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Was out sketching near Ulsoor Lake this morning and the way the light hit those old houses near the market… it was just golden. Made me think about how much of what I try to capture is just about that fleeting light, you know? The same crumbling wall looks entirely different at 8 AM versus 3 PM. It’s a race sometimes, trying to get it down before it shifts. Does anyone else feel that intensely about the light where they are?

Every year around this time I lose the light in my studio. The sun shifts, the building across the street blocks it, and for about six weeks I work under a flat grey that tells me nothing. I know it's coming and I still curse it. Today I spent forty minutes mixing a warm grey I could already see I didn't trust, because the light was lying to me. Wiped it off. Mixed again. Same thing. Finally put on a coat of titanium white on a scrap board just to have something true to look at. I don't use artificial light for painting. Never have. So I just wait it out, work on drawings, scrape old canvases, clean brushes I don't need to clean. It's a kind of enforced pause I didn't ask for. Maybe it's good for me. I'll let you know in November.

I paint by the window in the morning because the light is supposed to be better, that's what every tutorial says, right? But my window faces west. So the light I'm getting at 7am is this weak, flat thing that barely casts a shadow. By the time the light gets interesting, it's 2pm and I've already lost momentum. I keep telling myself I'll shift my table to the other room where the east window is. But that room has the dining table and my mother-in-law's plants and it just doesn't feel like my space. So instead I sit here at my west-facing window with my lukewarm morning light and make it work. I finally bought one of those little clip-on daylight lamps last week. It helps, but it's not the same. There's something about real morning light on watercolour, the way it hits the paper at an angle and you can actually see the sheen of the wet wash. Can't fake that with a lamp. Anyone else make do with a workspace that's technically wrong for what you do?

ok so I have this thing where I paint the window in my apartment over and over, it's basically my whole deal, and this morning the light was doing that thing where it comes in low and sideways and makes the whole room look like honey. so I'm sitting there thinking finally, THIS is the one, this is the day I nail it, and I did the first wash and it immediately went exactly where I didn't want it and by the time I'd tried to fix it I had a gray mud puddle where my nice warm morning light was supposed to be. haha. watercolor doesn't care about your plans. the funny thing is I've been doing this window for like nine months now and usually I can see what went wrong, like oh I was too wet or I rushed the first layer. but this one I genuinely don't get. I did everything right and it still just collapsed on me. so now I'm sitting here staring at a painting I hate and I'm gonna have to do it again tomorrow, which is honestly fine, that's the whole point of it, but right now I'm just annoyed. anyway if you paint the same subject over and over, what's yours? like is it a bowl of fruit, a street corner, a dog that won't sit still? I'm curious if everyone has a thing or if I'm just weird about this one window lol

I have a small interior study I've been fighting for weeks. A corner of my studio, the chair by the window, nothing grand. It never sat right. Every time I looked at it I knew the light was wrong but I couldn't say why. This morning I woke before the alarm, went down in the half-dark, and there was that particular grey Lyonnais light, the flat diffuse one that comes off the river. And I saw it. The painting had been lit like an afternoon in my head, warm and golden, but the room itself only ever looks like this. Grey. Honest. I mixed a little ivory black into everything, cooled the whole thing down, and it just... clicked. Two hours, gone. Funny that the answer was to make it less pretty. I think I'd been painting what I wanted the room to be instead of what it is. The chair looks more like the chair now than it ever did with all that fake sun on it. It's still not the painting I thought I was making. It's better.

Sold a painting last month. Interior, early morning light coming through a window, that grey-gold hour I actually like better than any sunset. Man who bought it emails me two weeks later: could I make the light warmer, his wife finds the room in the painting cold and it's in their dining room now. I said no. Politely the first time. Then he wrote again offering to pay extra. As if it were a colour grading slider in a video app. The whole painting is built on that light, the shadows are cool because the light is cool, you warm it and every edge in the piece collapses. He wasn't asking me to change a painting. He was asking me to change the wallpaper. What I wanted to say is that a painting is not decor that failed to match the sofa. What I said was that I'd buy it back if it didn't suit the room. He went quiet after that. The funny thing is I'd have discussed almost anything else. Composition, palette, even the frame. But there's a line where the thing stops being mine and starts being a product, and I couldn't pretend I didn't see it.

Every winter, around January, I paint the same three things without planning it. My daughter's hand on a tablecloth from when she was small. The corner of our bedroom in the grey morning light. A pear that sits on the same cloth for weeks until it rots and I have to buy another one. I didn't notice the pattern until last year. I thought I was just stalled, repeating myself. But my husband said, why would you stop, these are your prayers. Anyway. I painted the pear again this morning. It's not for anything. No show, no sale. Just the same pear in the same light and I still haven't got it right.

Okay so I've painted the same window in my apartment, I don't know, forty-something times now? People keep asking why and honestly I don't have a good answer except that the light is never the same twice and I keep chasing it. But here's the thing. I framed one today. Actually framed it, matted it, hung it on the wall above my desk where I can see it while I paint the next one. I've never done that before. Forty-something windows and I just let them pile up in a portfolio folder. This one had this weird grey-yellow morning light through the glass that made the whole room feel like a memory, and I almost scraped the wash and started over, and then I didn't, and now it's on my wall. It's not a sale. It's not a commission. Nobody's going to buy it. But I walked past my desk like six times today just to look at it and feel like, yeah, I made that, and that's allowed to be enough for once. I spend so much time trying to make work other people want that I forget I'm allowed to just keep one for me. Anyway that's my win today. Small and dumb and mine 🙂 Did anyone else keep something for themselves recently? Because I think we should all be doing that more.

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.

I went to this gallery in a different city last year, showed them my portfolio, old Bangalore houses, chai stalls, morning light in a certain neighbourhood. And the gallerist looks at me and goes, "This is lovely, but can you make it look more Indian?" I didn't even know what to say. I paint what I see every day. What does "more Indian" even mean? She wanted bright Bollywood colours and lotuses or something, I think. Anyway I didn't take it further obviously. But it stuck with me, that assumption that your work needs to perform some idea of where you're from, rather than just being honest about what you actually see and paint. Anyone else ever been asked to "look more" like something? Or the opposite, told you're too X and should tone it down? What's the weirdest feedback a gallerist has given you about your identity or subject matter?

I had this little study going, just a corner of my desk with the morning light hitting a ceramic bowl, nothing ambitious, and it was genuinely working. The washes were doing exactly what I wanted, the edges were soft where they should be soft, I was so pleased with myself. And then I started "fixing" things. Just tiny little adjustments. A little more shadow here, a little more definition there. Twenty minutes later I had a muddy overworked mess and I just sat there staring at it like why do I do this to myself every single time. Watercolor is so unforgiving about that specific impulse. Oil you can scrape back, acrylic you can paint over, gouache you can reactivate if you're careful. But watercolor just sits there and lets you ruin it and you watch yourself do it in real time. I know the solution is to just stop. Walk away. Start something else. But man, the compulsion to keep noodling is so strong when something is almost there. Almost there feels worse than not even close, somehow. Anyway I started fresh and the second one is fine but not as good as the first one was before I killed it. Just needed to yell into the void about this specific flavor of artist self-sabotage. Does anyone else have a version of this or is it just me and my inability to leave well enough alone

Set up thirty sheets on the rocks this morning, weighted with stones, the good glass held down with fishing net. Sun was perfect, low and honest. Then the sea did what the sea does and came in sooner than I planned. Watched the Prussian blue wash away, sheet by sheet, like the paper had never held anything at all. Some of them I'd coaxed for days. The seaweed pressed just so, the exposure timed to the morning light. I keep telling myself the ocean is the collaborator. Today it felt more like the editor. Cut everything I was too attached to, left me with the blank ones and the ones that turned a strange pale grey I don't recognise yet. I'll go back tomorrow. The tide won't ask my permission either way, and that's maybe the whole point.

A man came to the studio last week, looked at a small interior I'd been keeping for myself, the one with the morning light on the wall. He wanted it. I told him the price and he laughed, said that was too much for a painting that size, tried to bargain me down by half. I don't do the dance. I said, you don't have to take it, the paint will still be there tomorrow. He walked out. Came back two days later, paid the full amount without another word, and stood there looking at it for a while before he left. I think he wanted to hate me a little for making him do it, and I don't mind. He'll take better care of it because he had to fight for it. I've spent years undervaluing my own work out of habit. Saying the number out loud and not flinching when they laugh, that's its own discipline. Maybe harder than the drawing honestly.

Every winter I forget. I complain about the grey, I paint by lamplight, I tell myself the north light that I chose on purpose was a mistake. And then one morning in early March the sun comes in low and sideways through that same window and hits the wall behind my easel the colour of warm milk, and I remember why I chose this room. There is no decision involved. I just stand there with my coffee and watch it move across the plaster for fifteen minutes. The whole painting I thought was stuck last week looks different. Not better yet, but alive. I did nothing. Grey days make me doubt myself. Not the work, the whole enterprise. Then one yellow hour resets everything. The palette knife I use to scrape and start over, the rags, the smell of linseed in the cold air. Voilà, c'est reparti. I wonder if this is what people who garden feel in April.

Okay so I keep this schedule where I'm at the desk by 8, coffee going, big plans, looking so professional. And then without fail somewhere around 11 I hit this wall where everything I've done since breakfast looks like garbage and I'm convinced I should have stayed a Barista forever. Like genuinely considering applying to the café down the street. I've started just planning the crisis into the day. 8-11 is real work, 11-11:30 is me staring at the wall telling myself my last job had a 401k and then I make a second coffee and somehow that fixes my whole brain and I'm fine. Today's wall was the window painting, which is funny because I've done that same window maybe 30 times now. The light this morning was doing something beautiful with the frost on the glass and I completely butchered it. Not even a salvageable butchered, just wrong. And I sat there for a solid ten minutes thinking maybe I've actually never been good at this and everyone's just being nice. Then the second coffee happened and now I'm repainting it with a tiny bit of gamboge in the mix and it's fixing itself. I'm not even sure what the point is. Just that I think the 11am wall is part of the job now. Like my brain does a hard reset and I come back with slightly better hands. Does this happen to anyone else or am I just dramatic??

Kept a lemon on my windowsill and painted it three times, same light through the morning, same canvas size. First two are correct. The form is right, the color is honest, the drawing is fine. And they're dead. The third one has a shadow edge I let stay softer than it should be and a highlight slightly too pale, and suddenly there's air in it. I've been thinking about that all week. My students keep coming to me with work that is technically right and soulless, and I keep saying things like push the values, trust your eye, and then I go do the same wrongness-correct thing myself and catch it only on attempt three. The problem isn't that the first two have mistakes. The problem is they have no mistakes. A painting needs at least one deliberate wrongness in it, one place where the truth submits to what the paint wants. Where do you each keep yours? I mean that seriously, not as a trick. Name the spot in your own work where you lie on purpose and it works.

I spent this morning painting a section of an old workbench in my studio. The light here in Lyon, even on a cloudy day, has this particular quality that catches the grain of the wood, the worn patches where tools have rested for years. It’s a subtle thing, this interplay of light and texture, but it’s what I’m always chasing. It makes you feel the history of the object. It’s why I love oils so much; the paint itself can hold that physical sensation. Some days it feels like a battle to get it right, but when it clicks, voilà.

People talk about the light or the quiet and I get that, but for me the day starts with the smell of the box. Linseed oil, turpentine, a whiff of old wood that's soaked up thirty years of pigment. It's the first thing that tells me I'm back in the work, before my eyes are even properly open. My daughter says it smells like a hospital, which I think is the cruelest thing a teenager has ever said to me. There's a tube of Naples yellow in there I've had since my atelier days. The label peeled off years ago, the crimp is barely holding, but it's one of the few paints I refuse to throw out. Not because it's good, it's gone a bit dull, but because I remember exactly where I bought it and what I was painting that month. A whole year of my life in that little tube. I keep meaning to clean the box out. I never do.

There's a hotel in the old town here, small one, maybe fifteen rooms, family-run. The owner saw my work at a group show and asked if I'd do a large piece for their lobby, a view of the Saône at dusk, something calm. I said yes before I'd even thought about money. When we sat down to talk, he told me honestly he had almost no budget. The hotel barely survived COVID, they're still digging out. I said fine, I'll do it, just cover my materials. He looked relieved and ashamed at the same time. So I painted a 120x80 for the cost of oil and linen. About €280. The painting took me maybe sixty hours. I don't need to do the math again, I already did it and it's stupid. But here's the thing, it's in a place where people sit and look at it every morning over breakfast. The light in that lobby at certain hours is actually beautiful and the painting sits in it the way I hoped. I see it sometimes when I walk past. I don't regret it. I'm not saying this is a sustainable strategy. But a painting that lives well somewhere, even for nothing, I don't know. Sometimes that matters more than the hourly rate. And then sometimes I think I'm just telling myself that because I'm bad at business. Anyone else done a free or nearly-free piece that you still don't feel bad about?

Someone asked me to paint their parents' kitchen. Not a portrait, not a landscape, just the kitchen where they grew up. I almost said no. Kitchens are hard, all those surfaces, chrome, the light fights you. And the reference photo they sent was terrible, taken on a phone in the evening, everything yellow. But they wrote me a long email about their mother cooking in that room, about the afternoon light coming through the little window, and I caved. I should trust that instinct more often. What saved me was that I ended up painting it almost from memory of what a kitchen like that feels like. The photo was only a scaffold. I moved the light around, made it morning, put a bowl of apricots on the counter that wasn't in the photograph at all. She cried when she picked it up. Her husband filmed her. There is a video of a grown woman crying over a painting of her mother's kitchen and it is the most honest thing I've seen in months. I kept the bowl of apricots in. She said her mother always had fruit out. I keep thinking about what I almost said no to.