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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.

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?

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.

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.

My daughter, she studies in Patna now, came home for Diwali and saw me sitting with the brush and she said, Baba why are you not putting this on the phone. I told her I don't understand all this. So she took the phone, and she made one of those short videos, just my hand and the brush and the fish I was drawing, not even twenty seconds. She put some music on top which I found too loud, but I said nothing. In one week people came to my stall asking for the fish painting. A lady from Delhi bought two. A girl came and said she saw me on Instagram and wanted to learn. All this after I spent so many years doing exhibitions and cooperative meetings the proper way. I felt like such a fool ji, that the thing I ignored was the thing that worked. Now I am learning. My niece is teaching me to hold the phone steady while I paint. But I am also worried. The video showed the fish and the peacock, but nobody saw the ten years behind that line, the discipline, the ritual, the grandmother who taught my mother who taught me. I want the buyers but I also want them to know this is not decoration, this is our history. How do I put the history in a twenty second video without losing the people.

My first proper gallery show, the work sold on opening night itself. I was so happy, called my mother, the whole thing. And then... nothing. Three months before the payment came. Every time I followed up it was "next week, next week, sorry for the delay." I was too new to know if this was normal or if I was being taken for a ride. That was two years ago and I've learned a lot since. But still, is this just how it goes with some galleries? How long have you waited for payment after a show? And at what point do you start making noise about it? I'll go first: I waited 3 months that first time. Now I have a 45-day expectation written into the agreement itself, learned that the hard way.

I took on a private student a few years back, right after the worst of the crisis here. She was young, maybe 24, no money at all but she wanted to learn mosaic so badly. She showed up at my studio with a five-liter tin of her family's olive oil and asked if we could trade. I said yes because I remembered what it was like to be young and broke and hungry for a skill. She came once a week for six months. She was terrible with the hammer and hardie at first, kept shattering the glass instead of cutting it. But she learned. She ended up getting a commission for a hotel lobby last year. When she sent me photos I actually teared up a little. Meanwhile I get DMs every week from people who want to "collaborate", meaning they want my work for exposure, or they want me to teach them for free because "it would be good for my brand." I don't answer those anymore. The olive oil was good, by the way. Her family makes it near Kalamata. I used it for six months and every time I cooked with it I thought, this is what paying attention to someone actually looks like.

I've got two brayers for every job and I'll tell you why. Bought a good rubber roller about eight years ago, used it till it went hard and shiny, and the day I needed a third pass on an edition it started squeaking and I knew I was stuffed. Ink was sitting there, block was carved, paper was cut, and I had a roller that sounded like a rusty gate. So now there's a spare. Always. It's not even money, it's the difference between finishing an edition on a Tuesday and waiting a week for one to come from Dublin. The spare's a cheaper one, the kind you'd give a student, but it's there. I've never once regretted having it. But sure I had to learn that the hard way, same as everything. What's the thing you learned to keep two of? Or is it just me and my brayers. 🙂

It was at my brother-in-law's place in the 6th. Some woman I'd never met, nice enough, works in tech. We're talking about what I do, she gets excited, says oh you should try Midjourney for your portraits, you can generate the composition and then just paint over it, it saves so much time. I said that's not really how I work. She said no but it's the same thing in the end, the image is what matters. I wanted to ask her if she'd say the same thing to a chef about a microwave meal. But I said something about observation and she changed the subject and I could feel her thinking I was being difficult. The thing is, I spent four years learning to see. Not to copy photographs. To see the actual fall of light across a real face in a real room. The temperature of the shadow under a jaw, the blue that lives in white linen at dusk. If I let a machine decide my compositions, what exactly did I learn? I know we all use reference. I know photography changed painting forever. I'm not a purist. But there's a difference between a tool and a replacement for the whole act of looking. Maybe I'm just old. Maybe in ten years every painter works this way and nobody cares. But I care. I like the slowness. I like being wrong for two hours and then something clicks.

I finally replaced my steel ruler after 15 years. Same brand, same size, looked identical out of the package. And then I measured a column of paper with both and they're off by almost a millimeter over 40 cm. I kept the old one. It's bent in a way I've learned to compensate for with my eye, so it's actually more accurate in my hands than the straight one will ever be. The new one sits in the drawer, brand new, useless to me. Some tools you don't own. You just get to know them well enough to work around their flaws. That's the real relationship.

I been sewing log cabin blocks since I was maybe nine years old, sitting at my grandmother's machine with a footstool so I could reach the pedal. Thought I knew everything there was to know about it. Strip, strip, strip, go around and around. Then Tuesday I was piecing one for a new quilt and the light came on at my kitchen table, of all places. I had laid out this coral fabric from a dress my mama wore to church in the sixties, and I put it next to this dull brown from a pair of work pants my daddy had, and something in me just stopped. All these years I been cutting my strips even and square and neat. And my grandmother never did that. She eyeballed everything. That's why her corners never quite met and folks loved them anyway. I had to sit back in my chair and laugh at myself. Sixty years I've been making these blocks and I'm just now hearing what she was telling me all along. She wasn't sloppy, y'all. She was free. I ripped out that block and started over, let the strips run a little crooked on purpose. The Lord's sense of humor, me learning my own craft back to front at 63. Finished it and it feels like her hand is in it too. That's the best a quilt ever feels.

First gallery I ever showed with took 40% and made me pay for the wine at the opening. Forty percent, and still acted like I owed them thanks. I was green as grass and just smiled and paid for the merlot. Should've been the first clue. I know splits vary, sure, some places are worth it, but what's the worst deal you ever signed off on? And was it worth it in the end or did you learn the hard way like the rest of us?

Myself Ramesh. I will tell you one thing that still makes me shake my head. Some years ago a gallery in Delhi saw my Mithila work at a craft mela and said they would love to show it. I was happy, very happy. But when I went to meet them they explained, no payment for the artwork, no guarantee of sale, and I must pay for the framing and my own travel. They said it is good for exposure, it will build my name. I asked them, can my family eat exposure? They did not like that question ji. I walked away. Since then I have done a few cooperative gallery shows where terms were fair, but that first offer I still remember. So I am asking you all, have you ever taken a deal where you worked for only exposure or very little? Was it worth it in the end or did you regret? I want to know your stories so younger artists can learn.

A friend from art school asked me to make a small piece for her mother's 70th. Something with botanical prints, her mother loves old herbals. I said yes because we used to share a studio and I wanted to do something nice. I didn't think about the hours. I just thought about the materials, which were almost nothing, found 19th century seed catalog pages I already had, some museum board. So 500 SEK felt fair for a friend, maybe even generous. Then I actually tracked the time. Tearing and arranging is slow. Letting things sit and come back to them. I ended up at about 14 hours from start to finish. That's roughly 35 SEK an hour. About 3 euros. Less than a coffee in this city. I'm not angry about it. She's a friend and I'm glad I made it. But I realised I have absolutely no instinct for what my time is worth. I undershoot every time. I think because the materials are cheap I assume the whole thing should be cheap. But the materials are cheap because I spent years learning where to find them and how to use them. That's not nothing.

i was digging through old work last night, stuff from like 2017, 2018, before i had any clue what i was doing technically. and it's so raw. like genuinely uncomfortable to look at. there's this one charcoal portrait i did on newsprint of all things, the paper is practically disintegrating, and the face is just WRONG, proportions all off, but god it has something in it. it's looking at you. it's hurting. and i look at what i'm making now with my better materials and my figured-out process and it's more refined but it doesn't hit the same way. i feel like i've gotten safer without meaning to. like i learned how to make things that don't embarrass me and lost whatever made people stop and stare. i don't want to romanticize being in a bad place just to make good art. i've worked too hard to get somewhere steadier. but i can't pretend i don't see the difference. anyone else feel like their messiest work has a pulse the polished stuff doesn't?