Search

Young artist friend came by with a curator she's courting. I swept the floor, put the scrap metal in a pile instead of its usual chaos, stacked the papers. The visit went fine. But now I've spent two days trying to locate a specific hinge I know I had, the good kind from an old window frame, and it's gone into whatever dimension tidiness creates. The mess was load-bearing. It was my filing system. I spent my whole life learning to work through mess and now I'm learning that order is just mess you can't see into.

Started posting the shop floor last month. Chips on the ground, the jig I built to hold a 400-pound slab while I cut it, the hours of grinding nobody sees. Figured process content was the honest version of what everyone else does with their reels. Engagement dropped by about a third. The finished pieces still pull the likes. People want the clean picture of the thing, not the dirty work underneath it. The thing is, the people who did stick around are the ones asking real questions. About joints, about stone density, about how you keep a weld from cracking when the piece moves. That's worth more to me than the numbers I lost. But I won't pretend it didn't sting watching the count go down. I'm a grown man and I checked the likes on a Tuesday like it mattered. It doesn't. It still got me.

I keep my palette clean maybe the first hour of a painting. After that it's just layers of dried paint I mix into, scrape off, add more on top. Someone told me last week I should clean it between sessions and I looked at them like they'd suggested I set my hair on fire. I know painters who treat their palette like an altar. Wipe it down, lay fresh piles, everything in its place. I've tried. I last about twenty minutes before I start working wet into wet and the whole thing turns into a crusty ruin again. There's something about the chaos that helps me find colour faster, I think. I don't have to decide, I just pull from whatever's there and adjust. Today I've got a smear of burnt sienna that's been there since Tuesday, a pool of medium I accidentally spilled, and what might be ultramarine or might be cobalt, I can't tell anymore because it's mixed with the grey from yesterday's shadows. It's fine. The painting is coming along. Maybe I'll scrape it clean when this one's done. Maybe not.

I keep seeing artists post these immaculate studio reels, everything organised, camera angles, the paint squeezed in perfect little rows. Mine is a tripod knocked sideways and footage of me scrubbing brushes for twenty minutes because I forgot turpentine eats my skin now. And apparently that's the one people like. I don't understand it and I've stopped trying to. The careful video I made about glazing technique, with actual explanations, got a fraction of the views of me muttering "merde" because I dropped a tube of raw umber under the table. Some collector messaged me yesterday saying the video made them want to own something I made. Fine. I'll take it. But I refuse to become a performance of carelessness, you know? The moment I stage the mess it stops being the mess. Wondering how many of us are quietly performing our own failure because that's what the numbers reward.

Been hearing a lot about "content strategy" and "funnels" in these threads. Meanwhile my best sale this year happened because a woman I'd never met spent twelve months quietly watching my story highlights, then one day just wrote me a message in broken English asking if I could do a small version of a piece she'd seen me post back in January. No ad, no post boost, no newsletter. Just a person who liked looking at my work long enough to trust me with her money. The part nobody talks about is that I almost didn't post that piece. It was a commission that got cancelled halfway through, I was annoyed about it, and I only photographed it because I'd already set the lights up. One of those throwaway posts. My Instagram is a mess. Irregular, half-finished work, cats knocking tiles off the table. And it's the regularity of the mess that does the work, not the polish. People watch you be real for long enough and they stop seeing a stranger. The thing that actually sells is time. Nobody can buy that for you. All the paid reach in the world won't do what a year of showing up did for that one message.

there was a proper layer of crystallised sea salt built up on the corner where i leave prints to dry after the seawater bath. i don't rinse them, the salt is part of the process, it catches different tones. but the table had gotten bad. crusty. white deposits on everything. so i scrubbed it down this morning and now the wood looks too clean. like a stranger's workspace. i keep glancing over at that corner expecting to see the tide mark and there's nothing. i think i need to go get it messy again on purpose. maybe that's the whole thing, you spend years building a rhythm of mess and then one day you tidy it and realise the mess was the point.

ok so i KNOW this is gonna sound ridiculous but i cannot start painting unless i've done the exact same stupid ritual first, i have to make a cup of tea, i have to light this one specific candle my partner got me, and i have to put on the same playlist i've been using for like three years now. it's not even a good playlist, it's just a shuffled mess of stuff i added when i was 19. there's some owl city on there still. owl city!!! and if i skip any of these steps i will literally just sit there staring at my paper for 20 minutes like a malfunctioning robot. i keep trying to break out of it because it feels so silly and precious but honestly??? every time i've tried to just "go for it" without the ritual i've messed up the first wash within minutes and gotten frustrated and quit. so maybe the ritual is actually functional and i should stop being embarrassed about it? or maybe i need to finally delete owl city from the playlist. one of those. does anyone else have a weird little thing you HAVE to do before you can work or am i uniquely insane here

There's a layer of charcoal dust on every single surface in here. The radiator, my coffee mug, the window sill, somehow the ceiling fan blades. I wiped the floor yesterday and it looked like I'd been making storm clouds out of pure soot by tonight. People come over and I watch them look at their hands after they touch anything. Wild that I've just accepted this as my life now. You'd think after twelve years I'd have figured out a system but no. The system is I sweep when I can't see the floor anymore and my whites are all technically greys. The funny thing is I love it. I clean the studio for a client visit or a photo and it feels wrong, like I've sanded all the texture off the room. The mess is proof something happened today. Some days the work is terrible but the mess is still there and that counts for something I think. This place is basically a crime scene of me trying.

Swept the studio floor for the first time in... I don't want to say. The pile of paint flakes I scraped off the palette over the last month could've filled a cereal bowl. Looked almost pretty tbh, all the colors mixed together like confetti. I almost kept it. Instead I threw it out and immediately got back to work and made a mess again. So the floor is already on its way back. I don't know why I pretend the cycle matters. It's never going to stop being a disaster in here. The good part is the paint flakes used to bother me. Like the mess was a sign I was doing it wrong. Now I sort of think of it as proof of life. Like if the floor's clean something's off.

I finally did it. I packed up my little travel easel and drove out to the lake this morning before the kids woke up, and painted the same view I've been chickening out on since June. The light on the water kept changing every fifteen minutes and I nearly gave up twice, but I just kept blocking in and repainting until something stuck. It's not my best work. But it's the first plein air thing I've actually seen through to the end instead of coming home with a muddy mess and a headache. I've been doing that since my workshop in April and I thought maybe outdoor painting just wasn't for me. Anyway. It's propped up in the kitchen drying and I keep walking past it feeling weirdly proud. If you've been avoiding trying something new for months, just pack the bag and go. The worst case is you come home with a muddy mess and a headache, which is where you already are.

Ach, I'm still buzzing off this. A small gallery up in Sligo got in touch out of nowhere back in February, found me through Instagram, if you can believe it, said they'd been following the work for a while. I thought sure it was one of those scams at first, the ones where they want you to pay to be "featured," but no, genuine people running a proper little space. Sent them a dozen prints this morning, all matted and packed proper. The big heron I've been messing with for months made the cut, and a new hare that finally came together after I ruined about four blocks getting there. Felt strange sealing the box, like sending a bit of yourself off in the post. But good strange. Never had a gallery come to me before. Always been me knocking on doors, standing at markets, sending emails into the void. Nice to be on the other end of it for once. Now I just have to hope they sell and I don't have to pay return postage on twelve unsold prints 😅

I have this shallow drawer in my flat-file that's just chaos. Scraps of paper too small to use, edges I trimmed off, bits of envelopes, a receipt from an exhibition in Copenhagen three years ago, one single glove. Everything else in the studio is ruthlessly ordered, papers sorted by colour and weight, tools in their places. But that drawer is a mess and I can't bring myself to clean it. I think it's because if I sorted it, all those tiny bits would stop being potential and just become trash. As long as they're in the drawer they might still be something. I know that's not rational. But I don't think the studio needs to be rational everywhere.

I spent a full afternoon last month staging a still life, fighting with the light until it did what I wanted, photographed it six ways, wrote a caption I actually labored over. It did fine. Fine. Meanwhile the post that got me two commissions and a workshop enquiry was a photo of my palette at the end of the day, all the dirty mixes half-scraped off, with a caption like "today was a long one." No thought in it. I almost didn't post it at all. There's a lesson in there somewhere about people wanting the evidence of the work rather than the work itself, and I keep circling it. The polished thing reads as finished, and a finished thing doesn't invite anyone in. The mess does. Everyone can see themselves in a dirty palette. I still can't quite bring myself to lean into that deliberately. It feels like a trick the moment it's calculated. So I just post the leftovers now and let the careful posts be the rare ones. It's the reverse of every piece of marketing advice I've ever read, and it keeps working anyway. Bof.

I teach two botanical illustration classes a year, capped at twelve students, and I have never once advertised them. Word of mouth has carried that for over a decade and I assumed it always would. Then this past term three students told me they found the class through an Instagram post I made about pigment lightfastness testing. I had completely forgotten writing it. It was a photo of my test swatches in harsh sun, nothing more. That unsettled me more than it pleased me, honestly. I have spent years treating my social media as a ledger, a record of finished work, and the one post that actually brought people in was a half-finished experiment I nearly did not share. There is a lesson in there somewhere about showing process over polish and I keep resisting it because it feels like capitulating to trends I do not fully respect. I am still not sure what to do with that information. The finished pieces get the likes, but the mess gets the students.

My daughter set up my account and keeps telling me people want to see the process, the in-between, the mess. I get it, that's how it works now. But I spent thirty years learning to show people finished work and not before. A piece isn't a piece until it's out of the shop and on its feet. Posting a half-ground stone that still has tool marks all over it feels like showing someone a rough draft of a letter you haven't signed. She's got a point though. The numbers on the finished pieces are fine. The sketchbook photos do better. I don't like it but I'm not stupid. Still working on a five-foot granite piece, ten days in, and it's at the ugly stage. The one where you wonder why you started at all. That's the part she wants me to post. I keep telling her no one needs to see me sweat like that. Maybe she's right and the sweat is the part people actually connect with. I wasn't raised to show the sweat. You just did the work and let it stand.

I bought a pack of those super cheap synthetic brushes at Michael's a few months ago, like $8 for a dozen, just to beat up on for texture work and practice pieces. And now I reach for them almost every time over the nice ones my husband got me for Christmas. They're not even good brushes. The ferrule is wobbly and one of them is already shedding. But they're the exact right stiffness for how I actually paint, and I'm not scared to mess them up. That's the thing. The nice ones sit in the jar and I keep talking myself out of using them because what if I ruin them. Meanwhile the $8 ones are doing all the real work. I think I need to just give the good ones to a purpose. Use them on a piece I actually care about and stop treating them like they're museum pieces. Anyone else have brushes they are weirdly protective of and never use? Or am I just hoarding nice art supplies like everybody does.

Forgot my wet palette in the car last night. It was cold out, and this morning the paint had this weird rubbery skin on every single puddle. Not dried, exactly, just... bouncy. I scraped it off and the paint underneath was fine, but it threw my whole Sunday rhythm off. I'd planned to finish a little still life and instead spent the first hour messing with a palette knife trying to get a clean edge. Anyway. Note to self: carry the palette in the house with the groceries, Karen. It was sitting right next to the milk I also left out. Two for two. Anyone else have a "where did I lose the painting time this week" story? I feel like I lose more hours to setup and cleanup than I do to actual painting.

A consultant they hired said my feed lacked "curatorial coherence." Too much workshop mess, too many odd details, not enough of a unified aesthetic. So I posted a photo of a pigeon I found in my studio courtyard. Dead. Beautiful grey feathers, one wing slightly open, eye still clear. I put it on a piece of rusted sheet metal and photographed it in the morning light. Caption: "Studio assistant quit." It got more engagement than anything I'd posted in six months. The gallery was not amused. But two collectors messaged me asking if it was available as a print. I don't know what the moral is. Something about the polished version of ourselves being the least interesting one. Or that dead birds sell. One of those.

okay so I finally landed my first gallery showing last year and the whole process was honestly such a mess I'm still not sure I did it right. I cold-emailed like 12 galleries, heard back from TWO, one of which was a "thanks but no thanks" and the other took three months to respond and then acted like we'd been in conversation the whole time?? I was so nervous I basically wrote an essay about myself in every email and I cringe looking back but also... it worked?? eventually?? I want to hear your gallery origin stories honestly, how did you land your first one? Did you walk in somewhere, did you email, did someone see your work somewhere else? Tell me I'm not the only one who had no idea what they were doing and just faked it til something stuck.

I've been selling small edition screenprints through Instagram and my site for about a year now. Nothing huge, maybe 15-20 pieces a month. A few weeks ago I started slipping in a free risograph print with each order, just something I'd already made, an extra, no mention of it in the listing. I thought it would be a nice gesture. What I didn't expect is that people started posting the risograph more than the thing they paid for. Like, photographing it on their wall, tagging me, asking if it's for sale separately. The free thing became the thing they wanted. It's making me rethink how I present the work. People love feeling like they discovered something, even if you deliberately put it there. There's something about the "bonus" object that reads as more authentic than the main one, probably because it feels less like a transaction. I don't know, maybe this is just a thing everyone in product already knows. But coming from a fine art background where you never give anything away because it devalues the work, it's messing with my head a little.