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So here's something I've been chewing on. I had a gallery reach out, small, reputable, good space, and they were interested in a few pieces for a group show. But then came the feedback. "Can you make this a bit warmer?" "The composition on this one feels crowded." "Maybe try a larger format." And I sat there thinking, is this normal curation or am I being moulded into something I didn't sign up for? Because on one hand, they know their space and their buyers. On the other hand, these are my paintings, you know? I already finished them. I ended up doing some of what they asked and standing firm on others. Mixed feelings about it still. Have any of you had a gallery ask for changes before accepting work? Did you do it, negotiate, or just say sorry and move on? I want to know where the line is.

For years my habit when a wash went wrong in front of students was to stop, put the board face down, and start a fresh sheet. Clean, decisive, and I realise now it taught them absolutely nothing except that mistakes are terminal. This past Saturday I was demonstrating a leaf of Berberis, and the first wash of sap green went down too fast. It pooled along one edge and left a hard tide line where I lifted the brush a beat too soon. Nine people watched me do it. I left it there. Then I went back in with a barely damp brush and worked the tideline outward while the paper was still at that stage where it will forgive you, which is a window of perhaps forty seconds and no longer. It dried flat. Not invisible, but honest. The leaf still reads as a leaf. I told them what I was doing while I was doing it, which I have never done before, and one woman at the back said she had assumed that once a wash was down you simply lived with it. She has been painting for eleven years. The correction is now the part of the class people ask about. I have mixed feelings about that, since a demonstration of doing it right the first time would have been more useful, but it was the truer thing to show.

Myself Ramesh. I want to say something that has been on my mind. In the old way, we make our own colours. Rice paste for white. Lampblack from the diya. The red from kusum flower or from geru, the earth. My mother she would grind these things for hours on the sil-batta, mixing with gum from the babul tree. The colour sits on the paper differently. It breathes. Now many students and even some senior artists are using poster colours from the market. It is faster. Also cheaper sometimes. But I look at those paintings and the line has no life. The colour is flat like plastic. You can feel no hand in it. One girl in my class last month she told me guruji natural colours take too long. I said beta that is not a problem. That is the art itself. The grinding, the mixing, the waiting, this is not wasted time. This is the painting. But I also understand. The buyers they want bright. They want quick. And we must eat. So I am conflicted ji. I use both now. Some natural for my own work, some synthetic when I must. But I feel a little shame mixing the two in one painting. Like I am cheating my grandmother. Anyone else feel this way about old materials vs new ones? Or is it only me.🙂

I've been using the same Gamblin cold wax for about six years now. Same supplier. Same shelf in the studio. And the last two tubs I've opened, the consistency is off. Not separated, not bad exactly, but it's stiff in a way it never was before. You know how it should feel when you mix it fifty-fifty with the oil? Like soft fudge. Now it's more like, I don't know, cold mashed potato. You have to work it longer to get it to incorporate. I mix a lot of my own paint, so this matters. When the wax doesn't move the same, the whole layering rhythm shifts. I've had to start warming the tub in hot water before I mix, which I never had to do. Could be a batch thing. Could be they changed the formulation and I missed the announcement. Curious if anyone else has noticed this or if I just got two bad tubs in a row.

okay so I went in for one tube of something neutral today and came out with a tube of "decayed rose," "moody willow," and "antique brass" and I have no defense for it. the colors are gorgeous and I'll use them all but I know exactly why I bought them, it's the NAMES. I want to feel like a poet while I'm mixing my palette. I want to say "I started this piece with a wash of decayed rose" and sound devastating. I'm not even ashamed honestly except slightly because I do this every single time and my partner just looks at the receipt and goes "which one is for the window painting" and it's never the one I bought. the worst part is yesterday I painted with a technically perfect color called "indian yellow" (which I hate the name of btw, colonial vibes, we should rename it) and it was fine but I didn't feel anything. meanwhile "decayed rose" is just a muted pink I could have mixed in five seconds. the marketing got me good. I'm a trained professional and I fell for color name poetry. does anyone else buy paints for the names or am I the only one paying $14 for a fantasy

Okay so I finally caved and filmed one of those "paint this watercolor in 30 seconds" reels because every single person in my comments was like "this would be so good as a reel!!!" and the algorithm had basically stopped showing my work to anyone. 4.2k views. My actual finished paintings get like 30-40 likes on a good day. And I just feel weird about it. Like, great, that many people watched paint dry in fast motion. But did a single one of them buy anything? Did they even look at the finished piece at the end or did they just watch the satisfying part and scroll? I genuinely can't tell if this is a win or if I just spent an hour filming content for people who don't care about art, just about watching a puddle of pigment move around. I'm not saying I won't do it again because honestly the reach was nice for a change. But I can't shake the feeling that I'm optimizing for the wrong audience. The collectors I actually want to reach are not the same people who watch satisfying paint-mixing compilations at 11pm. Or maybe they are?? I have no idea. Someone tell me it's not just me feeling this.

I've been using Sennelier oil sticks for years. Usually reliable, a bit soft in warm weather but nothing you can't work around. The one I bought last week, a raw umber, came out of the tube with the consistency of toothpaste that's been left uncapped all night. Crumbly, dry, almost no oil feel at all. I had to break it up and mix it with stand oil just to get it to stick to the knife. I emailed the supplier. They said it's a known issue with a batch from the summer. No recall, but they'd replace it if I sent photos. Which I did, but I'm stuck on the fact that they knew and still shipped it. That's three tubes of paint I've had problems with this year across different brands and I'm starting to wonder if the supply chain issues everyone talked about in 2022 are still showing up now as rushed batches and bad checks. Anyway. The raw umber is fine now after the intervention. But I shouldn't have to doctor a Sennelier stick like it's cheap student grade. Anybody else hit a dud batch lately or is it just me.

I spent all Sunday afternoon on a landscape, trying to get this one tree just right. I think I finally mixed a color for the bark that felt authentic, but then the branches... they just look a bit stiff, you know? It's so close to what I see in my head, but not quite. Anyone else get that 'almost there' feeling and just have to put the brush down before they ruin it completely?

Spent most of this week on two large ones, 190 x 150, and for once the grey held. That sounds small. It is not small. Grey is the thing that eats me alive in the studio. Mixed warm it turns to mud, mixed cool it turns to dishwater, and after three days of layering and scraping back you look at it and feel nothing. This time I took the cold wax down hard, more than I usually dare, and kept the pigment lean. It dried matte, slightly chalky, and the colour underneath keeps showing through at the edges where I dragged the scraper. Two days ago I stood in front of it and did not want to fix anything. That almost never happens. Usually I want to fix everything. The other canvas is still fighting me. Same mix, same hand, and it sits there like wet cardboard. I keep telling myself the good one only looks good because the bad one is next to it, which is probably true and also useless as advice. I have a show in the spring, so the timing is good. The market can do what it does. Right now I am mostly relieved that a colour I have been chasing since about 2019 finally stood still for a minute.

A 180 x 140, stretched it myself in early March, and then it just sat there on the easel like an accusation every time I crossed the studio. Not blocked, exactly. Not afraid, either. Just nothing rising. Some canvases wait for a feeling and I kept trying to force one in. Today I stopped trying. Mixed a cold wax ground with a little raw umber until it was the colour of wet pavement and just pushed it on with a drywall knife, no plan, no sketch, no idea what happens next. Took maybe twenty minutes and the whole weight of the month went out of the room. I don't know what will come after. That's the honest part. But the white is gone and I can work again. Sometimes the first layer is just permission. People overestimate inspiration and underestimate how much of painting is lowering your own bar far enough to start.

there's a gallery near me that I walked into once, naive and hopeful, and the owner looked at my portfolio for maybe four seconds before saying "we don't really do mixed media here" and turned back to her computer. no follow-up, no "maybe try elsewhere," just dismissed. I still think about it when I email anyone new. what's the moment a gallery made you feel like a nobody? the one that sticks with you. and did it ever turn out they were wrong?

I keep two lists on my phone. One has the collectors who actually buy my paintings, the people who have been following me since 2016 when I posted a blurry photo of a studio wall. The other is what the algorithm tells me to make: flat lays, process timelapses, "how I paint skin tones" voiceovers, all the content that performs but that I feel slightly sick making. The uncomfortable thing is both lists matter and neither one respects the other. The timelapse of me mixing a flesh tone got four times the reach of the finished painting itself, and most of those new followers have never looked at my actual work. But I sold a triptych last month to a woman in Berlin who found me through exactly that kind of video, liked the person, then went back through the archive and bought the real thing. I've started treating the process content as the shop window and the paintings as what's inside. The window has to be well dressed or nobody comes in. But I also stopped pretending to myself that the window is the art. That distinction was costing me more than the algorithm ever has.

I took on a commission last year that I was genuinely unsure about. A woman brought me a box of broken tile from her old family bathroom, the renovation had just torn it out, and asked if I could make something from it. Not a mosaic of something, she said. Just... the tile itself, made into something that feels like it means something. I said yes because I liked her face and I needed the work. Then I sat with five kilos of beige ceramic for three months not knowing what to do. Tried arranging it as patterns, tried mixing it with other material, nothing worked. It just looked like broken bathroom tile. In the end I cut every single piece smaller, reduced it all to tiny irregular shards, almost like coarse sand, and set it into a very simple circle, graded from pale to dark, like a kind of eclipse or a coin. No image. Just the material, transformed by being reduced and rebuilt. Took weeks of just cutting and placing, cutting and placing. She picked it up yesterday and cried. Said it looked like her grandmother's bathroom floor, which wasn't even something I knew about. I don't know if I'll ever do that again, but I'm glad I did it once. Something about letting the material lead instead of imposing a design. Hard to describe. But it worked.

They were polite about it. The new director of a space in the 7e has this energy of someone who read three marketing books in a weekend. She wanted clips. My hand mixing, my brush on the linen, a time lapse of a glazing session for the reels. I said no, and I could feel the room cool about two degrees. Here is my problem with it. The part of the work that people would film is the part that is not the work. Watching me lay a glaze takes forty minutes and looks like nothing. The interesting thing, the thing I would want someone to see, happens over three weeks and you cannot put it in a vertical video. Voilà. Maybe I am wrong. I have watched the chisel clip thing, I know what it does. But I am not a process account. I am not going to perform the making of a painting as though the painting were an excuse for the footage. She asked if I understood how the market works now. I do understand it. I just don't agree that understanding something obliges you to do it. We will see if the show happens.

Today I ground my own green from the neem tree behind the house. My mother used to do this same thing, pluck the leaves, dry them in the shade for three four days, then grind with a little lime to hold the colour. The shade it gives is not bright, not like the market green from a tube. It is dull, dusty, like the underside of a leaf. But when you put it on the paper next to the vermilion it wakes up somehow. That is the thing nobody tells you about natural colour, it needs its neighbours. Alone it looks dead. Put it beside the red, beside the lampblack, and it starts to talk. I was thinking how many years I have been doing this and still the first hour of grinding feels like a waste. Paper dust and powder going everywhere, the colour looking weak, and you think, this is nothing. Then you mix it and you remember. Every single time the same doubt. My grandmother used to say the colour decides whether it will work for you, and you just have to ask politely and wait. She was right, I think. Maybe that is also the whole lesson of this art. You cannot rush the leaf.🙏

there's a specific green in my head that i've been chasing since like march. like a vinegar green, sort of sour, slightly dirty. cadmium yellow light + phthalo + a touch of raw umber got me close enough that i stopped noticing the difference, which honestly might be the goal and might also be cope. the thing that bugs me is that i know it's just sap green territory. i could've walked into the store and paid eleven dollars and had it in nine minutes. but every time i go to buy it my brain goes "no you need to earn it" and then i lose an afternoon. i think i've made peace with the fact that mixing IS the hobby and painting is what i do with the leftovers. also the leftover jar is now almost full of a green nobody asked for and i can't throw it out because that feels like admitting something.

ok so this is embarrassing and i'm probably the only person who does this but when i'm mixing colors, like really sitting there trying to nail a specific green or getting a skin tone right, i have a playlist i made that's literally just the first 30 seconds of songs repeated. like the buildup part over and over. i don't know why it works but my brain just turns off the "am i doing this right" noise and i can actually feel what the color needs. my partner walked in the other day and was like "...is this the same song?" and i had to explain myself and it sounded insane. but the color i mixed after that? genuinely the best warm grey i've ever made. so i'm not sorry hahaha does anyone else have a weird little ritual that sounds dumb but actually does something for your work??

I coated six sheets on Monday for a small show in April, all Arches, all the same 12 percent mix I have used for two years. Hung them on the line to dry and felt nothing. The problem is not the technique. The edges are clean, the exposures are even, the seawater did what seawater does. That is exactly the trouble. I have made these prints before, better, and now I am just repeating myself with more confidence. What I think happened is I stopped being surprised by my own materials. I know what the seaweed will do. I know the net will go soft at the edges. So I place it, I wait, I rinse, I get what I expected. There is no conversation anymore, only instructions. I have one sheet left from that batch. Thinking of coating it badly on purpose, too thick in one corner, letting it pool, not fixing the negative flat, and seeing if the mess says something I did not plan. Or maybe that is just a way to avoid admitting the real answer, which is that I should be working on something else entirely and I do not yet know what. If anyone here has come out of a stretch like this, I would like to know what actually did it. Not the advice version. The thing you did.

Like, I'll get a video of me just doing a really simple wash technique, something I thought was pretty straightforward and maybe helpful, and it'll get like, 100 views total. Then I'll post a sped-up video of me painting my cat, Bartholomew, looking super derpy, and it blows up to 10k. Bartholomew, of all things! haha. I'm not saying cats aren't great, but it's so hard to tell what the platforms actually want or if they're just messing with us. It makes me wonder if all the effort I put into explaining the pigment mixing or the paper buckling is just… wasted on them? It’s frustrating because I want to share the skill of it, you know? Omg, anyone else feel like they're just throwing paint at a wall and hoping something sticks with the algorithm gods lately?

So this is a small one, 9x12, a barn at the edge of a field I drive past on the way to my daughter's swim practice. I've painted the roof four times now. I wiped it off twice with a wet rag, scraped once, painted over it once. The problem is I keep making the roof too even. Like tile, when it should read as corrugated metal with rust eating into it. Every time I lay the lines in I make them all the same distance apart and the same value, and it looks like a barcode. My brain knows better and my hand still does it. The thing I'm actually stuck on: do I fight it and keep the corrugation visible, or do I just push the whole roof back into shadow so the eye doesn't go there at all and let the light sit on the field instead? Second option feels like cheating, but I've been on this roof for three evenings after bedtime and I'm starting to resent the painting. Also I'm working with a Mars black I mixed with a little burnt sienna for the rust and it keeps coming out orange in a way that looks like a pumpkin. Might be the paint, might be me.