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Someone asked me last week for a 30x40 cm still life, "something simple, just fruit." I quoted 1,400 euros and heard myself say it too fast, like apologising. So I sat down with the receipts, which I never do, because I knew I would not like it. Linen at 46 euros the metre, and I waste a good quarter of it cutting. The lead ground, the flake white, one tube of lapis I bought in March and have been rationing like it's medicine. Twenty-two hours at the easel, plus the sittings arranging the fruit and re-arranging it because the light moved. Framing in the rue Auguste Comte, 190. It comes out under 25 euros an hour. My student who does wedding photography gets 90. The thing is I will not go back to 900 for this size, and I know two people in this city who will do it for 600 and be happy. So the price is not really about the painting. It is about whether I want to be one of those painters. I do not. But I have been sitting on that 1,400 for three days, and I still have not sent the email.

Spent three afternoons fighting a small still life, same setup, same corner of the studio, and I kept pulling the canvas off the easel and starting again. Not because anything was wrong with it. Because the light was wrong in a way I couldn't name. Then it hit me around the third try, standing there with a rag in my hand: the sun is sitting lower now. October. The angle changed and I was still painting like it was July, expecting that warm top light and getting this thin pale side light instead. My own studio, forty-four years old, and I still paint by the light I remember instead of the light that's there. Took the whole morning to admit it. So I repainted the background, put the window where it actually is in the composition, and let the thing be colder than I wanted. It's better now. It's just not the painting I was trying to make, and I think that's the lesson I keep paying tuition on.

I pulled an old still life out of the rack this week. Pears on a copper pot, I painted it around 2015, and it always bothered me that the far edge of the pot went dead. Hard line, no atmosphere. So I set up to retouch it, scraped just that passage down, and repainted it. Now the problem is the mark itself. The new paint is confident, it turns, it sits in the light the way it should. But next to the older paint it looks young. You can feel the ten years in the difference. My hand is not the same hand. The retouch is technically better and it does not belong to the painting. I know there are ways to age a surface, varnish layers, glazes. But that's cosmesis. The real question is whether you can put a new mark into an old painting and have it be honest, or whether it always stays a transplant. I left it half done. Not sure I want to finish.

Had a collector ask me last month what a life-size figure in limestone would run. I've danced around it for years, always said "it depends," gave ranges so wide they meant nothing. This time I just told him. 14,000. He didn't blink. I think I could have said 18 and he still wouldn't have blinked. The math is the part nobody sees. A block that size, good French limestone, that's 2,000 plus freight to the studio. Then the roughing-out alone is two to three weeks. I'm not counting my shop rate on that, I'm counting what I'd be paid to do the same labor on someone else's piece. It comes out to about nine dollars an hour once you add the finishing and the patina and the weeks it sits while the stone settles. Nine dollars an hour for a skill it took me thirty years to build. And the guy was ready to pay more. I'm not sure what that says about me or about the market, but it sits wrong. I've been charging what I was afraid to charge, not what the work is worth. Still. Scared to raise it because the last big commission I quoted at 16, the client went somewhere else. Might have been the price. Might not have. But it's in my head now.

Started a still life in January. Brass candlestick, a blue jug that belonged to my grandmother, some lemons that I must have replaced nine times because they kept rotting before I got the passage right. The jug was the problem. That blue has a lot of green in it, and the light on it kept lying to me. I repainted that flank maybe six times, scraped it down just as often. At some point I stopped being angry about it and just started watching the thing properly instead of telling it what it should be. Yesterday it closed. No grand moment, I just put down the last glaze and knew, the way you know when a sentence is finally finished. I sat with it an hour and didn't touch it. That's the part nobody warns you about, how much of painting is just getting out of the way of the thing in front of you. Now I don't want to show it to anyone yet. But it's the best thing I've done in two years, and I'm a little afraid of that too.

I spent Sunday afternoon rearranging the same three pears and a teapot for the fourth time this month. Moved the light, tried a different angle, even set up one of those little viewfinder cards. And it still came out flat. Not wrong exactly, just... there. Like a photo taken straight on, no depth, no life. I know all the rules. Foreground, middle ground, background. Overlap things. Put something in front of the teapot. But when I actually set it up and paint, I keep lining everything up in a row like I'm arranging it for a lineup. It's like my eye just defaults to the neatest arrangement and I have to fight it the whole time. I'm wondering if this is more about how I see the setup than my brushwork, because the actual painting itself seems fine when I look at it as marks. Anyone else run into this? Where the composition is the wall, not the painting? I'm going to try moving the pears off the table line this week and see what happens.

A woman came by the studio this afternoon to look at a small panel I did in March. Copper pot, two pears, the corner of a linen cloth. Nothing ambitious, I painted it in two sittings and mostly to work out a problem with the shadow side of the pot. She stood in front of it a long time. Then she said it was her grandmother's kitchen and her eyes went. I did not know what to do with my hands, so I made tea badly and we sat on the two good chairs with the painting between us on the easel. She bought it. That is not really the win. The win is that for about ten minutes I stopped calculating: whether the price was right, whether the gallery would have wanted it, whether a small panel even counts as a serious painting. She was looking at the thing itself. That is what I have been chasing for twenty-five years and I forget it constantly, sometimes for months at a time. Anyway the wall where it hung is empty now and I keep glancing at the nail.

Painted a 120x150 for an old friend's anniversary two years back. She told me, tearfully, she couldn't afford my gallery price and I said of course, don't worry, we'll find something. Named €600, which was about a third of what that size goes for. She spread the word, quietly, and for a year after that I got three more people "from her circle" who all wanted the same deal. Each one I had to find a way to say no to without making her look bad. The painting itself was good, actually maybe the best of that stretch, and part of me still resents it. Not her. Me. I set the number and I treated my own time like it was worth nothing when a friend was on the other end of it. I've started telling younger painters in the academy a simple rule I wish someone had given me: the discount should come out of your profit, not your hourly rate. Figure out your real number first, then decide how much of it you can afford to give away. If you can't afford to give it all away, you can't afford to give it at all. I know it sounds ungenerous. It's actually the only way I stayed generous at all.

There's a print I did as a demo at a market two summers back, a little heron standing in a puddle, and I pulled it while a crowd of people stood watching me carve. Hands sweating, chatting away while I was praying I wouldn't slice clean through the lino and ruin it in front of the whole town. I gave the first few pulls away to people who stood there the whole time, the patient ones. Anyway. This week I framed one of the good pulls and it's on the wall in the studio now, and I keep glancing at it and feeling grand about it for the first time. It's not the best print I've ever made, not close. But it's the one where I stopped being terrified of doing it badly in public, and that turned out to be a bigger thing than the print itself. Framed it in a bit of oak scrap I found in the shed, which is very on brand for me. The matting is wonky. I don't care. Anyone else got a piece that matters for the doing of it, not the look of it?

Same copper pot and lemons, three times now. First attempt sat in the studio for a month looking like a poster. Second one I scraped down to the ground and walked away. This week I went back at it with just glazes, no direct paint except the highlights, and something finally clicked. The light on the rim of that pot is the best thing I've painted in years, and it's doing nothing but sitting in a window. Funny how the third try is the one that teaches you. Atelier training made me think the discipline was in the first pass. It's not. It's in being willing to kill the thing twice before it starts behaving. What's the longest anyone else has sat on a piece before it turned?

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.

Every time I sit down to a fresh sheet, handmade paper, the one I like from the Srikrishna batch we got last year, I tell myself I will do something new this time. A different composition. Maybe the wedding scene I have been thinking about since my niece's marriage last month. But my hand, it goes to the dhaan. The paddy stalks. That old motif curving from the corner, the grains full and heavy, dropping toward the bottom edge. My mother used to say it is not decoration, it is a prayer, for the land, for the stomach, for the season coming right. I put it in even when the painting is about Durga or the fish or the tree of life. Sometimes I hide it small behind a border so only the person who looks carefully will see it. My grandmother told me once: if you paint the dhaan enough times, the goddess will recognise your hand and bless your harvest. I was a boy then, I thought she meant the rice harvest. Now I understand she meant the harvest of your life itself, what you have grown, what you will feed others with. So today again, starting a new piece for an exhibition in Patna next month. And there it is. The paddy stalks already. I did not even decide. They just came. 🙏

Yesterday while painting I realised I have drawn fish almost every single day of my life since I was maybe six years old, and still the eyes give me trouble. Not the shape, that is easy. But the eye is what makes the fish alive or dead. My mother used to say the eye is the soul's window, even for a fish. She would watch me finish the body and then stop, and she would take the brush from my hand and do the eye herself, one small circle with a dot inside, and the fish would suddenly be looking at me. Yesterday I finished the whole piece, all the fish, and when I stepped back I saw every one of them was looking the same direction. All staring to the left. Like a whole school that had decided something together without telling me. My wife laughed and said they are all going to the same place, maybe that is good luck. I did not correct them. I left it. First time in my life I let the fish all face one way. I am not sure it is right, but my hand did it, so maybe the hand knows something the head does not. Has anyone else ever looked at their finished work and found the hand did something you did not plan, and you left it anyway?

Met a man at the community center show yesterday. He stood in front of my piece for a good long while, this one I'd been working on for weeks, pieced from my grandmother's old housedresses and my aunt's aprons, all those soft faded florals. He looked at it. Nodded. Said how much for this one. I told him. He about choked. Said "that much? My grandmother made quilts for free her whole life. Just gave 'em away." I said well sir, your grandmother probably did it in a time when nobody thought her work was worth money. And she was wronged by that same thinking. But I am not my grandmother in that way. He walked off. And I stood there thinking, that man thought he was telling me something about value. All he told me was that his grandmother never got paid for her gift. And somehow that's supposed to make me lower my price instead of raise it. My grandmother never sold a quilt in her life. She gave them to every child, every cousin, every newborn in the church. And they'd say thank you and put it on the bed and wear it thin. And she died never knowing what her hands were worth. So no sir. I'm not doing it for free. I'm doing it for both of us.

There's this old bungalow on Nandi Durga Road, one of those Art Deco ones with the curved verandah and the beautiful terrible paint job, salmon pink over original white, peeling everywhere. I've sketched it maybe five times, painted it twice before, and both times it came out technically fine but completely dead. No life in it. Like a photograph but worse. Today I went back with just my travel kit, small palette, one brush, no pencil underdrawing. Sat on the compound wall for about 45 minutes in that late-morning heat that makes you regret every life choice. And something just… unlocked. I let the watercolour bleed into the sketchy ink lines. Didn't try to fix the wonky bits. Left the verandah half-raw. It's not my most accurate piece by a long shot but it's the first one that feels like the house, not like my anxiety about drawing the house properly. Anyway I'm still riding that high. Chai and Marie biscuits kind of celebration tonight. 🙏

Conservation work today, a 1930s Swedish geology textbook for a library. Beautiful binding, and someone had used a page as a bookmark. Not a receipt, a folded grocery list. Bread, coffee, some kind of fish I can't read the handwriting for. I photographed it before I let it go. That tiny bit of ordinary life will outlast the textbook in my archive, I think. It's the part of this job nobody warns you about. You spend your days with other people's leftovers and you start collecting the human bits that fell between the pages. I have a drawer of them now. Postcards never sent, one pressed flower, that grocery list. Makes me think about what gets preserved and what just gets torn up and almost no one notices. The book is the treasure. The list is the actual life.

Working on a seated figure, roughly 90 by 70, and I've repainted the left knee three times now. First two passes were wrong because I wasn't seeing it. This third one is right. Proportions check, the foreshortening reads, the shadow side sits where it should. It's the best-observed knee I've painted in a long time and it is completely dead. I know what happened. I painted the knee as a thing to be solved instead of a thing sitting under cloth in a room. Every plane is accounted for and none of them are breathing. I've been circling it for two days, adding half-tones, taking them out, which is not painting, it's polishing. What I think I have to do is scrape it and come back in with a much bigger brush and a lot less information. Which is terrifying because the drawing is good and I'll lose it. But the drawing is exactly what's killing it. It's a diagram now. For the people who work from life: when you've painted something accurately and it has no life in it, do you destroy it or do you try to paint your way out from the inside? I've done both and I genuinely don't know which one is honest here.

I've been setting a small panel for three weeks now, roughly 22 by 30, a figure half turned away. Not saying more than that. The problem is one section of red smalti in the drapery. I cut it, laid it, and the transitions are exactly what I planned. Every tesserae sits where I wanted it. It is the best-executed passage of red I have made in years and it is completely dead. I have been looking at it from across the room for four days. From there it reads like a photograph of drapery, which is the worst thing I can say about mosaic. The hand is gone. No gaps, no small errors, no slight wrongness that tells you a person sat on the floor placing these. I smoothed it out of existence. I know what I have to do. Rip out about forty pieces from the middle of it and set them badly on purpose. Deliberately. Wrong sizes, a couple of them turned a few degrees off the flow, one piece of a different red that is almost but not quite the same, so the eye catches on it and moves. Not chaos. A few honest mistakes that I am going to have to manufacture. The strange part is I spent years training out those mistakes. Conservation teaches you to blend, to match, to disappear. Then you go make your own work and you spend the rest of your life trying to be visible again. Tomorrow I take the chisel to a section that took me two days. Anyone else set something too well and had to wreck it back to life?

I still remember my first actual sale through a gallery. Not a group show nod, not a "we love your work" lunch that went nowhere. A real cheque, for a real piece, from people I didn't have to explain myself to. I sat on the tram holding it like an idiot. Drank the worst celebratory beer of my life and it was the best beer of my life. How long did it take you to get there? And was it to a stranger or to someone you knew the whole time?

Yesterday one of my new students, maybe fourteen years old, sat down with my mother's old chart of the fish motif and asked me a question nobody has asked me in my whole life. She said, why always two fish, one facing this way and one facing that way? Why not three, or seven, or just one big fish? I laughed a little, but then I saw she was serious. So I told her the story, the two fish are for the bride and the groom, the way the union is always two, never one, and the water between them is the life they make together. It is not decoration, I told her. Every line in our paintings is a word. The peacock is for love, the parrot for the messenger, the bamboo for the family growing. She thought for a long time. Then she said, but in our house nobody is married. It is only me and my mother. And I did not have the answer ready, ji. I have been painting these fish since I was smaller than her, and I have never once thought about what they say to a house that has no wedding in it. Maybe the fish still speak. Maybe they wait. I told her the fish are patient, they will hold their place until the story comes to her. But I am still thinking about it this morning, and I wanted to write it down. Our art is old, very old, but it is not finished. The young ones are showing me the empty spaces in it.