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I've talked for months about wanting to do a series of rooms in my house, just as a personal project, and I kept putting off the kitchen. Too familiar, I told myself. Too boring. Nothing to say about a place I stand in three times a day. Finally sat down with it last week and I think I get now why I avoided it. It's the hardest subject I've ever painted and I've done a whole summer of plein air. Familiar means you know every wrong angle, every shadow that doesn't sit right. You can't fudge it because you can feel when it's off. The mug tree was the thing that nearly broke me. Those little wooden branches crisscrossing. I must have repainted it four times. Eventually I stopped trying to paint each branch and just painted the light falling through them and you know what, the branches showed up on their own. I haven't been this nervous to show a piece to my husband since I first started painting again. He looked at it for a long time and just said "that's our kitchen." That was it. That was the whole review. Now I'm scared to do the kids' bathroom.

I've been trying to paint that scratched-up yellow Formica table my mom had in the 90s for like three years now. The one where I did homework and she paid bills and we ate cereal at 10pm because nobody felt like cooking. Every attempt came out stiff or too sentimental. Last night I just went at it loose, no sketching, just blocked in the yellow and let the scratches happen with a dry brush. Painted the little chip by the corner where my brother threw a toy truck. Put a salt shaker on it because she always left one out. And it's just. Right. My husband came in and said "that's your mom's kitchen" without me telling him what it was. I don't know why that hit me so hard. Maybe because I feel like I finally painted something only I could paint. Anyway just wanted to share with people who get it. 🥲

Someone asked me to paint their parents' kitchen. Not a portrait, not a landscape, just the kitchen where they grew up. I almost said no. Kitchens are hard, all those surfaces, chrome, the light fights you. And the reference photo they sent was terrible, taken on a phone in the evening, everything yellow. But they wrote me a long email about their mother cooking in that room, about the afternoon light coming through the little window, and I caved. I should trust that instinct more often. What saved me was that I ended up painting it almost from memory of what a kitchen like that feels like. The photo was only a scaffold. I moved the light around, made it morning, put a bowl of apricots on the counter that wasn't in the photograph at all. She cried when she picked it up. Her husband filmed her. There is a video of a grown woman crying over a painting of her mother's kitchen and it is the most honest thing I've seen in months. I kept the bowl of apricots in. She said her mother always had fruit out. I keep thinking about what I almost said no to.

There's a still life on my easel I've repainted the same fold of cloth on six times since February. Terracotta pot, two pears going brown, a white bowl with a chip in the rim. Nothing worth anything to anyone. A woman came Thursday to see the big interior I've been struggling with. She looked at it for maybe ninety seconds, polite, and then turned around and pointed at the small study of the pot and asked if it was for sale. I said yes before I'd decided anything. She paid what I asked without blinking, which told me I asked too little, and I don't care. She came back Saturday with her husband to collect it and told me she'd been looking for a painting of a kitchen for eleven years. Eleven years. The whole time I was teaching figure drawing to people who didn't want to learn it, painting almost nothing, this woman was walking around looking for my pot. I didn't sleep well that night. Not from the money. From something else, harder to name. Ten years of telling myself the work was fine sitting in the studio, and then one stranger's hand hovering over the surface, not quite touching, and I understood I'd been lying to myself a little. Anyway. She's hanging it in her kitchen where the pot will get afternoon light, which is where it belonged all along.

I spent the whole afternoon yesterday just looking at my kitchen table. Not painting it. Not photographing it. Just watching how the light moved across the surface of a wooden bowl, a half-empty glass, a cloth I'd left crumpled. From about 3:30 to 5, the quality of it, that cold winter light coming in low, bouncing off the building across the street, was something I could never invent and could never capture with a camera. The photos I took are dead. Flat. They have all the information and none of the truth. It makes me wonder how much time I've wasted collecting reference images when I should have been training my eye to hold what it sees. The camera is a crutch. A useful one, I use it too. But it flattens everything into information, and painting is not about information.

Honestly the amount of my "studio practice" that is just me physically relocating my entire setup every 45 minutes because the light moved is kind of embarrassing. I have a desk. I have a window. But the window faces east so by noon I'm basically working in shadow and I refuse to turn on a lamp because it changes everything about how I see the washes. So I just pick up my block, my brush jar, my palette and I chase the sun across the apartment like a little lizard. My partner keeps finding random wet paintings on the kitchen table and the bathroom counter and once on the floor by the back door. I have a perfectly good studio corner I am simply not using because the light is wrong and I will die on this hill.

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?

A student brought in a phone photo of her grandmother's kitchen and asked if she could paint from it. I said of course, but that's not the real question. The real question is why she wanted to. She said because the light in that room doesn't exist anymore, the afternoon sun through the window where her grandmother used to stand. So I told her to go find a room with the same kind of light, sit in it, and paint the memory anyway. The photo gives you the facts. It can't give you the hour you were there. We don't paint what we see. We paint what it was like to see it. That's the whole job and nobody teaches it anymore because you can't put it in a curriculum.

I've been waking up at 6 for the past week just to paint the same corner of my kitchen counter. The lime slice from last night, the steel tumbler from morning chai, the way the sun hits the grout between the tiles. It lasts maybe forty minutes and then it's gone, and I know it's ridiculous because I could just take a photo and paint it later. But it's not the same. There's something about catching it while it's happening, while the light is actually moving across the surface. I think this is my current obsession, I can only paint things in the moment they exist. If I photograph them and come back later, the feeling is gone. The urgency is gone. And the painting comes out flat. Anyone else have a weird time-of-day thing they can't let go of? Or am I the only one waking up unreasonably early for a lime slice and a steel glass 🙂

The tube split open this morning near the crimp, so I had to decant the last of it into a small jar. Zinc white I have had since maybe 2019. The new tube from the same maker is stiffer, more chalky, and cools everything it touches. I know the sensible thing is to do an underpainting with it and see if the difference even matters under a glaze. Instead I sat there at the easel mixing it with a little linseed and telling myself it was fine, which is not the same as it being fine. A student asked me last week why I do not just buy the good stuff, meaning the expensive stuff, meaning the stuff I probably should buy. I did not have a good answer. I have a good answer for almost everything else in that studio. Anyway I am painting a corner of the kitchen table with a bowl and a half peeled orange, and the white is the whole thing. Everything else is just the white being interrupted.

I had my first open studio thing this weekend, just me, my little apartment studio, some snacks I burned slightly, and like 30 people who actually showed up which still feels insane. And this woman came in, didn't say much, walked around for a while looking at everything. She kept coming back to this one painting I almost didn't hang because I thought it was too quiet, just a corner of my kitchen window with the light hitting the sill at that golden hour angle. I'd painted it like six times trying to catch it right. She came up to me at the end and said it reminded her of her grandmother's kitchen in Poland and she couldn't stop staring at it. And then she bought it. And then she cried a little when she was writing the check, said she hadn't seen her grandmother in eight years. I didn't know what to do with that honestly. I just stood there holding the cash like a complete idiot. My partner had to nudge me to say thank you properly haha. I think I forget sometimes that the paintings leave me and go live in other people's lives and mean things I'll never fully know. That's kind of terrifying and lovely at the same time. Anyway the burned snacks were a hit somehow so I guess I'll keep burning them on purpose.

When I moved in I was so pleased with the light. Big window, north facing, nothing direct, the kind of light you can set your palette against. Three years later I finally say it: it is too even. Nothing tells me anything. Every edge I paint there goes soft and agreeable and I bring the canvas downstairs to the kitchen and it looks like it was painted by someone being polite. So now I paint at night, one lamp, 2700K, and I check the day's work in the morning in bad light by the door before I let myself touch it again. Yesterday I wiped two hours off a forearm because of that. Two hours and a quarter tube of lead white, gone, and honestly it was a good two hours because I learned the arm was wrong. The north light is still the best wall in the flat for drying. I am not ungrateful. I am just not going to be lied to by a window anymore.

ok so the commission I've been excited about all month, the one where the woman found me through a friend of my mom's and said she loved the window paintings and wanted one of HER kitchen window, which, honestly, that's the nicest thing anyone has ever asked me to do, she wanted a 12x16 of her kitchen window, and I quoted her $420. and I keep doing the math on it in the shower. paper and gouache and the cold press block and the fact that I'll paint this window a minimum of three times before I get the light right, and I'm not fast, I don't want to be fast, that's the whole point of the medium, so realistically it's like 14 hours plus the matting plus the shipping tube and I'm at what, $23 an hour before the cost of anything I burned through getting it wrong. my partner said "so raise it" like that was a thing you could just DO. two days ago I quoted it. you can't just email someone and go hi actually, ignore my number, here's a bigger one. or can you?? has anyone done that and lived?? because I've heard you can and every time I consider it I hear my mom's voice saying well they're being so nice about it and I fold immediately. the thing is I KNOW my hourly is garbage, I did the math, I did it twice. but knowing it is somehow completely disconnected from being able to say a bigger number out loud to a person who's being nice to me. I can say $420 out loud fine. it rolls right out. it's the next number that gets stuck. anyway it's 11pm and I'm going to go paint her window badly for the third time, which is apparently what $420 buys. 🙂

Spent three hours this morning arranging a bowl of lemons and a blue cup on my kitchen table, and then I didn't paint the bowl or the cup at all. I painted the shadow they threw across the tabletop. That's the whole painting. Just grey-blue shapes and one bone of light where the cup sat. I do this thing where I'll build the perfect setup and then abandon the actual objects because the shadow is more interesting. The lemons were so yellow and pretty and I left them out of it entirely. My partner came in and was like "why did you even bother" and honestly I don't have an answer. The shadow was just saying something the lemons weren't. Is this a real practice or am I just avoiding committing to a subject?? Because I feel like I'm circling something with it but I can't name what. Also the shadow moved by the time I finished so now I've got a painting of a shadow that doesn't exist anymore. That might be the most honest part of it.

ok so I've been circling this one piece for like three weeks, a view from my kitchen window at dusk, the one I paint over and over, but with all this heavy gray-green raincloud coming in. And I kept ruining it because I was trying to make it look "dramatic" and "serious art" or whatever and it just kept coming out dead and muddy. Then yesterday I was in a mood, like genuinely anxious about money and whether I'm wasting my savings on this full-time thing, and I just grabbed my brush and went at it without thinking. And I let the water take it where it wanted, didn't fight it, didn't try to control every bloom. And it's the most alive thing I've painted in months. The clouds look like they're moving. My partner came home and said "that one feels like you." I think I've been so scared of making bad art that I forgot the good stuff comes from the same place. Anyway it's drying on my table and I keep walking past and going "oh, there you are." Just wanted to tell someone who'd get it 🙂

I spent all last year trying to crack the algorithm. Filming my process with proper lighting. Voiceovers about the "meaning behind the work." Scheduling posts at optimal times. The reel that got me actual sales? Me, 11pm, exhausted, propping a half-finished painting against a wall in bad kitchen light, no audio, just a 5-second clip of me adding charcoal lines. Caption: "this isn't working yet but I like it." That's it. 14k views. Two commissions. I don't know what to do with that information. It makes me want to stop trying at all, which is probably not the takeaway, but also maybe it is?

There was a long stretch where every blank canvas felt like an exam. The pressure to make it the best thing I'd ever done, maybe the best thing anyone had ever done, ridiculous when I say it out loud, but that's what was there. And of course nothing survives that kind of weight. You kill it before you start. Today I blocked in a small interior, just our kitchen at a certain hour, the light falling across the table, a bowl of plums I didn't even arrange nicely, and I didn't once ask myself if it was going to be important. I just painted it. It's not going to change anything. It's a kitchen with plums. And it's the most alive I've felt in front of an easel in months. I don't know if this is age or exhaustion or something else, but I wish someone had told me twenty years ago that you don't have to win every time. You just have to show up and mean it.

so one of the first galleries that ever showed my stuff, the owner walked me through his actual kitchen to get to the "gallery." fridge magnets, a dish rack, the whole thing. i still said yes because i had zero leverage and one group show under my belt. it ended about how you'd expect. he "lost" a painting for four months and then found it in that same kitchen. tell me yours. the flag you saw, the thing in your gut, and you signed anyway. i want to know i'm not the only one who ignored the smell of a bad deal because it was the only door open.

ok so I need to say this out loud to people who'll get it. back in like February a friend of a friend asked me to paint her parents' house, small thing, gouache, maybe 9x12, and I said 180 euros because she was nice and I panicked and it felt rude to go higher for something that "small." eleven hours. eleven. and honestly probably more if I count the two evenings I just sat and stared at the roof line because the perspective was fighting me. so that's what, 16 euros an hour, and that's before the paper and the paint I burned through redoing the sky three times. my partner did the math out loud in the kitchen and I genuinely wanted to leave the room. the worst part is it's a lovely painting now and I'm proud of it and she cried a little when I dropped it off, and I still can't figure out how to feel about that. like the crying was worth something but it doesn't pay my rent and I can't take it to the shop. I think the actual thing I'm working on is that I price by how bad I feel asking, not by the work. which is a terrible system. my old teacher used to say price the thing you'd be happy to do it again for and I keep not doing that. anyway I've got two more of these little house commissions sitting in my inbox and I'm seriously considering going back and saying I quoted wrong, which feels mortifying. has anyone actually done that and survived it

Something happened last night that I did not expect at 44. I stopped early. Voluntarily. On a painting. It is a small interior, a corner of the kitchen with the morning light coming across the zinc, and I had been fighting one passage near the copper pot for three sessions. I knew exactly what I wanted to do to it. I could feel my wrist already making the stroke. And then I put the brush in the turpentine and walked away. Ten years ago I would have stayed there until two in the morning and ruined it. I have done that many times. The painting looks wonderful at 1am and dead in daylight, and you cannot save it because you have closed everything underneath. My teacher at the atelier used to say the hardest thing to learn is not the drawing. It is knowing the moment your eye stops seeing and starts inventing. Took me twenty years to actually hear that. So, voilà. The pot is not finished. It is also not ruined. I am calling that a win this week, which feels strange to type, but there it is.