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Y'all, I finally broke down and let my granddaughter talk me into getting a brand new machine. The old Singer I been sewing on since I don't know when, it still works, but the tension's been fighting me something fierce for about two years now and I been cussing at it quiet so the Lord don't hear me too clear. New one came in the mail yesterday. Shiny. Got all these stitches I don't know what to do with. And you know what I did? Sat and looked at it for twenty minutes before I touched it. It felt wrong somehow, like I was cheating on a old friend. My grandmother's machine was treadle. Foot-powered. I ever tell y'all that? I learned on that thing, how fast you go is how fast your foot wants to pump. This new one don't even need me to guide the fabric straight, it's got a little arm that does it for you. I told my granddaughter that ain't sewing, that's supervising. But I used it this morning. Made a little test block, just scraps, nothing special. And I got to admit it sews real pretty. Real even. I still don't trust it though. Might keep the old Singer right there next to it for a while, just so it knows I ain't forgot where I come from.

I had a new student in my botanical watercolor class yesterday. She's a pleasant enough woman, retired, looking for a hobby. We were going through the basics of setting up a composition from a live specimen, a simple cyclamen leaf, and she asked, quite earnestly, if she could just take a photograph of it and trace the outline instead. I explained that tracing would defeat the purpose of learning to see, which is rather the whole point of the exercise. She seemed unconvinced. She said it would save time and look neater. I suggested she give it a proper try first, and if she still wanted to trace at the end of class, I would help her. She did not want to trace by the end of class. But the amount of energy I had to spend not saying "you are paying me to teach you to draw, not to show you how to avoid learning to draw" was considerable. I understand that people want shortcuts. I do. Watercolor is difficult and it takes years to develop any real control. But the shortcuts don't actually get you where you want to go. They just leave you dependent on the shortcut. I suppose I am old-fashioned about this. Learning to see, really see, is the skill. Everything else is technique layered on top of that foundation.

Been thinking about how long it takes me to learn a stone. People think you pick a material once and you know it. No. I've worked limestone for thirty years and it still surprises me. A block from one quarry will hold an edge like it's got something to prove. Another from twenty miles away, same color, same grain to the eye, and it'll spall off under your point chisel if you breathe on it wrong. You can't get that from a book or a video. You get it from ruining a few good pieces and remembering exactly how it felt when it went wrong. The sound it makes right before it lets go. That's the tuition. I watch young sculptors post these perfectly polished things and I wonder what they learned making them. I'm not saying polish is bad. I'm saying the learning is in the near misses, the ones you keep in the corner because they taught you something even though they'll never sell. Just finished a piece where I knew by the second hour what the stone wanted. First time in a long time. Took thirty years to get there. Still got the scar from the one that taught me that particular lesson.

Early in my career I bid a municipal project, a 10-foot eagle in granite for a courthouse plaza. I was so hungry for the job I priced it at $14,000. I spent six months on it, ate every hour of fabrication and travel and installation, and after materials and the foundry work on the base I cleared about $2,000. That's not counting the months I spent waiting for the city to pay me. I learned nothing from it because I did the same thing twice more after that. You don't learn from losing money. You learn from getting so tired of being broke that you finally stop. I still see that eagle sometimes when I drive through that town. It's a good piece. I just gave it away.

Ran a two-day smalti workshop in a borrowed space last month. Priced it at €450, which felt fair for sixteen hours and materials, and I spent weeks anxious about it being too much. Nine signed up. Fine. But the four who filled in the form and then vanished before paying are the interesting part. Two of them I know, they are not broke. One wrote back that she assumed the price included tools she could keep. It did not, and I never said it did, but she read the page and made that up on her own. So my whole booking page is now wrong. It doesn't say what you get, it says what it costs and hopes you'll guess the rest. I don't think the answer is discounting. I think the answer is that I described the workshop like a hotel describes a room, and people filled the gaps with whatever they wanted. Next one I'm listing exactly what's in the box, including the tesserae you take home, and I'm going to say out loud that no, I will not teach you to grout a shower. Third person asked about that. Anyway. Nine people set real stone for two days and one of them, a retired dentist, cut the cleanest andamento I've seen from a beginner in years. So the money part was annoying and the work part was good.

Dropped a three-foot welded steel piece on the studio floor yesterday. My own fault. Sloppy rigging on the hoist, clip let go around head height. It bent where I'd spent a week getting the line right and I wanted to throw the whole thing in the scrap bin. Left it sitting there overnight instead. Came in this morning and the failure is obvious now. The foot wasn't plumb before the drop, it was just welded well enough to fool me. Ground it out, re-cut, re-welded. It's better now than it was yesterday before it fell. That's the part nobody tells you about this work. The disasters teach you more than the wins ever do, if you can stand to look at them the next morning instead of smashing them to pieces. I've had a ruined bronze teach me more about wall thickness than any book. Anyone else got a piece that failed and came back stronger?

Had a new student yesterday, first day, and she walks in and says "how do you breathe in here?" I told her open a window, and anyway we're only in oils two days a week, the rest is drawing. She looked at the rack of drying canvases like they were going to get her. I remember being that age and convinced the fumes would rot my brain. Now I've painted in studios that smelled of turpentine for thirty years and honestly the only thing that's happened is I can't stand the smell of fresh linen. Priorities shift. But it made me think about how we guard the young ones. My atelier master smoked a pipe while he ground his own lead white. We've come a long way from that and I'm glad. Still, there's something in me that misses the old seriousness about materials, the ritual of it. These days everyone wants water-soluble oils and quick-dry mediums and I get it, I really do, but paint takes the time it takes. You can't fix patience with a product.

That old Singer from the 50s, my grandmother's machine, it's still right there in the corner of my studio. She bought it secondhand when I was a little girl and it's sewn every quilt I ever made, every dress for every child, every hem I ever turned. It's got a sound to it, a kind of whir and thump that's as steady as a heartbeat. The light flickers sometimes and I have to jiggle the cord just so. My granddaughter keeps telling me to get a new one, a modern one that does all the fancy stitches and whatnot. And I tried one, a couple years back, borrowed a neighbor's. Made a whole afternoon of it. And I couldn't stand it. Too quiet. Too smooth. Felt like the machine wasn't talking back to me. I know people say tools are just tools. But I don't know. That old Singer knows my hands. It's got my grandmother's prayers still in the metal somewhere. Anybody else got a tool they just can't swap out?

So here's one I'm still chewing on. I do a run of hares, hand pulled, edition of 40, €180 a sheet at the markets and it sells grand. Steady, not mad, but grand. A small gallery in town got in touch about stocking a few and the girl was lovely on the phone, then she says the price is the issue, that for their online shop they'd want it at €120 "for the digital crowd." And I said yes. Which surprised me, because I'm usually the stubborn article who'd rather sit on a box of prints for a year than be told what they're worth. Here's the thing though. They sold 11 in three weeks at €120. My own stall did 4 in the same stretch at €180. So the gallery made more off my work than I did, the buyer got a bargain, and the poor hare went out into the world at a price I don't really believe in. Money's money and I'm not above it, there's a fella carving in a shed in Carna and two small ones wrecking the gaff, but I don't think I'll do it again. Feels like I taught a whole new audience that my work is a €120 object. Anyway. I don't think there's a clean lesson in it, I just wanted to say it out loud to people who'd get it. Curious if anyone's done the same and regretted it, or done it and not.

I repainted a white camellia this week that I first attempted in my early twenties, and the difference between the two is not talent. It's patience. The first one I pushed and pulled at until the paper was nearly worn through, trying to get the petals to glow by sheer force, loading wash on wash until it turned to mud. The camellia I finished yesterday has exactly three layers. Each one left completely alone to dry. That's the whole secret nobody tells you: the luminosity in white flowers isn't how much you put down, it's how much you leave alone. I spent three decades fighting the paper and the pigment when the answer was simply to stop. I keep the old one in a drawer. Not out of sentiment. Out of a reminder that technique is mostly the courage to wait.

Three months on one canvas. Not the kind of three months where you're building, more the kind where you're moving the same five shapes around and every version is worse than the one before. I knew it was dead, everyone in the studio could smell it on me, but I kept going because I refuse to give up on a surface until I've really earned the right to. Then yesterday I took the scraper to the whole thing. Pulled it all the way back to the weave. There's something almost shameful in it, that moment, like admitting three months of your life was just practice. And of course it fell into place in four days. The piece I was actually trying to paint this whole time. The best part is I have to throw the whole episode in the bin now, the good version plus the bad months, because you can't separate them, and I'm annoyed at myself that it only worked when I stopped being stubborn. The irony of this job is you do the work precisely to learn that the work has to be undone. I keep having to learn it, too. Apparently I need a reminder every few years.

A gallery in Berlin asked for my follower count before they'd even look at slides. Not my CV, not my exhibition history, not the work. Just the number. I told them 4,800 and the conversation cooled about ten degrees. They said they'd "keep me in mind." I've been painting seriously for thirty years. Thirty. I remember when a gallery would come to your studio and stand in front of the canvas for fifteen minutes before saying anything. Naja. I can't even be angry, I'm too tired for it. But I keep thinking about what that number actually measures. It measures how well I perform for strangers on a phone. It doesn't measure a single thing about whether the work is any good. The irony is I'm not even a Luddite about it. I post, I show the process, I answer comments. My daughter set up the whole account for me and I've learned to tolerate it. But I refuse to make the account the point. I'll take the smaller galleries, the ones that still come to the studio and stand in front of the wall for a while. There are fewer of them every year, but they exist. I don't know what the answer is. I just know I didn't spend my twenties learning to draw so that my worth could be decided by an algorithm in California.

When I first started going to galleries with Mithila work, one owner looked at my paintings and asked why I only paint fish and peacocks, did I not have capacity for portraits. I was so taken aback I said nothing. My mother taught me these motifs carry meaning, each one has a story, a purpose. That man saw decoration only. Later I realised this is part of the work now, explaining what our art is. But it is tiring, always. So I ask you all, how do you manage when a gallery person knows nothing about your tradition or your medium? Do you educate them, or do you walk away? And has any gallery person surprised you by learning, truly learning? Share your experience ji.

Its quite amazing to go back to old pieces and see how much you've changed especially when learning animation, I've learned so much about the process and creation of it, it blows my mind

Had a young guy at the booth this weekend, looked at my price tag, nodded like he'd figured something out. Said he could probably do the same thing himself with a Dremel and some YouTube tutorials. I said maybe he could. But I'd been thinking about it all evening and it still bothers me. Not the disrespect, I don't care about that. What bothers me is the assumption that the tool is what matters. Like the only difference between me and him is I own bigger equipment. I've got a 50lb tungsten chisel that I dressed myself because nothing on the market was right for the cut I needed. I spent three months learning to sharpen it right. A Dremel wont teach you how to read grain or when to walk away or what to do when you're 40 hours in and the stone decides to split wrong. Anyway. He walked off with a print. Probably gonna try to carve it this weekend. I hope he does. That's how you learn the difference between wanting to make something and wanting to have made something.

I've been rationing it. Squeezing the tiniest worm out onto the palette and then working it with a palette knife like I'm stretching a paycheck to Friday. Meanwhile the piece is SCREAMING for a big wet slab of it and I know it. I know it. And I still sat there for twenty minutes trying to mix the same red out of alizarin and a burnt sienna that's basically a rock at this point. The last piece I made I did it in like 4 hours because I stopped caring and just went at it with my hands, and it's the best thing in my studio right now. You'd think I'd learn. Apparently I only learn for two weeks at a time. also the tube is basically empty and I'm already dreading the drive to the art store where the guy will look at my hands and know exactly what I've been doing

The brush for the fine line, the one for the outlines, that brush is now having only three hairs. My mother used that same brush. Before her also it was there in the house. The bamboo handle is black and shining from oil of the hand only, no varnish ever. My son said buy a new one from Patna, it is nothing, hundred rupees. I said you bring it and I will see. He brought. The new brush hairs are too many, too stiff. It drinks more paint and puts it down thick, and in Mithila line the whole thing is that the line should be thin like a thread of the sari border and should go and come back without shaking. So now I am doing the peacock tail with three hairs and it is taking double time. Last week I finished only two sheets. The fish border I did in one and half day which normally is half day work. There is a girl who is coming to learn, Sudha, fourteen years. She asked why not just use the new one, it is better brush. I told her the new brush is better for the person who is learning, so the hand becomes steady. For me the three hairs are giving the line I know. But I am also thinking now whether I am keeping the old thing because it is good or only because it is old. That question is sitting with me since two days. Anyway. Work is going slow and the eyes are getting tired by evening. If anybody here is having a brush they have kept beyond its life, I would like to hear honestly how long you kept it.

I got my first no from a gallery last month and honestly I'm still thinking about it. They wrote back in about four lines, very polite, "not for us at this time." Fine, vale. But then a friend told me she prefers to just walk in because a no to your face is cleaner, you can see the person, you can ask what they didn't like and learn something. I did not learn anything from my email except that they have good stationery. So which is it for you, do you want the rejection in person where you can ask questions, or by email where you can close the laptop and go throw something at the wall? And I'm curious too if anyone ever got a real answer out of a no, like actual useful feedback, or is that just a story we tell ourselves.

Yesterday one man came to my house, his daughter is 14, she has been learning with me on Sundays since four months. She is good, ji, very steady hand, better than many boys who come and go. He sat in the verandah drinking tea for one hour and did not look at a single painting. Then he asked what scope is there in this work. I did not have proper answer. I said she is learning our own art of Mithila, this is not some hobby, this is what our grandmothers did on the walls for every marriage and every festival, whole world is now buying it. He nodded in that way people nod when they have already decided. Truth I did not say: last month I sold one painting for 9,000 rupees and it took me 22 days. In between I did two marriage invitations for a family in Darbhanga for 2,000 each because the money was needed that week. Her father is not a fool. He has seen my house. He is thinking of tuition classes where the rate is fixed every month and no one asks if the fish has meaning. She will come next Sunday, I think. She wants to. But I am also knowing that one more Sunday and he may stop her. We talk about reviving the art, saving the art. Nobody talks about whose daughter is going to sit for 22 days for 9,000 rupees after I am gone.

I've shown with the same gallery in Berlin for twelve years. When we started, I signed their standard agreement without really reading the resale and secondary-market clauses. Stupid, I know. You think you're being gracious, above the business, and you're really just being careless with your own livelihood. Last spring a collector who bought two big canvases from me in 2016 sold one at auction for nearly four times what he paid. Fine, that's his right, that's the market, whatever. But then I learned my contract gives the gallery a cut of that resale, a percentage that runs indefinitely. Not to me. To them. For a painting I made and they sold once, a decade ago. I did the math on it. That one resale paid them more than my last three new commissions combined. And I sat there feeling petty for even noticing, because they were good to me when I was nobody. But nobody works for free, and I have a family. I raised it with them, gently, at our last meeting. The director went a little quiet and then said we could "look at restructuring" for new works. New works. The two paintings already out there, nothing to be done. I don't know what I'm asking here. Maybe just that someone who's been at this longer than me tell me whether this is normal, whether I'm the fool for not having read the fine print at 34, or whether everybody learns this exact lesson the same way and at the same cost.