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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.

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.

I took a commission back in February for a 16x20 landscape, a friend of a friend wanted a specific view from their vacation photos. I quoted $200 which is usually fair for that size and my level. What I didn't account for was the two weeks I spent staring at those reference photos, trying to figure out how to handle the lighting, sketching thumbnails in my head while I was folding laundry, completely rethinking the composition twice before I even touched a brush. By the time I actually started painting I had probably put in 6-8 hours of just... mental labor. And I didn't charge for any of it. Finished it in about 10 hours of actual painting time so the math works out to like $12/hour before supplies. I know you can't really bill for "thinking about it" but also, that was work, you know? It was work. I'm trying to figure out how to price differently next time without feeling like I'm nickel-and-diming someone. Maybe just raise the flat rate enough to cover it and stop overthinking.

found this landscape at goodwill for $4. someone painted it carefully, every tree has individual leaves, the sky is blended smooth. i bought it because i wanted to collage over it, use the sky as a ground for something else. but now i can't bring myself to touch it. it's not good, technically, but you can feel the time in it. someone sat with this for hours. maybe it was a gift. maybe it hung in someone's kitchen for thirty years. i keep pulling it out of the stack and putting it back. i've had it for three months. i know the rational thing is to just work on something else. but this is the one i keep circling. anyone else get stuck on a piece of source material like it's a person you owe something to?

two years it's been leaning against the wall in my studio, face turned away like I couldn't stand to look at it. this landscape I started right after my brother died, trying to paint the place we scattered his ashes, and it was just... bad. muddy. overworked. I couldn't touch it. today I finally pulled the staples out. ripped the canvas off the frame. just let it crumple on the floor. and then I cut out the only part of it that worked, maybe six square inches of sky, and glued it into my sketchbook. like a little window. the rest went in the trash. felt like I could breathe again.

Signed up for a "Sunday afternoon landscape workshop" at the local community center. $65, reasonable. Show up and it's 1pm to 6pm. That's not an afternoon, that's a full work shift. I've got to pick up my 8 year old at 4:30. So I got to do the underpainting and then pack up while everyone else was adding their second layer. I asked if they ever do shorter versions and the instructor said "well, you really need the full time to develop the piece" like I hadn't just paid to develop about 40% of a piece. I get that you can't rush painting but also I have a life??? I'd pay the same $65 for a tight 2.5 hour session that actually fits into a Saturday.

I've been looking at my palette knife scrapings lately. You know, the thick little piles of paint I scrape off when cleaning my knife. They dry into these surprisingly complex little landscapes. I'm fascinated by the way the oil dries, the subtle variations in color and texture depending on the pigment. Some are almost like tiny, cracked desert surfaces, others have a waxy sheen. It's a reminder of the physical life of the paint itself, beyond the image I'm trying to create. Perhaps I should start collecting these little beauties.

I spent all Sunday afternoon on a landscape, trying to get this one tree just right. I think I finally mixed a color for the bark that felt authentic, but then the branches... they just look a bit stiff, you know? It's so close to what I see in my head, but not quite. Anyone else get that 'almost there' feeling and just have to put the brush down before they ruin it completely?

So I had this conversation with a gallery owner last week. Small place, mostly sells to people who want "art that goes with the sofa" kind of thing. She was genuinely interested in my work, wanted to take a few pieces on consignment. But she kept pushing me to price them higher than I wanted, not in a greedy way, more like she thought I was undervaluing myself. And I couldn't explain it properly to her. It's not that I think my work is worthless. It's that I paint these old Bangalore houses that are being torn down, and I know the people who used to live in them. Some of them still come and watch me draw. So when I put a price on it, it feels like I'm putting a price on someone's childhood, you know? She said "then don't sell them, just show them." But I do need to sell. I just don't want to pretend it's the same as selling a print of a nice landscape. Anyway, I priced them lower than she wanted and she took three. Two sold in a week. Which I don't know if that proves anything or nothing.

I love my mom so much, she's my biggest cheerleader, she framed my first shitty little landscape and hung it in the kitchen for years. But she called me today and was like "oh my friend Linda just bought this beige couch and I told her you could paint her something nice to go over it, nothing too weird, you know, something with flowers maybe?" And I just. Stood there holding my phone. Because first of all I haven't painted a floral in two years and I don't want to and second of all the thing I'm actually working on right now is this huge moody piece of my partner's back in low grey light and it's the best thing I've ever done and nobody in my family has seen it because they don't really look at my work they just want me to make things that match their beige couch. I said "I'll think about it" and I won't and now I feel guilty and also annoyed and also like a snob. Why is it so hard for people to understand that "you're so talented, you should paint me something!" is not actually a compliment?? It's like being asked to write a poem for someone's birthday party theme. I don't paint beige couch flowers Linda I'm sorry.

found it at a thrift store for five bucks, bad landscape, muddy colors, somebody's vacation painting they probably felt proud of. but the frame was solid wood underneath that godawful gold finish and i just stood there in the store knowing i was going to spend way too long fixing something i don't even want. and i did. sat on my floor with pliers and a flathead like some kind of idiot monk. took the thing apart completely. the painting is in the trash. the frame is stripped and sitting on my worktable and i still don't know what i'm going to put in it. this is just what i do now. rescue ugly frames from ugly paintings and fill them with my own ugly paintings. feels like a metaphor i don't want to examine too closely.

Anyone else had a gallery go totally cold after acting super interested? I had one last year where the owner literally told me my landscapes were "exactly what we need" and then... nothing. I followed up twice, polite, just checking in, and got radio silence. Still not sure if I should have pushed harder or if that was my answer. What's your cutoff point? How many follow-ups before you take the hint and move on?

I have this piece, it's a landscape with a lot of tiny tesserae, and it's technically perfect, the lines are clean, the colors are all there. But it just... doesn't breathe. It feels flat, like a photograph. I've tried adding more texture with some rougher stones, even some broken glass, but it's not lifting it. Maybe it's the composition, or maybe I need to think about the 'andamento' differently. Any ideas on how to bring life into a mosaic that feels like it's just lying there?

I was at a local craft fair last weekend, had a small table with some of my landscape paintings. Nothing fancy, just trying to sell a few and maybe get some commission interest. This woman comes up with her daughter, spends a good minute looking at this painting I did of a marsh at sunset, it's one I was actually proud of, the light came out right for once. She says "oh that's lovely" and I'm thinking oh cool. Then she turns to her daughter and goes "see, you could do that, couldn't you sweetie? with your little watercolor set?" I just smiled and said "she should definitely keep painting" because what else are you gonna say. But man. That one stung more than it should have. I spent like 12 hours on that painting. My 11 year old asked me why I looked grumpy when we got home and I didn't even know how to explain it without sounding ridiculous.

Was painting a pine stand this afternoon (trying to salvage a canvas I started two months ago and abandoned) and I grabbed a flat brush on a whim instead of my usual tiny round. And wow. One stroke and it actually looked like pine needles. Not a hundred fussy little lines that all run together. Just... one confident sweep that did the job. I've been doing landscapes since I picked painting back up and I never even questioned what I was grabbing. Just assumed smaller = more control = better. Turns out I was making everything twice as hard for no reason. Got me thinking what else I'm doing wrong out of pure habit. Anyone else have one of those "wait, THAT'S how you do it" moments way later than they'd like to admit?

I still use the same daylight lamp I bought in 2002, when I was finishing my master's thesis and needed to see specimen slides at odd hours. It's an old Ott-Lite, the kind with the curved neck and a bulb that takes several seconds to warm to full brightness. It has a crack in the plastic housing from when I knocked it off a shelf in 2007. The switch is held together with a strip of electrical tape. I have tried newer lamps. I own two very good LED full-spectrum lights that cost considerably more and render colour more accurately on paper. They sit in a cupboard. Every so often I take one out, set it up, work under it for an afternoon, and then put it back. The next morning I am standing at my desk, switching on the old lamp, waiting those few seconds for the light to settle, and it feels like the work can begin. I know this is irrational. I do not care to examine it too closely. Some things are simply part of the landscape after long enough, and to change them would be to change the room itself, not just the light.