Search

my youngest, three years old, got in here last week while I was making tea. found my good carving tool, the Pfeil No. 11, the one I've had about twelve years, the handle's worn to fit my hand. took it out to the garden and carved his name into the concrete path. just scratched it in there, lovely and deep, like a little viking. I was raging for about thirty seconds before I realised that's the most permanent mark I've ever seen that gouge make. sure I'll never move house now, there's a signature on the place. the worst of it though is I spent the next hour hunting for the gouge I was actually using before he came in, the 5mm V-tool, I'd only put it down for a second, and I still haven't found it. it's gone. the kids have their own dimension where tools go. I'll find it in a welly boot in three years. anyway the path has beautiful lettering now, fair play to him. kid's got a steady hand.

Kid couldn't have been older than twenty. Points at a piece I'm loading out, thirty pound chunk of basalt I spent three weeks on. Asks if I found it like that. I said no, I carved it. He says yeah but did you make the rock or did you find the rock. I told him I found the rock. Four hundred million years old, I didn't make it. But I sure as hell made what's inside it. He nodded like I was humoring him and walked off. Not his fault. Nobody teaches looking anymore. They think if it didn't come out of a machine it must have washed up on a beach fully formed.

Been at the same studio for twenty-two years. My DeWalt angle grinder dates back to the first month. Replaced the brushes three times, new cord once, dropped it off a ladder onto concrete and it barely chipped. The shop supervisor at the fabrication place I apprenticed under always said you buy a good tool once and it outlasts every relationship you'll have. He wasn't wrong. Finally had to retire it today. The armature's gone, I can smell it, and no amount of new brushes fixes that. Put it on the shelf instead of in the bin. Can't bring myself to toss it. Which is ridiculous, it's a tool, tools get used up. That's the point of them. My kid asked why I kept it and I didn't have an answer. I think I just wanted one thing to outlast the work, not the other way around.

My gallery suggested it as a favour, half-joking, because I keep sending them photos of paintings that look flat and dead in a jpeg. So I found a student from the academy, a video person, and let her follow me around for three days. Scraping back a layer, mixing cold wax, the stupid thing where I stand and stare at the wall for twenty minutes. I figured it would be nothing. She cut it into forty seconds and posted it herself. I did not look at the comments for two days because I was sure it would be embarrassing, the way I always look slightly annoyed working, and then the gallery called me and said my inbox was full. I don't know what to do with this. I spent twenty years building a reputation the slow way and a clip of me scraping paint off a canvas has done more for attention than any exhibition opening I've had since 2019. It is not the work. It is me looking like I am concentrating, which I am, but so is everyone. I am not going to pretend the attention is bad. But I am old enough to know that this is a different kind of currency and I do not yet know what it buys, or what it costs me to keep minting it. The kid wants to come back and film the next piece start to finish. I said yes. I have no idea if that was wise.

I had a booth at a local craft fair Saturday and a woman picked up one of my acrylic landscapes, looked at it for a good minute, and said "oh this is nice, I could probably do this with my daughter's $5 watercolor set." And I just stood there like... okay. So do it then? I'd love to see you mix titanium white into a puddle of Crayola paint and get that kind of coverage on canvas. Please. Film it. I didn't say any of that of course. I smiled and said "you should give it a try, it's really relaxing!" and she moved on. My husband said I was too nice and I probably was but also what's the point. People who think art supplies are all the same are not people you're going to convince in one conversation at a folding table. Still felt like packing up my easel and going home though.

Young guy at the open studio last weekend. Watched me work a piece of limestone for maybe thirty seconds. Then he tells me he could program a CNC router to cut the same shape in twenty minutes and walk away while it ran. I asked him when was the last time he chipped a tooth on a tool grit he didn't see. When he had to look at a piece of stone for three hours before he knew what was in it. When he ruined a week of work because he hit a fissure nobody could see. He said he didn't need to do any of that because the machine did it for him. I'm not against the machines. I've used them for roughing out when it makes sense. But the way he said it, like the whole point was to not be there. Like the work was an inconvenience between him and having something to sell. Twenty minutes. I wanted to hand him the chisel and a block of granite and see how that twenty minutes felt on hour three.

Dropped a slab of bluestone off at a quarry supply yard this week to get it re-surfaced. Been using this same stone thirty years. Same yard, same guys, most of them know me by name. New kid behind the counter. Twenty-two maybe. Sees the work order, sees it's going to a sculptor, and launches into a lecture. Sandstone is softer, better for fine detail, you should really be using limestone if you want it to hold an edge. Talking at me like I just walked in off the street. I let him finish. Then I asked him when he last dressed a block with a point chisel, or even held a bushing hammer. He said he hadn't. I said the bluestone's fine, I've carved about four hundred tonnes of it, and my edge holds plenty. He's still mad about it. I paid and left. Young enough that being wrong in front of people still costs him something. I get that. But I've earned the right to not be schooled by a kid who's never swung a fretsaw. The worst part is I'll get older and do the same thing to someone else. That's what's coming for all of us.

I was working on a small still life on Sunday, just pears, nothing fancy, and my 11yo wandered through the kitchen, glanced at it, and said "that's fine, mom." Fine. Not good, not bad, just fine. And I know that's a kid being a kid, he didn't mean anything by it, but man it's stuck with me. I think because I've been in a rut lately where everything I finish feels just... fine. Competent but flat. Like I hit the technical notes but there's no spark. And hearing it out loud from somebody who wasn't even trying to critique me just kind of confirmed it. Anyway I moved the pears around and repainted the background last night and I think it helped. We'll see if he upgrades me to "pretty good" this weekend lol.

Got the go-ahead on a commission for a large landscape piece. It's a local scene, a rolling hill farm at sunset. I'm so excited but also a little nervous, it's bigger than anything I've done before. I've stretched a 30x40 canvas and now just have to actually put brush to it. Wish me luck! I'll need all the focus I can get with the kids home for the summer too. Maybe I'll hide out in the garage studio after bedtime.

My sixteen-year-old came into the studio yesterday without knocking, which she never does, and stood behind me for maybe a full minute while I was working. Then she said, "Maman, your paintings look less sad now." I wanted to be defensive at first. But she's right. I didn't even see it until she said it. For years my palette was all terre verte and raw umber and bone black, everything in that low grey northern light. I think I was painting the inside of my own head without realising it. The fallow years I had, the disappointment, it was all there in the colour, every time. Now there's more warmth. Not bright, not cheerful, just... alive. A little Naples yellow in the shadows. A red glaze where I would have left it dead. Kids see things. She doesn't know about the decade I lost, she only knows what she sees on the easel. And she saw it.

Three weeks without the press. Sent the bearings off to a fella in Clare who said he'd have them done in a week, took three, sure what's the rush in Clare. I was half-convinced I'd get it back and something else would be wrong with it, or I'd forgotten how to print altogether. Stripped it down, cleaned everything I could reach while I was waiting, found a biscuit wrapper the youngest had posted through the roller gap back in February. Reassembled it this afternoon with a spanner I'd left out in the rain and had to dry off on the Aga. Pulled the first proof an hour ago. An old block, a hare I've carved so many times I could do it in my sleep. And it just... worked. Clean. Even pressure. The ink laid down like it was glad to be there. I stood there staring at it for longer than I'd admit. The missus came in and said "is that it" and I said yeah that's it and she said "grand" and went back to putting the kids to bed. Which is exactly the right amount of fuss. If you've got a tool or a machine or a process that's been sitting broken and you're dreading getting back to it, just get the first one done. The second one's easy after that.

There's a little fleam I bought off an old carpenter at a market in Ennis maybe eight years ago, cost me a fiver, and it's still the sharpest thing in my toolkit. Handle's held together with electrical tape at this stage but I'll not part with it. Every morning I'm in the studio I run it along the edge of a gouge a couple of times and it brings the life back into it. And then I've a brand new burnisher I paid forty-odd quid for sitting in a drawer since I got it because the one I actually use is a smooth bit of bone I found on the beach in Connemara. Kid you not. Dog dug it up, I cleaned it off, and it's the perfect thing. What's the bit of kit you won't let go of because it works and that's all that matters, and what's the expensive thing you own that you barely touch? I'm not talking brushes obviously, we all have the brush we'd cry over losing. I mean the odd bits.

Picking out a block of limestone this morning. Twenty years I've been buying from the same yard. Kid working there, maybe 25, sees me checking for fissures and starts telling me about CNC waterjets and how much waste I could save. I told him I don't want to save waste. I want the stone to tell me where to cut. He looked at me like I was speaking Latin. Not mad about the tech. It's fine for some things. But I'm not trying to produce units. I'm trying to find what's already in there. You can't program a machine to do that and pretending you can is how you end up with a thousand identical smooth river stones that all look like nothing.

Seven years I did the Christmas markets circuit around Galway, and sure I loved the craic of it, the whole gang of us makers propping each other up over cold tea at half nine. But I started doing the sums on it last year and the amount of hours I was standing on my feet to shift maybe thirty prints at a tenner margin each... you'd get more per hour stacking shelves in Tesco. So I pulled out of the big one this winter. No table, no fairy lights, no man trying to haggle me down to a fiver for something that took me two days to carve. What I did instead was dead boring. I printed a plain little catalogue, four pages, black and white, every piece photographed flat on the kitchen table with the kids' homework shoved out of frame, and I posted the damn thing to about forty people who've bought off me before or who run the small galleries I've dealt with. Old school. Envelopes and stamps, like a man posting letters to his granny. And it worked. Sold twenty-three prints before December even got going. People wrote back, some of them just to say they liked the look of the hare on page two, no purchase, and that's grand too. The gallery in Westport took twelve on the strength of a paper catalogue and a phone call. I'm not saying markets are dead. I'm saying I was so busy performing the selling I forgot the actual selling. Nobody wants to scroll you at a draughty hall in November when they can sit in their own kitchen and pick what they genuinely like off a table of your work. Turns out the thing that worked was the most old-fashioned thing I could have done, and my phone never once told me how many people saw it.

Painted a still life tonight at the kitchen table after the kids went down. Same table we ate spaghetti at two hours earlier. I wiped it down, laid out the drop cloth, and there's still a smear of tomato sauce on the corner of my reference photo that I just decided to live with. I used to feel bad about not having a real studio space. Read all these posts about people's dedicated rooms with north light and proper easels and I'd get all wistful. But honestly the kitchen table works. The light is awful. The cat walks across my palette at least twice a session. My 8 year old stuck a drawing of a dinosaur to the easel I can't even use because there's no room for it. But it's the only uninterrupted hour I get and I'll take it. Finished a decent little pear study tonight, better than my last one. That's the whole win. Packed it up and now I'm eating leftover spaghetti over the sink like a civilized person. Who else is painting on a dining room table or a folding tray or wherever they can grab space?

Twenty-four prints in an edition and not one of them with a bald spot or a jagged edge. I've done this long enough to know that's not luck, that's the block finally behaving itself after I stopped fighting it. Carved that heron for the third time, third go at the same bird, and this is the one where I just let the lino tell me where it wanted to give. Sounds feckin' mystical writing it out but that's genuinely what it is. First forty prints all had this one spot on the wing where the ink was shy. Re-carved it once, twice, then I just left it and the thing started printing like a dream. Signed and numbered the whole run this morning with the kids at the table, little fella trying to press his palm into the corner of every one. Had to tell him no about forty times and he still got one. So there's a print out there with a tiny handprint in the margin that I'll sell to nobody and keep for himself. Grand. Anyway. Twenty-four clean pulls, my back is wrecked, and I'm dead proud of the lot of them. The bird finally earned his keep.

Kid came to the workshop Tuesday, wants to learn mosaic, great. First thing out of his mouth: why don't you just stick everything with epoxy and skip the grout, save yourself the week. I stared at him for a second. We're in Thessaloniki, the floor under our feet has been sitting there with lime mortar and grout for 1,400 years, still holding. And he wants me to explain to him why I don't use construction adhesive on a panel I'd already be dead before it needed re-grouting. I get it, nobody teaches this stuff anymore, it's not his fault. But I told him to work a whole small piece the old way before he asked me that question again. He did a palm-sized fish, got real quiet around hour three of nipping smalti. There's a reason the Romans didn't have a shortcut, and it's not that they were too dumb to invent silicone. I'm not saying grout is sacred. I'm saying you don't learn a two-thousand-year-old technique by asking how to skip its middle. He's back tomorrow. We'll see.

Okay so I finally wrote down the actual hours on a piece for the first time. Big mistake. Huge. This vase, the one I posted last week, the green one with the little face peeking through the glaze. Sold it at the market for €80, felt like a win. Real figure, fine, whatever. Then I counted. Seven days on and off because the clay kept slumping when I built it too tall, two failed attempts in the kiln, the glaze crawled on the first fire and I had to sand the whole thing down and redo it. Like 55+ hours all in. €80 for 55 hours. That's about €1.40 an hour. A kid with a lemonade stand earns more than that. I don't get how other makers survive on this. Either they're way faster than me, or they're not counting either, or they've got a partner with a real salary. My grandma keeps asking why I don't just charge more and honestly? Fear. I'm scared that if I put €180 on it nobody buys it and I've made a thing that just sits in the studio taking up shelf space. But at €1.40 an hour I could flip burgers and have more money and more free time. I want to know what the actual number is that makes it worth it. Not the dream number. The one where I don't feel like a clown doing this.

ok so I've been painting the same window in my apartment for basically the whole eight months I've been full time. same frame, same light, same cracks in the plaster. people keep asking when I'm gonna do something else and honestly??? the more I do it the less I want to. it's not about the window it's about how the light changes the whole thing and I never catch it. today at like 5pm the sun hit the ledge and turned everything this weird honey color and I did a wash that I was SO sure was gonna be the one and then it dried and it's wrong. again. but my mom called while I was staring at it and she said it sounds like I'm learning the same way I did when I was a kid drawing the same horse over and over. I don't know if that's comforting or if it just means I'll never be done. probably both. anyway if anyone else has a thing they paint on repeat for no good reason tell me I'm not insane. also the honey light is still sort of there if you want to come look

Month and a half sitting staring at the same half-carved block of a heron and hating every line of it. Told meself it was the wrong lino, wrong tool, wrong phase of the moon, whatever I could blame. The whole time the real problem was I'd decided this one had to be The Good One, the one that says something, and sure you can't carve under that yoke. No wonder the blade kept slipping. Then the kids got into the studio last week, the usual carnage, and my daughter knocked the block off the bench. Landed lino-side down on the concrete, gouged the corner of it. Would've wept a month ago. Instead I just carved straight through the damage, turned the scar into part of the bird's wing, and it's the best couple of passes I've done in three months. Proofed it tonight and there's a heron on the paper with a proper scuff in its wing and I'm mad about it. There's a lesson in there somewhere about not being so precious about your own work and I'm sure I'll forget it by Thursday. But tonight I'm chuffed. That's the win. And for the record the lino was grand. It was never the lino.