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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.

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.

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.

my sister-in-law's friend asked me months ago if I could paint her parents' lake cabin for their anniversary. I kept putting it off because the pressure of doing something for someone else, someone paying me, felt so much heavier than painting for myself. finally got it done this week and mailed it out this morning. I'm not sure how it landed honestly. I kept second guessing the colors, the angle I chose, whether it even looked like the place. but it's gone now so it's out of my hands. she paid me $200 which felt like both a lot and not nearly enough at the same time. told myself I'd use it to buy better brushes but I'll probably just spend it on the kids 😅 anyone else get weirdly nervous about commissions or is it just me

I did the math on a commission last week. Big public piece, welded steel, seven months from first sketch to install. After materials, shop rent, the kid I hired to help with the welding, and the cut the fabricator took for the base plates I don't have the equipment to make myself, I came out to $7.50 an hour. I remember when I started out I'd have been thrilled with that. Thrilled. Now I look at it and think what the hell am I doing. The worst part is the client was happy. Paid on time, no complaints. So the price felt fair to them. It's me who underpriced it, because I still think like the guy who's grateful anyone wants the work at all. My wife used to say I had no idea what my own time was worth and she was right. Three years since she passed and I still hear her saying it. Anyone else do the math on a finished job and feel like a damn fool?

I was digging through the closet looking for my good brushes, the ones I hide from the kids, and I pulled out this canvas I'd completely forgotten about. A little barn scene I started in a workshop back in 2021 and then gave up on because I couldn't get the shadows right on the roof. I sat there holding it for a minute, and I could see exactly what I was doing wrong back then. So I mixed up some Payne's grey and burnt umber and fixed it in about ten minutes. Ten minutes! Three years of sitting in a dark closet and it just needed a little patience and a better eye. Felt weirdly nice. Like giving past-me a hand. Anyone else ever rescue an old abandoned piece?

I cannot paint in silence. It feels like the room is waiting for something. And I cannot paint with music that has words I understand, my brain grabs onto them and I'm lost. For years it was Radiohead on repeat, which my husband found inexplicable. Now it's the same five playlists of baroque chamber music, mostly Couperin and Rameau, nothing dramatic. The rhythm of it gets into my hand somehow. If the tempo changes too much I notice. Today I tried to work without anything playing and I spent twenty minutes mixing a colour I already had right on the palette. Just staring. So I put the headphones on and the painting started behaving. What do you listen to that you'd be embarrassed to admit? I'll start: I know every word of Kid A and I don't even like it anymore. It's just what the paint wants.

Took me three weeks to get back into the studio proper after Christmas. You know the way, kids back to school, chest infection going round, the whole place damp and cold and the ink was like treacle. Kept finding reasons to just tidy the bench instead of cutting. Anyway last night I finally pulled a proof of a block I started in November. Big heron, neck curved down, standing in that shallow water you get on the Corrib at low tide. First proof was rank, cut too deep in the wing feathers, lost the line. Had the whole thing sitting there mocking me. Pulled a second proof at half eleven last night with a different black and a lighter touch on the roller. And the missus came down to see what I was at, coffee in hand, looked at it drying on the rack, and said "that's grand now, that's a nice one." For her that's the highest praise you'll get. No fuss. Took herself back up to bed. Sometimes you just need to get through the bad version to find the good one. And a "that's grand" off someone who's seen every failed print you've ever made. That'll do.

Started a new still life tonight after the kids finally went to bed. Got all my supplies out on the kitchen table, got my palette set up, got maybe 20 minutes into blocking in the background and realized I forgot to pack my son's lunch for tomorrow. So I had to stop, wipe my hands, make a sandwich, put the grapes in the little container he'll complain about anyway. Came back and the paint on my palette was already starting to skin over. I love painting in the cracks of the day but man, I dream about having a space I can just leave a mess and come back to. Even a corner. Just one corner where a half-finished canvas isn't in danger of getting ketchup on it. Anyone else making it work in a non-studio studio? How do you handle the constant setup/teardown without losing momentum?

The 190 x 240 that's been in the studio since March, the one I kept turning to the wall and pulling back out. Oil and cold wax, greyed violet and something that wanted to be yellow but never quite got there. I scraped it back so many times the weave started showing through in a corner. Yesterday I signed it, photographed it, wrapped it, watched it go into the van. All day I told myself it was just another piece. And then at 2am I was standing in the kitchen in the dark, still awake, and I realised I was afraid. Not of it failing, of it meaning something. To someone else. Outside the room where I made it. That's the part you can't rehearse. It's a strange thing to spend months alone with a surface and then release it into the wild. Like watching your kid get on a bus for the first time. You want them to go. But you also want to pull them back and keep them safe. Anyway. It's gone now. I'll know in a few weeks. Or I won't. Sometimes you never know.

okay I'm dying to know how everyone landed their first gallery. not the dream one, the first one that actually said yes. mine was this tiny cafe-gallery hybrid in a neighborhood that's definitely getting gentrified lol. I literally walked in with a portfolio folder (remember those??) and asked if they'd look at my stuff. the owner was like "sure kid, leave it with me" and I think she mostly felt bad for me but she gave me a two-week show and I sold three paintings. I was SO nervous I almost threw up before the opening. did you email? walk in? get introduced? someone slide into your DMs? I feel like everybody's story is different and I wanna hear the real ones, not the polished version.

two open ink tins, one of them definitely crusting over. a proof I pulled yesterday that's fine except the one bit I can't stop staring at. the cat asleep on the only clean bit of newsprint. a coffee mug from three days ago that I'm pretending I'll wash later. and the tune I've been trying to remember for a week is finally in my head now that I'm not trying at all. I spent the whole morning just sharpening tools. that's the whole story. didn't cut a single line. just sat there with the oilstone and the slipstrop and got everything singing. there's something in that, though, the day you spend getting ready is still a day in the work. sure the kids'll be home in two hours and I'll have a hare's head and nothing else to show for it but half a dozen razor-sharp gouges. grand. tomorrow they'll earn their keep.

i sent a bunch of portfolios out last autumn and about half just… disappeared into the void. no reply, no nothing. one gallery i really wanted i emailed twice, three months apart, nothing. i convinced myself they hated it, threw the pots away, told everyone about the weird spanish kid who sent them photos of wonky clay faces. but then i ran into the owner at a market totally by accident, she was super nice, said she'd been meaning to write back and got buried. i sent a follow up the next day and got a studio visit out of it. so now i'm like, was i stupid for not following up sooner? is two emails desperate or normal? what do you do when a gallery ghosts? send another? take the hint? bring an offering of tiny pots as a peace treaty?