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I still remember the first gallery I walked into cold with my portfolio. It was a small natural-history gallery in a city I didn't know well, and I had rehearsed what I would say roughly forty times on the train. The owner was polite, asked to keep the portfolio overnight, and called the next day to say she didn't have room on the walls but she'd keep me in mind. She never did call back, but the experience taught me something about just showing up. What happened with yours? Did anyone say yes, or was it a quiet no that you learned from anyway?

This American couple at a café in Vieux Lyon yesterday. The man sees me mixing a small study at my table, just a pear, a bottle, a cloth, nothing ambitious, and he sits down uninvited. Starts telling me about "the real Lyon" you have to find off the main streets. The traboules, the bouchons, the silk history. I've lived here forty-four years. My grandfather worked in the Canuts. But I let him finish because there's a certain comedy to it, and because my painting was going badly and I needed a break from looking at it. Then his wife notices I'm French and asks if I've ever been to Paris. Like it's the natural next stop on the tour.

I did it this morning. Third time I've repainted this interior, same corner of my studio, same grey November light through the window, and it just would not settle. The drawing was off, the values were muddy, I kept overmixing and killing the colour. So I took the palette knife and scraped the whole thing back to a thin brown smear on the canvas. There's this moment after you scrape. The painting's gone, but the canvas has a history now, ghosts of all the wrong decisions. The surface is smoother, there's a stain to work into instead of a white void. And suddenly I can see what was wrong the whole time. The floor plane was tilted. Of course. I don't know if other painters feel this, but scraping down is almost better than a good day of painting. It's a reset without being a blank slate. You keep the mistakes as a foundation. Very few things in life work like that.

I got to sorting my scrap basket this morning. Lord, it was a mess. I mean a honest-to-goodness tangle of strips and triangles and odd-shaped pieces I told myself I'd use someday. And I got to noticing how I sort 'em, by color family first, then by what they came from. That little blue floral, that's from a dress my niece wore to Easter Sunday back in ought-eight. That mustard yellow, that's a man's shirt from the thrift that I unpicked for the good seams. I don't just sort fabric, I sort memories. And I thought, well that's me all over. Can't throw nothing away if it carried a story. My grandmother was the same way, she had a button tin that was more family history than any photo album. I told my daughter this morning, I said, I don't know if I'm a quilter who saves things or a saver who quilts. She just laughed and handed me her old jeans with a tear in the knee. "Here, Mama," she said. "Add me to the pile." I reckon that's what I'll do this afternoon. Turn her jeans into something she'll give her own girl one day. Y'all got a scrap basket that's really a memory basket too? Or am I just the old woman who can't let go? 🙂

I keep seeing the war stories piling up in here, and I've got a few of my own. But I'm curious about something more basic. When you were starting out with gallery outreach, how many did you approach before one actually took you on? Mine was 22. Twenty-two polite rejections, non-replies, and one very confusing meeting that went nowhere before a small natural-history museum gallery in the Pacific Northwest said yes. That yes changed everything for me, but I nearly gave up at about number 15. I've had students ask me this and I never know what to tell them. What was your number? And was it worth the ones that said no?

I spent this morning painting a section of an old workbench in my studio. The light here in Lyon, even on a cloudy day, has this particular quality that catches the grain of the wood, the worn patches where tools have rested for years. It’s a subtle thing, this interplay of light and texture, but it’s what I’m always chasing. It makes you feel the history of the object. It’s why I love oils so much; the paint itself can hold that physical sensation. Some days it feels like a battle to get it right, but when it clicks, voilà.

So my granddaughter set up my Instagram a few years back, and I just post what I'm working on. I don't know all the tricks, I just put the quilt up there with whatever I feel like saying about it. And this young lady from California, she's a curator at some museum, I had to look it up, messages me and says she found my work through a hashtag I didn't even put on there. #improvisationalpiecing, something somebody else tagged me with. She said she'd been looking for quilters working "in the Gee's Bend lineage" and couldn't find nobody who wasn't already famous and priced out of reach. I sold her a quilt for $800. She found it through a tag I didn't even know existed. I got regular customers, Lord bless 'em, the ones who buy baby quilts and lap quilts for their mama. That's steady money. But the people who find me through these art-world tags, they're a different kind of buyer entirely. They want the story. They want the history. They don't blink at the price. Makes me think I'm posting for the wrong audience half the time. But I don't have the energy to chase two worlds at once. Y'all got any advice on that?

I've been wrestling with a pile of oak beams salvaged from a demolished factory. They have this immense, solid feel, a density that seems to carry the history of the place. Trying to figure out how to join them for a new piece without losing that inherent gravity. Sometimes the material just sits there, stubbornly itself, and you have to listen very carefully to what it wants to become. Or, more often, what it absolutely will not become.

Found a frame at Goodwill last week, heavy wood, gaudy gold leaf on top of god knows what. Brought it home and started stripping it. First layer came off easy, that cheap spray-on gold you see everywhere. Second layer was a dark green, almost black, like a forest at night. Someone had painted that on carefully, by hand. Third layer, and this is the one that stopped me, was a deep burgundy, but only on the inner half, like it had been sitting against a wall and they only painted what showed. Three different people, probably three different decades, all trying to make the same frame fit their walls. None of them knew each other. And now I'm the fourth person, sanding it down to bare wood because I don't know what to put on top of all that history. I'm not sure what the move is. Part of me wants to leave it patchy, let all the layers show in different spots. Part of me thinks that's sentimental and just pick a color and commit. Anyone ever hit a wall with a found piece like this? Not asking for a solution, just wondering if you've been there.

A foreign buyer came to my village last year. A German lady, very polite, through a cooperative. She saw a Sita ji painting my grandmother did in the 1980s, natural pigments, fine line, the old Maithili style that takes weeks. She wanted to buy it. I told her price, 8,000 rupees. She smiled and said "for local art, that seems high." Then she offered 500 rupees. I could not speak for a moment. 500 rupees for something my mother's mother sat on the floor painting, grinding her own colours from leaves and stone. I told her no, sorry, this painting is not for sale now. She looked confused. I think she thought I would bargain. But some things you do not bargain over. This is the problem we have with folk art. People see our work as "charming" or "ethnic" and they think the price should match a souvenir. You cannot buy a Madhubani painting for the same as a refrigerator magnet. My daughter worked three days on a single fish motif last month. Three days. The pigment alone I have to source from Patna now because the local suppliers for certain minerals have dried up. I am not angry at the lady. She did not know. But I am tired of explaining that this art has a price. My time, my mother's time, my grandmother's recipes for colour. It is not decorative. It is our history.

My old desk lamp finally gave up today. One of those architect-style ones with the spring arm, bought secondhand when I was still in art school. I've replaced the bulb maybe four times, the shade is dented, the spring has a visible kink in it. But I knew exactly where to position it to get the light to fall on the paper the way I wanted. Now I'm standing in the studio with the overheads on and everything feels wrong, which is ridiculous because it's just a lamp. I went online to look for the same model and found it immediately. Haven't ordered it yet. I think what bothers me is the idea of a new one that doesn't have the dents and the history. That's not rational. Anyway. Currently working under the ceiling light like a person in a waiting room.