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Three years I've been collecting for this installation. Forty-one doors, most of them from a demolished panel building in Ostrava, the kind with the laminate peeling off in sheets. I measured the space in September with my own tape and wrote the numbers in the notebook. Then somebody in the office "transferred the data" and now it's 60 centimeters shorter on the long wall. 60 centimeters. Nothing, you say. Except the whole thing hinges on the doors standing at exact intervals and the last one ending where you can just barely not touch it. Change the wall, change the rhythm, change the entire sentence the room is saying. I could cut one door. I could shuffle. Both are wrong. I spent today in the space with a folding rule, moving two doors back and forth like an idiot, and I have to say I started laughing somewhere around hour four. Twenty-eight years of this and the enemy is still a number in a spreadsheet typed by someone who was probably eating lunch. Under communism we had different problems but at least nobody could email a room and make it smaller. Anyway. Tomorrow I measure it myself again, in the morning, with coffee, and I will not be diplomatic about it.

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.

Six lengths of 3/8 rod, they rang it up as six separate items and charged me cutting time on top. I cut it myself. I was standing right there with the grinder and the kid watched me do it. Twenty two years I've been going to that yard and the old man knew my truck. Now there's a tablet and a loyalty card and a guy in a polo shirt asking me what I'm building. I said a gate. He wanted to know if it was "for a project." I said it's for a gate. Cost me $61 more than last month for the same order. I paid it because I needed to get back to the shop, but I'm going to start driving out to the place in Fallbrook. Forty minutes each way. Cheaper and they leave you alone. Anyway. If anyone in the area knows a yard that still sells off the rack and lets you walk the aisles, say so.

Not a metaphor, it's actual lino dust and ink and the same two feet in the same spot for eleven years. The floor is that cheap grey vinyl stuff and there's two pale patches about the size of my boots worn clean through the pattern, and a crack running off the right heel. I noticed it properly last week because the small fella was in under the table looking for a toy and he came out with a lump of dried ink shaped like a kidney and asked me was it a fossil. Anyway the actual thing on my mind: I'm laying a new floor in there in the spring and I genuinely don't know whether to keep the patches. Part of me wants to cut the two of them out and nail them to the wall over the bench, like a pair of old boots. The other part of me thinks that's the sort of thing a fella does right before he starts charging people to look at his studio. The crack I'm not worried about, the crack can go. What's the daftest thing ye have kept out of a workspace because throwing it out felt like a lie about how long you've been at it.

Went out this morning to sketch a house off Richmond Road, the kind with the curved verandah and teak columns, and found the demolition crew already there. Roof off, most of the back wall down. The foreman saw my sketchbook and just nodded at me like, yes, daily occurrence, get on with it. So I sat across the road and drew what was left. And honestly the strangest thing happened, the half-drawn house was more interesting to sketch than the whole one would have been. The brickwork where the plaster fell away, the exposed beams, the bathroom tiles still clinging to a wall that had no room behind it anymore. I was making this nice little study of a house mid-death and I felt awful about enjoying it. I looked up the property card later. 1948. That house was older than independence itself and I was out there enjoying the demolition like it was a landscape. I don't know what to do with this feeling. I'm glad I drew it. I also hate that I drew it. Both things are true and I can't decide if that makes me a documentarian or just someone watching the city fall down for entertainment. Anyway. Two studies done, both half-hearted and honestly better for it. Might pin them up side by side and see what the week makes of them.

For two days my son has been photographing my paintings for the website. He has made a white cloth, two lamps borrowed from the neighbour, and he is very particular about the angle. Forty paintings he has done. It is good work and I am grateful, because before this we were only selling through the cooperative in Darbhanga and whatever the buyers who came to the house would take. But here is my difficulty. On the screen, my Kohbar and my Durga all look the same size. The line which I pulled for three days with a squirrel-hair brush looks thin like a hair, and the fish which I made the size of my palm looks small like nothing. A painting is not made to be looked at in a small box on a phone. It is made to be sat in front of. He is telling me this is how people buy now, they will not come to Madhubani to see. Maybe he is right. Still I am thinking we should put one photo where he has kept a matchbox beside the painting, just so the person knows. My mother never measured anything in her life and now I am measuring for a machine. If any of you are selling your work this way, kindly tell me one thing. Do you send the actual size, or the person will understand by themselves?

Yesterday I was grinding lamp black for the outlines, sitting on the floor with the stone as always, and my daughter-in-law came and stood at the door and asked what I am cooking. Nothing is cooking, I said. It is only the soot. But she is right, the smell is there. I collect the soot from the mustard oil lamp in the prayer room, the one that burns through the evening aarti, and I keep it in an old Bournvita bottle for months before I use it. When I grind it with a little gum and water, the whole room becomes that smell. Mustard oil, a little burnt, little sweet. My mother did the same bottle, same lamp. She never measured anything. I also do not measure, and my son says this is why I cannot give a rate card for the work, and I tell him some things are not for rate card. Anyway, the outline on this peacock is going well. Fine as a hair. But I am thinking now the black from this year's soot is a shade warmer than last year's and I cannot decide if I am imagining it or if the oil is different. Anyone else here working with their own lamp black, kindly tell me if it changes for you also. It is a small thing but it is sitting in my head since two days.

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.

Been using the same 1/4 inch masonry bit since 1994. It's got maybe an eighth of an inch left on it and the carbide's chipped in two places. I've got a drawer full of new ones that cut cleaner. But that old bit has gone through three shop walls and half a dozen concrete pours, and I know exactly how it walks before it bites. New ones chatter. That one just goes. My daughter keeps telling me to retire it. Says it's sentimental, like the thing has feelings. It doesn't. It's just measured. When you've pulled a tool a thousand times you don't think about it, you just know the weight of it in your hand. Same reason I don't change how I set a weld after thirty years. Not habit. Just settled. Most people think the old guys are stubborn. We're not. We just already found the thing that works and we're not going to fight it.

Not a growth tactic, more a survival measure. For years I answered everything the day it arrived, and the day it arrived was usually a morning I had planned to work. One email about a group show in Antwerp and the whole morning gone, because after answering I am no longer in the painting, I am in the correspondence about the painting. So since March I answer on Tuesdays. Everything. Piles up, I read them Tuesday morning with coffee, answer in one go, and the rest of the week the studio door is shut properly. What surprised me: the fairs and the institutions do not care. They wait a week. Two commercial galleries dropped me off their list of people to ask for things, which honestly I count as a gain. One collector I have known for eleven years wrote back after nine days and said it was a relief, he had assumed he was the only one drowning. The thing it did not fix: the actual selling. Being unavailable makes you slightly more interesting to some people and simply absent to others, and the others are the ones with the money in the room. I have not solved that and I am not pretending the calendar solved it for me. But I have had eight uninterrupted weeks in the studio since March, which is more than the whole of last year, and the work is better for it. That is the whole of my marketing strategy at the moment. A closed door on Wednesdays.

I raised my originals by forty percent at the start of the year. Not a gradual thing, just a decision after a commission took me three weeks longer than I estimated and I did the math on what I actually earned per hour. I expected some pushback, at least a pause before purchases. Nothing. The last three pieces sold within the same window they always have. I am not sure whether to be relieved or annoyed that I undervalued myself for years. The work did not change. The buyers did not change. Only the number did. It makes me wonder how much of what we price is habit dressed up as principle. If you raised rates recently, did it change anything measurable? I would like to know whether my experience is the rule or the exception.

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.

Since two weeks I am stuck on one thing and it is not the drawing, the drawing is fine. It is the black. In our work the black line is everything. Without it the fish is only a shape. But real black we do not buy in a tube. We make it from soot, from the lamp, and to bind it we use goat milk and a little gum from the babool tree. My mother used to keep it in a small brass bowl, covered with a cloth, and she would say do not let it dry, keep mixing. If the milk is more, the line becomes grey and faint like old writing. If the gum is more, the brush drags and the line breaks at the tail of the peacock, exactly where you cannot afford it. Yesterday I made a fresh batch and it came out wrong. Too thin. I painted one whole border before I accepted this, and now that border is sitting there looking like a pencil sketch, and I have to decide whether to go over it again or start the paper fresh. The paper is Sanganeri, not cheap, so I am not starting fresh. I am sitting with it. My mother never measured anything. She would dip her finger and know. I have tried many times to do that and I cannot, so now I keep a small glass bangle in the bowl to see the level. It is a poor substitute for her finger. Any of you who grind your own colours, kindly tell how you judge the binding. I am not asking for a recipe from the internet, I am asking what your hand tells you.

People ask me which brush company and I have to laugh. For the fine black line in Mithila work we do not buy brushes at all. We take a small twig, neem or sometimes bamboo, and we chew the end of it, or press and roll it on a stone until the tip becomes soft and pointed like a needle. Then it is a brush. Nothing else. I keep a small bundle of them tied with thread and when one goes blunt I simply cut the tip and make it again. My mother used to do this sitting outside in the morning light and I do the same now. It is the first work of the day, before any painting. The twig has to be fresh, if it dries it splits and you cannot get the line. So there is a little tree behind the house and my grandson is always the one sent to break the branches, which he does very happily and very badly. Somebody from Delhi once saw my bundle and asked if I could not simply use a 0.1 mm brush from the art shop. I said I could. I did not say I would. The line from a chewed twig is not like the line from a brush. It drinks colour and gives it slowly. If your hand is not steady it will show, there is no help from the bristles. So the twig keeps me honest. When I have not painted for many days I feel it in the first twig, the line comes out shivering. That is my measure of practice. Only difficulty is the colour. My twigs are good for black and for fine work, but for filling large areas the squirrel hair brush from my mother's time is still doing duty, and it is now more thread than hair. I have not found anybody here who makes them. If any of you know a person, kindly tell me.

Not a manifesto, just a thing that happened. I closed the account in the first week of January, mostly out of fatigue. Photographing a canvas under three lamps, adjusting the white balance, cropping so the edges don't show, then watching forty people like it and nobody write. Ten years of that and I was tired in a way sleep doesn't fix. Three commissions have come in since, all through the same channel: someone saw a painting on a wall at a friend's apartment in Lyon and asked who did it. One of them is a large interior, a woman at a window, and she has already sent me the light measurements from her apartment and asked me to visit at 4pm to see the room. That is worth more than any algorithm has ever handed me. I'm not saying everyone should quit. I still have a website with prices on it because I'm not a monk about this. But it's been two months and I have not missed it once. What I do miss is the excuse to see other painters' work, so I've been going to the Musée des Beaux-Arts on Thursdays instead, when it's empty, and looking at the Fantin-Latour for an hour. That has done more for my work than a year of posting ever did.

Quoted a set of driveway gates in 2022. Client wanted them, then didn't, then did again two years later when the price went up and she didn't blink. I'd half written it off. The frames are 1 1/2 inch square tube, forged scrolls, and a foliage panel I cut by hand with a plasma torch because I'm too stubborn to buy a CNC. The last seam on the hinge stile went in this afternoon. Ran a root pass, let it cool, ground it flush, and there it was. Three years of a pile of steel leaning against the shop wall and it's a gate. What got me is the gate hung true on the first try. That never happens. Twenty years ago I'd have measured it eleven times and still shimmed it. Today I eyeballed the hinge spacing off the brick line and it swung clean. I don't celebrate much. But I stood there in the driveway and swung it a few times with one finger. My back is going to hate me tomorrow and it was worth it. Delivering Thursday. Dreading the driveway more than the welding.

got the email this morning. we love the work, we'd like to include it, one small thing: could it be, and I'm quoting, "scaled down slightly to fit the wall." it's a physical object. it's paper glued to board. it's 30 by 40. there is no smaller version of it, that's just a different piece. I spent twenty minutes drafting a polite reply that said no in six different ways and then sent "let me check the wall dimensions" like a coward. anyway the wall is 34 inches. so now I'm sitting here measuring my own painting like it's a couch.

I finally sat down and looked at where last year's sales actually came from. Three paintings, all three to people who had seen the work in person first: one at a two-day botanical illustration symposium in Asheville, two through my open studio weekend in October. Not one sale came from anything I posted. Not one. Meanwhile I've spent a year learning how to shoot vertical video, which I am not good at and do not enjoy, and I'm reasonably sure I've converted the account into an audience of people who like watching paint dry in the literal sense. They came for the process and they are not buyers. That's not a complaint about them. It's a complaint about me not noticing for twelve months. What I have not worked out is whether the online thing is genuinely wasted effort or just too slow to measure, and I suspect nobody can actually tell me. The symposium cost me a table fee, four nights in a hotel, and a week of framing, and it paid for itself in the first hour. I'm keeping the account. I've stopped pretending it's a shop.

Working on a half-length figure, a girl at a window, morning light coming in flat and grey. The ear is the problem. Four times I've laid it in, scraped it back, laid it in again, and each version is more correct and less alive than the first one, which was wrong in every measurable way and had the light in it. I know exactly what I did the first time and I can't get back to not knowing it. So the ear stays in the corner of the studio facing the wall and I'll look at it tomorrow with worse eyes, which is usually the fix. Bof. Some days the craft is the whole point and some days the craft is what's standing between me and the thing.

Woman wants a garden piece in limestone. I measured, I told her 3 feet tall, 900 pounds, delivered and set on a proper base. Gave her a number. She says she loves it. Forty minutes later she calls back. Can we do four feet. Same price. Forty inches of extra stone doesn't come out of the air. Bigger block, bigger crane, bigger base, and I have to hand it anyway. I told her no. She acted like I'd insulted her. The part that gets me is she thinks size is a preference. Like picking a color. It isn't. Every inch changes what the stone can hold up. Go past a certain point and the ankle of the piece gets thin and it fails in ten years, and I'm the one whose name is on it. Block is already sitting in the yard. I'll cut it down to three feet and it'll stand for a hundred years. That's the whole offer.