portrait for a long time. I think he's actually looking at it, the light on the shoulder, the way I handled the edge of the jaw. And then he turns to me, very serious, and says: "Your technique is impeccable, but don't you ever feel like loosening up? More freedom?" Freedom. From what, exactly? From the years it takes to make a transition between light and shadow look inevitable? I've spent twenty years learning how to make a passage look effortless and he's telling me it looks too effortful. I said, "It took me a decade to get this tight. I'll loosen up when it costs me nothing." He walked off. I spent the rest of the night wondering if he had a point and hating that I wondered it. The portrait is good. It's honest. It's hard-won. That's the whole of it.

I make my cyanotypes with seawater instead of tap, which I know sounds romantic and is mostly just practical, the sea is a two minute walk and the tap water here is very hard anyway. But the tray of it has been on the balcony since Tuesday and I have not gone near it. The thing about seawater is it does not stay the same. Something in it keeps working on the print after you think you have finished. Two days in and the blues start to go slightly green at the edges, then a sort of grey comes up from underneath. Sometimes it is beautiful. Sometimes the whole thing turns to dishwater and there is nothing to do but start again with a fresh sheet. So now I am standing in the kitchen looking at the balcony door, knowing there is a print in there that is either the best thing I have made this year or a dead loss, and either way it is already too late to change it. I have been finding small reasons not to go out. I watered the plants twice. I will look tomorrow. I always say tomorrow.

So the small cheap brayer I'd been using for years finally gave up, the roller went egg-shaped on me around last Tuesday, and I went in to the art shop in town half intending to buy another cheap one and came out with a proper hard rubber one for a tenner. I know. Wild spending. But here's the thing, I've been printing the same block of a heron for about three weeks now trying to get an edition of twelve out of it, and I was blaming the lino, blaming the ink, blaming the damp weather in the shed, and it turns out the whole time it was the brayer. The cheap one was pressing uneven, so the middle of the block was picking up ink lovely and the edges were starving. Twelve prints in and the last six look like a different block entirely. So many years at this and I still spend a fortnight giving out about the wrong yoke. The block was grand. I was the problem. Trimmed the first six in half for test prints, which killed me slightly, but they're in the bin now and I've moved on with my life. Anyway, the heron's nearly there. Much darker at the edges now, properly moody, which is what I wanted all along.

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.