Search

just spent three hours "saving" a piece that was fine at hour one. now it's got this muddy patch in the corner that i'm going to have to look at for the next week before i figure out how to unfuck it. i know the rule. i know exactly when i passed the point of no return. i did it anyway. every single time.

Working on a little 8x10 of a pear on a blue cloth for a craft fair submission this weekend. It's my third painting this week and I think I cooked it. The highlights on the pear started out nice and soft and I kept messing with them and now it looks like it's made of plastic. The cloth is okay but the whole thing just feels... tight. Like I sucked the life out of it by trying too hard. I know the answer is probably "put the brush down and walk away" but has anyone actually gotten better at knowing when a piece is done? Or is it always this guessing game of is it finished or did I just ruin it?

i know there's a "right" way to wedge. i've watched the videos. but my body just wants to do this violent ram's head slam every time and i swear the clay remembers the aggression. my left wrist has started clicking in a way that's definitely not normal. tried soft wedging yesterday like a normal person and the clay felt dead. like i'd been polite to it and it didn't trust me. had to go back and really put my weight into it before it started feeling alive again. my teacher from the course would be so disappointed. but also she had perfect wrists at 55 so maybe she was onto something. idk. anyone else have a bad habit you KNOW you should fix but it works so you don't?

Started three canvases this week and killed all three by Thursday. Overworked, muddy, the cold wax turning to glue because I wouldn't stop pushing. You know that feeling when you can feel yourself making it worse and you keep going anyway. This morning I scraped one of them down to the linen with a palette knife. Just a ghost of yellow ochre left in the weave. I thought, good, now it's a fresh surface and I've got nothing. Sat with it for an hour. Then I took a tube of Prussian blue and a rag and just wiped it across, thin, no plan, no composition. Let it dry forty minutes. Came back and put one mark on it, a single stroke, cadmium orange, right through the middle. Stood there. That was it. That was the whole painting. It's small. 60 x 80. But it has something the other three didn't have. It knows when to stop. I don't learn that lesson, I relearn it every time.

Not a study exactly. More like I got stuck on the line from her ear down to the chin and kept thinking the next sheet would fix it. Eleven sheets of grey Canson, all of them on the floor around my chair now, and my thumb is so black it looks bruised. The annoying part is that I can see the problem in every one of them. Too soft in the corner. Then too sharp and she looks like a different person. Number seven is closest but I overworked the shadow under the jaw and now it sits flat. I know it is flat. I still cannot make my hand do the other thing. I read once that you should stop while it is going well, and I try, but with faces I never know when that is until two hours later when it is too late. Pastel does not let you take it back either. Once the tooth of the paper is full, that is that. Anyway. Does anyone else end up with a pile like this, or do you all stop at three and go make tea. I would honestly like to know what the stopping point feels like from the inside.

Not deliberately. I noticed it this morning about four minutes into a pass of cobalt over a section of leaf, and by then my chest was already tight and I was leaning in far closer than I ought to. I catch myself doing it perhaps three or four times in a working session. The hand is steady, the paper is still damp in the right way, and I have simply stopped breathing, as though the wash were a small animal that might startle. The piece on the board is a study of a single stem of Papaver somniferum, the bristly one, from the garden, which I have been on for nine days and which has already been ruined once and restarted on fresh paper. I am working on Fabriano Artistico, hot pressed, 300 gsm. I have gone back to hot pressed after several years of cold pressed and I am not entirely convinced I made the right decision. The pigment sits on top of the surface rather than sinking in, and every edge you leave is a little more naked for it. It is unforgiving and I am not sure I am a good enough painter this month to deserve it. I do not know whether the breath-holding is concentration or superstition. It is probably superstition. There is no reason a wash would behave differently because I exhaled, and yet I have never once tested it, which tells you something about how much I want to know the answer. Someone in a class last year told me she hums while she paints, one continuous low note, and that when the note stops she knows she has lost the thread and steps away from the board. I thought it was a clever trick. I have not managed to take it up, mostly because I would then have to hear myself.

A client came to me two years ago wanting a welded steel gate for their property. Custom, so I quoted $4,500. I had done the material math, figured my hours at a rate I thought was fair. Then the design kept changing, which it always does. I added the scrollwork because they asked for it, went back and rebuilt the hinge mounts twice because the masonry turned out to be garbage. Six weeks door to door. When I actually added up the hours, including the redo, it came to about $11 an hour. I could make more welding pipe for a plumber. I don't know what the answer is. You raise the quote and clients balk, or you stay honest about hours and you're priced out. I just know I stopped quoting a flat number without writing down how long I genuinely expect it to take. That gate taught me the lesson, $11 at a time.

Okay so I finally did the thing I'd been avoiding for months and went through every commission I took last year. Added up all the hours, all the money, all the materials. Average came out to like €11 an hour and that's just... not a living wage where I live. And I already knew it was bad, but seeing it in a little spreadsheet made me feel genuinely sick for a day. So I raised my prices. Not wildly, like 25% on the mid-range stuff and more on the bigger pieces. And immediately two people who'd been "definitely going to commission me soon" for months just went quiet. Poof. Never heard from them again. One of them had even sent me a moodboard and asked me to hold a date for them. And I keep going back and forth, like did I price myself out of the people who actually wanted my work? Or were they never going to pay me fairly anyway? I think I know the answer. But it's hard when the quiet is so loud, you know? The worst part is the people who DID book in at the new prices have been my favorite clients ever. Which feels like it should be the lesson. But I still spent an hour last night being mad at myself for losing the other two. Anyway. If you've done the spreadsheet math and kept your prices the same after, I'd genuinely love to know what stops you from raising them, because I get it more than I want to. 🙂

Chased a weld on a 3/4" base plate last week. Pulled the whole thing out of square by about a quarter inch over three feet. My first thought was to cut it and start fresh, which is what most people would do now. Instead I did it the way my old mentor would have. Laid it flat, worked the high side with a torch and a hammer, checked it against a straightedge about fifty times over two days. Slow, boring, unphotogenic work. It's square now. I keep telling younger guys that knowing when to stop is the whole game. Turns out knowing when not to start over is the other half. The plate has a story on it now, and it'll hold. Some things are worth the boring fix.

I have a photogram I made last week, a net and two lengths of eelgrass on 40x50 Bergger Cot 320, and I cannot tell if it is finished or just underdone. It sat in the sun fourteen minutes. The net is fine, the knots held, that pale bone-colour against the blue. But the eelgrass came out as a soft grey smear, no edge, no bite, and I keep looking at it thinking there is a decision in there I did not make. Everything I have read says go longer, push the exposure until the blue goes almost black and you lose the paper's warmth. The last time I pushed it that far the print went cold and dead and I ended up using it to test for something else. So I am stuck between two failures. The one where nothing is decided, and the one where everything is decided and none of it is mine. I did a small version on scraps, 10x15, same plants, eighteen minutes, and the water marks along the edge came out like something I would actually hang. So maybe it is the size. Big sheets hide from you, they take the light differently and I am never sure the coating is even across the whole thing. If you work with these long exposures, how do you know when to stop? Not the technical version, I know the technical version. The other one.

Patching a seam on a steel piece for a fellow down in Allentown. Ran the bead, let it cool, then spent about forty minutes with a 4 1/2 inch grinder and a hard disc taking it down flush. Then a flap wheel, then a scotch-brite. You get it down far enough and the joint disappears. Nobody will ever know there were two pieces. That's the part I like. Not the welding. The taking away. Anyone who's been at this a while knows you can tell a bad fabrication from across a room by the welds somebody was proud of. Nice fat stack of dimes sitting there like a tattoo. Means the man stopped when he was done showing off, not when the work was done. The hard part's knowing where to stop grinding. Take too much and you dish the surface and it's a whole afternoon getting it flat again.

I buy the Arches oil paper in the big pad, the 350gsm. Been using it about four years, always the same. Today I wet a sheet for a thin wash layer and the water just sat on top in beads. It's like they oversized it. I let it dry, tried again, same thing. Had to scrub the surface with a stiff brush to get any tooth back. Anyone else hit this batch? Or is this just what happens when a brand gets big enough to stop caring. I know I should probably just size my own paper and stop complaining. But I liked the convenience and I'm annoyed about it.

Spent the morning on a piece of Indiana limestone I've been working for two weeks. Block was clean, good color, no veins. I kept pushing on it. Refining a curve that didn't need refining. At noon I stepped back and saw what I'd done to it. Took that curve too far. Now I'm chasing it back. Thirty years in and I still do this. The stone tells you when you're done and I keep going anyway because stopping feels like I'm being lazy. Had a mentor who'd slap his hands on his thighs and walk away mid-afternoon. I thought he was slacking. He wasn't. He just knew. Now I spend half my time carving and the other half wishing I'd walked away an hour earlier. If you're at the point where you're just fiddling, put the tool down. The work is already done. Fiddling is how you ruin it.

I did a custom portrait commission for a friend of a friend back in February. Watercolor, 9x12, pretty detailed reference photo of her dog who had just passed away. I quoted her $80 because I was still in my "I have no idea what I'm doing and I'm terrified to ask for money" phase and also she was nice and sad about her dog. 14 hours. I literally tracked it because at some point I was like wait this is getting absurd. $5.70 an hour. I had to buy a new tube of burnt sienna halfway through because I ran out, which was $12, so make that even less. She framed it and sent me a photo and I was happy she loved it. But I also wanted to cry a little bit. I think about that commission a lot now that I'm trying to take this seriously. Like what would I charge today? Probably $300 minimum. And even that feels like I'm making it up. I don't know when that stops feeling fake honestly.

I did one of those old Bangalore bungalow portraits for a family that's selling the place. They wanted it as a keepsake before the demolition. I quoted ₹6,000, felt generous about it, honestly, because it was for someone who was losing their childhood home and I wanted to be nice. Eleven hours. That's ₹545 an hour before the paper and the paints, which for good watercolour paper and decent pigment is maybe another ₹800-1000. So call it ₹480 an hour. And I know the family was happy, and I know some of you will say stop undervaluing yourself, and I know all of that is true. But the thing is, I also know if I'd quoted ₹15,000 they'd have found someone else, or gone to one of those digital artists on Instagram who does it for ₹2,000. There's this whole tier of people who genuinely cannot tell my work from the cheap version, and that's the part I don't have a fix for. Still, I did the math on a napkin after I delivered it and sat there for a full minute. I don't even know what the answer is. I just wanted it written down somewhere.

Had a piece in the shop for weeks, a steel column with a joint that kept failing. I'd grind it back, re-weld, let it cool slow, still cracked. Every time I finished I was already bracing for it to give. Finally got sick of it and stopped being careful. Ran the arc hot, laid it in one pass, didn't nurse it. Held. It's been sitting out back through rain and frost for a month now and it's still solid. Spent a lot of years learning to be careful. Turns out the lesson was knowing when to stop being careful. That column taught me more than the last three workshop books I read. Not sure where it'll end up. Maybe it stays in the yard a while longer. I keep going out to look at it like it might lie to me.

Working a block of Indiana limestone this week, a small piece, maybe forty pounds. Cut past my line on the left shoulder of the form by about a quarter inch. Not a disaster. Just means the whole thing is now a quarter inch narrower than I wanted, and every measurement downstream of that has to move with it. That's the thing nobody tells people starting out. You can't put it back. With steel you cut and weld and grind and it comes back. With stone the mistake only goes one direction, and the only skill that saves you is knowing when to stop hogging off material and go to the chisel. I still catch myself rushing that last half inch. Thirty years and I still do it.

I've got a piece on the bench right now, welded steel figure about four feet tall. It's been "done" three times this week. Every time I walk past it I see one more weld I could dress down or a line I could push a quarter inch. I know the difference between stopping because it's done and stopping because I'm out of gas, but I'm not sure the piece knows. My old teacher had a rule: the last thing you do should be the smallest thing you did. If you're making big moves at the end you started too late. I've gone back and forth on whether that's actually true or just something old men tell themselves so they can quit. What's your tell? The thing you notice when a piece is actually finished and not just abandoned?

A welder I've worked with on and off for fifteen years came by the studio last week. Looked at a piece I finished in April, one I'm actually happy with, and said it could use another element up top. Just a little something to balance it. He meant well. He's a good welder. Here's the thing. He's never once asked me what made me stop there. Nobody does. They see a finished piece and their first thought is what to add to it. Nobody asks what made you decide it was done. That's the whole craft and it's invisible to almost everyone. I told him no. He looked at me like I was being difficult. Maybe I was. I'd rather be difficult than weld one more bracket on a thing that doesn't need it. Knowing when to stop is the only skill that matters and nobody teaches it and you can't charge for it.

ok so this happened tuesday and I'm still weirdly annoyed about it. There's this watercolorist I've followed since like 2019, I have her book, I've basically studied her washes. She reposted one of my gouache pieces to her story. I sat there refreshing like a maniac. 40 new followers in two days, which is more than I usually get in a month, and I was SO sure this was it, this was the breakthrough, I'd finally have to figure out how to do a mailing list properly. Two people emailed me. One of them asked if I could paint a portrait of their dog for $60 because "it's just a small one." The other was a company asking if I'd do a free piece in exchange for exposure. Meanwhile the thing that's actually kept me fed since I quit the café is a 3-person email list (ok slight exaggeration, it's 91 people) where I send a photo of whatever's on the easel and a paragraph about how it's going, and I sell something almost every time. It's ugly and unglamorous and I keep trying to make it prettier than it needs to be. I think I've been chasing the wrong number this whole time and I don't totally know how to stop. Followers feel like a scoreboard. They're not. Anyway if you have a mailing list, what actually goes in it? Because mine is basically a group text at this point and I'm not sure if that's the secret or if I'm just getting lucky with 91 very patient people.