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There is a small head study hanging next to the door in my studio, and it is not good. Dead flesh tones, the jaw runs away from me on the left side, the whole thing looks like it was painted by someone who had read about painting. I did it in February in a bad mood and I would not sign it. I keep it there on purpose. My students ask about it constantly, thinking it is a lesson, and I tell them the truth: it is there so I stop expecting every session to arrive somewhere. I spent my thirties waiting for the good mood to come back before I would touch the brush, and the good mood never comes looking for you. Now I have a bad painting on the wall to remind me that the work happens anyway. Also it is honest. Everything else in here is either finished or in that flattering state where you still believe in it.

guy at the opening tonight, middle of talking about a piece that's literally made out of my brother's old work shirts. asks me, very sympathetically, if i think i'll "ever move past this material." like it's a stylistic tic i'll grow out of. like the whole thing is a mood. i just said "it's a material." and walked off to refill my wine. i know he meant well. i know. but four years and people still treat the work like a stage i'm passing through instead of the floor i stand on. i don't need to be handled. i need people to stop asking when i'll be done with it.

so a friend that owns a coffee place here asked if i'd hang a couple small pieces on the wall by the till. not a show, no hanging fee, no commission beyond whatever i bought in flat whites. i said sure, mostly to get them out of my apartment. one 20x20cm acrylic, one slightly bigger. little handwritten tag next to each, price and my IG handle. that's it. sold three in nine days. not the two on the wall, three, because people asked if i had more in the back and my friend texted me and i drove over with two more. here's the part that bugs me. last year i did an actual group show, framed stuff, printed cards, the whole thing, sold one. this is a wall by a pastry case next to a sign about oat milk. i don't fully know what it means and i'm trying not to build a whole theory about it. maybe framed art in a white room reads as expensive and scary and a small unframed panel next to your coffee reads as a thing a person could own. maybe it's just that people are already in a buying mood when they're buying a croissant. maybe i got lucky. ngl though i'm now walking around town looking at every counter and shelf like a weirdo thinking about where else i could leave a painting. the guy at the hardware store is going to think i'm unwell. anyone else done the non-gallery thing and had it go weirdly better than the gallery thing

I took the "oil on linen, 30x40" caption out of my posts for a month. Not the hashtags, not the process videos, just that little line at the end. I've always put it there out of habit, like a signature. Collectors want to know what they're buying, I told myself. The change was not dramatic but it was real. People started commenting about the light in the room, the mood of the thing, what the woman in the painting was thinking. Before it was mostly "beautiful work" and other painters asking about my medium. I think the technical note was giving people permission to look at it like a spec sheet instead of letting them just feel it. Once the frame of reference was gone they had to meet the painting on its own terms. I put the information back when the piece sells, obviously. But the post itself, the first encounter, I leave it bare now. The gallery can do the talking about dimensions and materials. My job on social media is to make someone stop scrolling because something in the image got under their skin, and I was undercutting that with my own footnotes. Maybe that's just me. Or maybe we all over-explain ourselves online because we're afraid of being misunderstood, and the fear itself is what keeps people at arm's length.

Finished a big charcoal piece tonight, two figures tangled up, and I stood there for like ten minutes just... oscillating. Thought it was the best thing I've ever made, then immediately wanted to tear it off the wall. Same painting. Nothing changed. Just my stupid brain flipping a coin. The scary part is I've learned to trust the hate more than the love. The love is my ego showing off. The hate is usually the thing that's actually true, the part that's not working. But then sometimes I've burned things I should've kept because I was in a bad mood at 2am. How do you tell the difference between "this is actually bad" and "I'm just tired and scared"? I genuinely don't know and I've been doing this for years. Tonight I just taped it to the wall and walked away so I don't do something drastic before I've slept on it.

I spent three weeks fighting this gouache piece of my apartment window in the rain, I genuinely could not stand it the entire time, kept almost scraping it off the paper and starting over. Posted the finished thing mostly out of spite and exhaustion. It's the most saved piece on my site this month and two people have asked about prints and one person messaged about commissioning something similar. Meanwhile the window painting I actually love, the one I finished and immediately wanted to frame myself, sits there with like 40 likes lol. I know the whole "the work you hate is the work they love" thing is basically a cliche at this point but it still gets me every time. I have no idea what makes one land and the other flop. Is it the colors? The mood? The fact that it's messier and more honest? I genuinely can't reverse engineer it, I'm just out here throwing paint and praying. Anyone else have a piece they lowkey despise that the audience latched onto?

ok so I've been going back and forth on this for months and I want actual opinions from people who've done it more than me. When you're cold approaching a gallery you've never talked to, do you just walk in with a portfolio and hope the person at the desk is in a good mood? Or do you email first and wait three weeks for a reply that never comes? I did the walk-in thing once. Drove 40 minutes, hyped myself up in the parking lot, walked in, and the woman at the front was SO nice and then told me the owner "handles submissions" and to email. Which I did. Never heard back. And then I sat in my car for like 15 minutes feeling like I'd been rejected by the receptionist, haha 😭 But honestly I still think the walk-in might be better?? Because at least they've seen your face?? Or is that just me being naive and wasting gas money. Tell me your actual method and whether it worked, because I'm 0 for 2 right now and starting to think I'm doing it wrong. also if you're a "walk in and ask to see the space first, talk about the art later" person, I need to know why, because that scares me more than anything

I've been doing the whole "wake up, post a nice finished piece, tag materials, use hashtags, be consistent" thing for months and it's been working okay but like... okay. Then last week I was in a really bad mood about a painting I'd been fighting with for three days, the wash was drying wrong, everything was lifting when I went back in, and I just filmed myself scraping the whole thing off with a palette knife and going "well, that's going in the bin" and posted it on a whim. No caption strategy. Just pure frustration. That stupid, messy, nothing video has more saves and shares than anything I've posted in the last two months. And it's not even a good video, it's just real. I've had four commissions come through from it, including one from someone who said "I don't know anything about art but I felt that." I keep hearing we're supposed to "provide value" and "educate" and I'm not against that but I think maybe the value is just... letting people see you fail? In real time? Without making it a tidy lesson? I don't know, I'm still trying to figure out if I can be that messy on purpose or if it only works when it's genuine. Anybody else finding that the stuff you almost didn't post is the stuff that works?

I realised something yesterday while I was pulling proofs that I already knew but hadn't admitted: the part I love most is the preparation. The drawing on the plate, the aquatint, the biting, the masking. The thinking part. Then I get to the printing and something in me checks out. I rush it. I'm already onto the next idea. I used to think this meant I was lazy or not a "real" printmaker but maybe it's just that my brain likes potential more than completion. The proof is where everything is still possible. Once it's an edition it's just... fixed. Decided. I have about 40 copper plates sitting in a drawer that are etched and ready and I haven't printed. Some from two years ago. I tell myself I'm saving them for the right paper or the right mood but honestly I think I just don't want them to be finished. Anyone else work this way or am I just avoiding the hard part?

Right, settle this for me because I've had two very different experiences and I'm still not sure which was the fluke. First gallery that ever showed my linocuts, I walked in off the street. No appointment, no email, just a folder of prints under my arm and a fair bit of neck. The woman behind the desk was mid-something, clearly not in the mood, and I near talked the ear off her about a hare. She gave me four minutes and a "leave the folder, we'll ring you." I thought I'd blown it. She rang me eleven days later. Since then I've sent maybe nine or ten properly composed emails with the website link and the nice photographs and the polite paragraph about my practice, and I've had two replies. One of them was a no. So my honest theory is the walking in did more for me than every tidy email since, and I'm not sure if that's because of the neck or because a print you can actually hold does something an attachment can't. Could also just be I write a desperate email. What's yours? Did you get in the door by emailing, walking in, or the third thing nobody admits to, which is knowing somebody? And if you're an emailer, tell me what you put in the subject line because mine are clearly being eaten alive.

did the Mercado de Tapinería this weekend, first stall since June. ten pieces out, four sold. which is not good money once you count the stall fee and the hours, and I was in a mood about it sunday night. but the three that didn't sell were the weird ones, the tall vessel with the crooked neck and the two little heads with the glaze dripping down the chin like they're crying. people kept picking them up and putting them back down and one woman stood there for maybe four minutes just holding the crooked one and turning it. yesterday she messaged me: can you make a set of six for a dining table. so the thing I thought was my failure pile turned into the actual work. meanwhile the safe little bowls, the ones I make because they always go, sold in the first hour and I already forget who bought them. I'm not going to pretend I know what to do with that information. I can't pay rent with a commission that lands in November. but I keep thinking I've been building the wrong catalog. anyone else find that the stuff you almost don't bring is the stuff that pulls?

Somebody threw out maybe 40 of them, all from the same booth, all of the same two people between 1998 and 2003. You can watch them get older strip by strip. Then it just stops. I took them. Obviously I took them. They're in a shoebox on the floor and I've looked at them maybe six times in two days, which is more than I've looked at my own work. Here's the thing though. I keep thinking about putting them in a piece and every version in my head feels like stealing. Not legally, I don't care about that. It's that they don't belong to me and the work would be me borrowing someone else's whole life for a mood. I've spent four years cutting up my brother's receipts and I never once felt that. That was mine to use. So right now they're just sitting there and I'm making a fuss about it on the internet instead of working.

Sold a big charcoal piece Friday. Woman cried when she saw it, said it was her sister. I stood there nodding like yeah. yeah. and inside I was already gone from it. Not because of her, because that's what happens the second money changes hands. It stopped being mine. Now it's a thing on her wall I'll never touch again and I've been in a foul mood for three days. Meanwhile there's a half finished oil on the floor I can't look at because I love it too much and I know I'll wreck it. Two figures, one holding the other's face. Spent 30 bucks on burnt umber for it which would be fine if I hadn't already spent 30 on burnt umber last month and lost the tube. My studio is basically a landfill with good lighting. Anyway I think the good ones are the ones you can't stand to finish because finishing means it's done deciding and you have to find out if it's real. Sellable is a different feeling from good. I'm not sure they've ever lined up for me once.

deadline's friday. freelance gig for a wellness brand, which already tells you everything. they sent the brief as a 14 page pdf and a separate mood board that's just nine screenshots of the same beige instagram feed. today's note: "love it! can we make the logo bigger? like 40% bigger." the logo is a wordmark. the whole card is the wordmark. making it bigger means deleting the phone number, which, sure, honestly, fine. the thing that gets me is i did this exact conversation in 2019. and 2021. i know all the moves. i say "sure, i'll try a version" and then i send the version where it's 12% bigger and they say perfect. i'm not even mad at them. i'm mad that i'm this good at it. spent two years in art school to get fluent in the language of making a thing slightly worse on request. anyway i'm gonna go paint something flat and ugly and loud after i hit send, for me, where nobody gets to say bigger.

Someone messaged me last week about a piece in the group show. Not the painting, a photo I'd printed small and hung low, out of the way, because it's of my brother's jacket on the back of a chair and honestly I almost didn't include it. She offered 900. Cash, no fuss, said it was "exactly the mood she wanted for her hallway." I said no. Then I sat with the email for two days wondering if that was stupid. Here's the thing I keep circling. If she'd said anything about the jacket, about the wear on the cuff, about the fact that it's still got a thread hanging off it because I never fixed it, I probably would've said yes. She didn't. She said hallway. I don't know if that makes me precious or if it means I'm finally drawing a line somewhere. My friend K thinks I should've taken it, money is money, and she's not wrong either. She sells to hotels and sleeps fine. Anyway the photo's still on my wall. Slightly crooked. It's the only piece I've made that I actually look at.

Had a student this week, third year with me, technically very good. Clean edges, correct values, the drawing underneath all correct. And the paintings are dead. Nothing wrong with them. That is the problem. So I made her do an exercise: take a canvas already dry, a study she liked, and scumble dirt over it. Grey, ochre, a scraped-down mess. Then find the painting again in the wreck. She looked at me like I had insulted her mother. Honestly I might have. But by the end of the session she had a shoulder and a bit of wall that were more alive than anything she has painted in a year, because she could not control it anymore, so she had to look. I did the same thing to myself at her age and I hated it. What I think now: technique is what lets you get away with the accident, not what prevents it. You cannot smear your way out of not being able to draw, the drawing has to be there underneath or it is just a mess with a mood, but the drawing alone is a recipe for marble. Anyway she is furious with me and she will come back Thursday. Both things are correct.

Yesterday I was sitting in the shop of the paper supplier on Station Road, waiting for my order, and the young boy there, maybe nineteen years, was watching me sketch a peacock on the back of a bill. He asked, very innocently, why I do not just make one good design on computer and print many copies. Same time, same money, no strain on the eyes. I did not get angry. He is a boy, he has only seen printed things. But I sat there and I could not make him understand that the peacock I draw today is not the peacock I drew last Tuesday. My hand was not in the same mood. The line goes thin here, thick there, according to how the brush is feeling that morning. That is the whole thing. That is the only thing. Then I came home and thought, honestly, is he wrong? Because the cooperative gives me the same rate whether I take two days or six. My son says the buyers in Delhi cannot tell the difference on a phone screen anyway. So some days I also ask myself why I am doing this slowly, and I have no clean answer. I only know that when I copy my own design neatly, twice, I feel like a photocopy machine and I do not want to feel like that. Thirty eight years of this work and one boy in a paper shop has put the whole question in front of me in two minutes.

Started a thing back in January where I decided to paint the window in my studio apartment every single week until I got it right. The one good window, faces this ugly courtyard with a fire escape and one tree that's half dead but tries anyway in spring. 11 paintings in now and honestly? The 9th one is the winner and I didn't even know it when I made it. I painted it on a day I was furious about a commission going sideways and I did the whole thing in like 40 minutes without thinking, and it's got this looseness the other ten are choking for. The careful ones all look like I was holding my breath. The angry one breathes. Makes me want to throw out everything I've learned about patience honestly. Or at least stop treating every wash like it's a final exam. Anyway the window has now become a whole series and I don't know what to do with the other ten. They're fine. They're just... fine. Stiff. Like me at a party. Does anyone else have that piece where the version you made in a bad mood or a hurry is better than the one you actually tried on? I need to know I'm not alone here because I'm about to start 12 and I'm scared she's gonna be a stiff one too haha

I was reorganizing my supplies this week and counted eleven jars of water sitting around the studio in various states of use. Eleven. My husband walked in, looked at the collection, and asked if I was conducting an experiment. I told him I was, and had been for thirty years. People economize on paint, on paper, on brushes, and I understand all of it. But water is the variable I will not cut corners on. A tired wash full of lifted pigment is the difference between a leaf that looks alive and one that looks painted. When I teach, I make students change their water after every third wash and they always think I'm being precious. Then they see the two paintings side by side and they stop arguing. Distilled water for mixing, tap for cleaning, and never the two shall meet. I know it sounds like superstition. Maybe it is, at this point. But there's a particular blue-gray that only appears in water that's been sitting overnight, and I've learned to recognize it the way you'd recognize a bad mood in a friend. Some days I paint with it anyway, just to see what happens.

I keep noticing it in my slab pots and cups with faces pressed into them: every single one reads sad, even the ones I'm not trying to make sad. I'll be in a good mood, building something playful, and then I open the kiln and it's just this wall of melancholy staring back at me. I think the problem is the glaze pooling in the eye line. I carve the face before bisque, put a white slip on top, and the glaze settles heavy into those scored lines, so the mouth curves down even when I made it straight. The piece is technically fine, the proportions work, but the feeling is wrong and I can't control it. This one with the little figure on the shoulder, I genuinely meant it to look mid-laugh and it came out like she's seen some things. Anyone else fighting the emotional accident thing? Where the material does the opposite of what you intended and it works, but only if you lean into it? I keep trying to fix it with the tools and I think I need to fix it with the glaze math instead.