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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.

Six lengths of 3/8 rod, they rang it up as six separate items and charged me cutting time on top. I cut it myself. I was standing right there with the grinder and the kid watched me do it. Twenty two years I've been going to that yard and the old man knew my truck. Now there's a tablet and a loyalty card and a guy in a polo shirt asking me what I'm building. I said a gate. He wanted to know if it was "for a project." I said it's for a gate. Cost me $61 more than last month for the same order. I paid it because I needed to get back to the shop, but I'm going to start driving out to the place in Fallbrook. Forty minutes each way. Cheaper and they leave you alone. Anyway. If anyone in the area knows a yard that still sells off the rack and lets you walk the aisles, say so.

Saturday, open studios, and I'm not paying attention because I'm talking to a man about his dead father's shed for twenty minutes. Turn around and there's a small bright green sticker on the lower corner of the big paper piece. Some kind of dinosaur. I left it. It's still on there. Two days now. Partly I'm annoyed. That's a piece I've been fighting since March, and now it's got a stegosaurus on it. Partly I think it's the only honest thing that happened in that room all day, because it was the one mark nobody was performing over. The kid saw a thing and stuck a thing to it and walked off. No statement, no price list, no explanation about tension and memory. The friend who helped me hang says take it off before the next thing. She's right, obviously. I just keep not doing it. Anyone else had their work improved by someone under the age of six

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.

Spent two hours this morning sharpening a chisel that was already sharp. Knew it when I picked it up. Did it anyway. I've got a limestone piece on the bench, about 300 pounds, a torso. Been on it since April. It's done. Not "done" the way a client means it. Done the way I mean it, which is that the next cut is the one that takes it apart. I've got the mallet in my hand and I keep putting it down and going back to the stones. The kid who sweeps my shop on Saturdays asked what I was doing. I said sharpening. He looked at the edge and said it's already sharp. Kid's right. That's the problem. Thirty years and I still don't have a clean way to stop. You learn how to cut. Nobody teaches you how to walk away from a piece while you can still walk away from it. My old man did forty years on a lathe and never had this trouble. Part came off the machine, you moved on to the next one. Anyway. Back to the shop.

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.

I keep reading that walking in with work is the bold move and emailing is the safe one, and I honestly can't tell which is true. I'll go first: I emailed. Twice. Got one very polite no and one total silence, and the silence stung more than the no did, weirdly. I've never had the nerve to just show up with a portfolio on a Saturday, partly because I'd have my kids in the car and that's not the vibe I'm going for. So which actually worked for you, the email or the showing up in person? And if you walked in, what time of day did you go? Trying to settle a small argument with myself here.

I had this snapshot from a box of estate photos, four people at a beach, all of them squinting, one guy holding a cigarette like a pen. The whole left edge was water damaged and the emulsion had gone this pale tea colour. Perfect. I used it in a piece in March. Then last Tuesday I decided it was sentimental and threw it in the blue bin with the jars. Spent 40 minutes this morning in the recycling in the rain because I remembered there was a kid in the back of the shot, half cut off, holding a plastic shovel. half his face is gone now. it's just a smudge. and I need that smudge. anyway the bins were collected Wednesday. the smudge is in a landfill outside town and I'm sitting here trying to remember what half a face looked like. this is the third time I've done this to myself. I do not learn.

So I quoted a piece last week, 16x20, four figures, real time on it, and the person goes "that feels steep for watercolor, no?" and I just sat there typing and deleting for like ten minutes. Because here's the thing, that's the exact sentence watercolor gets. Gouache never gets it. Oil never gets it. But watercolor is "just" the medium that comes in a little pan for kids. Which is insane because watercolor is the least forgiving thing I do. There is no covering up. No scraping back to a happy accident. You make one wrong wash at hour nine and you're starting the whole sheet over. I have a stack of failures in my closet that would make you cry. I didn't say any of that, obviously. I wrote something very polite about materials and process and how many hours it takes and how the paper alone is like $40 a sheet before I even touch it. And you know what, they said yes?? They just wanted to understand it. Which I guess is the actual lesson and I hate that the lesson is "explain yourself more." But also I'm kind of tired of explaining myself more. Does anyone else get the "feels steep" thing and how do you answer it without turning into a lecture. Because I keep doing the lecture and then apologizing for the lecture and then giving a discount, haha. The discount is the real problem. I know the discount is the real problem. 🙃

Not a complaint exactly. The yard is quiet at six, the compressor hasn't started yet, and I can hear what I'm doing. Cut a 40 pound block of Indiana limestone down this morning before anyone showed up to ask me what I thought about anything. The kid who's been helping me out asked why I don't just start at nine like a normal person. Told him the stone doesn't care what time it is but my hands are better before the phone starts ringing. He looked at me like I'd handed him a fortune cookie. Thirty odd years and I still haven't figured out a better way to say it. The good hours are the ones nobody wants.