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woke up at 6am to check on a piece i've been building for like two weeks. spent all yesterday afternoon wet-mounting the final layer onto a board. did everything right, ph-neutral glue, even pressure, let it cure slow. came in this morning and there's this fucking ripple running right through the middle where the humidity changed overnight. not even a dramatic change, just a normal spring shift. i know how to fix it i just don't want to. i want to be done with this piece. it was already fighting me the whole way. the worst part is nobody who sees it framed will notice. but i'll know. and i'll look at it every time and think about the night it rained and my paper curled like a dying bug.

I tear everything by hand, deliberately, because a torn edge catches light in a way a cut one doesn't. That part is fine. But then I mount it on a straight-cut board, square corners, and I line the whole thing up so it sits dead level in the frame. Spent yesterday on a small piece, maybe 18 by 24, and the torn paper was doing what I wanted, soft grey page from a 1953 Swedish almanac, one warm ochre scrap, a lot of white. Then I squared it off and it went quiet in the wrong way. Not calm. Just corrected. I keep telling myself the frame is the discipline, the edges have to hold the tearing in. But I'm not sure that's true anymore. Maybe the tearing is the piece and the square is me being afraid of it. Anyone else flatten something out of a piece and only notice after? Or is this just what mounting is and I should stop thinking about it.

The cordless drill gave up this morning, mid-screw, some little mounting bracket that has no business being dramatic. Twenty-two years, that thing. Two batteries, the chuck replaced twice, survived the fire in the Karlin studio and the divorce where I got custody of it along with the good ladder. Now it just sits there, warm, refusing. The new one is cordless, lighter, quieter, and honestly I already don't trust it. It hums too politely. The old one roared like something offended. I keep the dead one on the shelf. Not for art. It's a witness. I think that's what a studio is, half the time. A graveyard of tools that outlasted their jobs, and then in a room somewhere someone walks through the whole thing and calls it a statement. It's a drill. It's a drill that worked for twenty-two years. I'm going to drink my coffee and look at the bracket I didn't finish mounting and feel old in the way that's actually fine.

There's a bucket of seawater on my studio floor that's been there since Tuesday. I keep meaning to dump it and I keep not doing it, and now it's become this small fixed point I walk around, like a pet I've forgotten to feed. Probably has something living in it by now. I don't even remember what I was going to use it for. Some experiments I had in mind about development time in colder water, and then the day got away from me like they do. It's not the first time. There's a shelf of dried prints I've never mounted because I liked them better loose, and they're starting to curl. I think half of making work is just this. Holding things long enough to decide they matter, and letting the rest quietly go bad in a bucket.

I spent yesterday evening peeling a piece of 1950s bookplate off a backing board and it just tore. Not a clean lift, the whole inner corner shredded. My own mistake, wrong adhesive when I mounted it two years ago, and now the paper is gone with it. At conservation we'd call it a lesson in reversibility. At home it's just me being annoyed at myself. There's a strange thing though. That torn corner, that little loss, it's actually the most alive part of the collage now. The rest is too neat. I've been staring at it all morning trying to decide if I'm going to fix it or leave it as the best piece of the whole thing.

I need to say this somewhere. Two years back, a friend's sister asked me to do a sketch of their old house in Basavanagudi, the one with the red oxide floor and the wooden pillars, before the builder came in. I said 6,000. Family-adjacent rate, I told myself. She was thrilled, paid half upfront without a word. It took nine days. Ink on cold press, 12x16, and I redrew the facade three times because the perspective on those pillars kept going soft on me. Fine. That's my problem, not hers. But then came the framing. I wanted it to look good for them, so I got it mounted and framed properly. 2,800. And the drive to and fro, two trips with samples, another 600 in autos. So 6,000 minus 2,800 minus 600. Plus paint, paper, my own time. I did the arithmetic that night and just sat there. The thing is, I have not raised my rate since. Same 6,000 for a similar size, and I know two other people who were quoted it too. It has become THE number. I'm scared to touch it because they all know each other. The house is gone now, by the way. Demolished last March. So the drawing is the only record of it, which makes it worse somehow, like I should have charged more for that. If you've broken out of a friends-and-family number without it turning into a whole thing, tell me how. I genuinely want to know. 🙏

Right, so I'm two weeks into a block of a heron standing in the shallows, all that hatchwork around the water done, maybe three hours from being ready to proof, and the lino tears. Clean down the middle, right through the bird's chest. Not a crack or a chip. A catastrophic divorce. I stood there holding the two halves for a good minute. Then I laughed, because what else are you going to do. The dog looked up at me to see if I was alright and decided I wasn't worth the effort, went back to sleep. Two weeks. And the stuff I was using was perfectly good lino too, not cheap grey stuff, it just decided it was done with me. The funny thing is, I kept both halves. I'm fairly sure there's a way to mount them and pull them as two pieces, but honestly I might just frame the block itself the way it broke, it's sort of brutal and lovely. Or use the heron's head half for a smaller print. Give it a chance to redeem itself. Anyway. If anyone's got a method for rescuing a torn block, I'm all ears, but I'll warn you I've already talked myself into it being art. The missus says I'm a hoarder with a printing press. She's not wrong.

There was a commission years ago, a wall piece for a hotel lobby. They paid me well enough, I thought. But the scrap dealer I got the steel from held onto the offcuts for me, and a decade later I reassembled them into something that finally worked. Those offcuts sat in my studio paying rent for eleven years while they waited to be art. A museum in Brno asked for it, and I priced it like it was a new piece made in a month. €1,200. I didn't count the storage, the handling, the times I nearly threw it out, the re-welding when I finally understood what I had. Rented the van myself on the way up there, carried it in with their technician, fixed the mounting when their wall wasn't level. They were nice people. I like the museum. But I added it up on the drive home, which was the mistake. That offcut had cost me more in rent than the piece sold for. I still take these deals. That's the part that worries me more than the bad math, that I keep agreeing to them because I'm flattered someone wants the thing at all. Fifty-eight years old and still pricing like a student.

A client came to me two years ago wanting a welded steel gate for their property. Custom, so I quoted $4,500. I had done the material math, figured my hours at a rate I thought was fair. Then the design kept changing, which it always does. I added the scrollwork because they asked for it, went back and rebuilt the hinge mounts twice because the masonry turned out to be garbage. Six weeks door to door. When I actually added up the hours, including the redo, it came to about $11 an hour. I could make more welding pipe for a plumber. I don't know what the answer is. You raise the quote and clients balk, or you stay honest about hours and you're priced out. I just know I stopped quoting a flat number without writing down how long I genuinely expect it to take. That gate taught me the lesson, $11 at a time.

A woman at the last market stood in front of the big one for a long time. A 50x70 photogram, seaweed and a piece of net, developed in water I walked down and got at Foz the week before. She liked it. Then she said, well, the sun does most of it, no? So it should be cheaper, no? I think I said something polite. What I wanted to say is that the salt is free and also the whole point, and that I ruin about one in three sheets before one survives. I asked 380. Not the number I wanted, the number I said out loud. I had worked it out at home properly, paper, chemistry, the mounting, the days, and it kept coming to around 520 if I wanted to be paid like a person who was doing something real. Not a large sum, but the difference between 380 and 520 is not small when it is your month. She did not buy it. Someone else did, two markets later, at the same price, without any talk about the sun. So the price was fine and I was the problem, standing there letting a stranger make the case for my own work being cheap. The next one I ask 520. I already know I will be nervous. Writing it here so it is at least on the record before I go and do the other thing again.

I've had them sitting on the studio floor since I moved in here. Actually I had them five years before that, in a box, then on a shelf, then on the floor because putting them on a shelf felt like making a decision about them. The sole on the right one is split almost the whole way through. He wore them like that for two years, wouldn't replace them, kept saying he'd get to it. So the piece is mostly about that split. I stitched it. That's it, that's the whole thing, I stitched the sole back together with linen thread and mounted the pair on a panel with some of the paper from the box of his stuff I still can't get through. What got me is I kept trying to make it more than it was. For about a year I kept adding. Charcoal, wash, layering paper over the toes, I don't know what I thought I was doing. Somewhere around month eleven I scraped all of it off and just left the boots and the thread and the one sheet of paper behind them. It looks almost empty now. Empty enough that I wasn't sure it was a piece at all until I saw it from across the room this morning with the light coming in the wrong way. Anyway. It's done and it's hanging in the hallway because I don't have wall space and I didn't want to put it in the closet with the rest. Fourteen months. I'm not sure if that's slow or if that's just what this one cost.

Someone at the framing shop today watched me bring in a piece for mounting and said, very kindly, that she thought I was "so brave" to work in pastel. Brave. Like I was doing something dangerous, not smearing pigment on paper with my fingers. I know she meant it as a compliment. I stood there and smiled and thanked her. But all I could think was that pastel isn't the brave part. The brave part is showing the thing to anyone at all. The medium is just the messy way I got there. I have a drawer full of pieces nobody has ever seen because they're all the ones I decided weren't good enough. Those are the brave ones, honestly. The hidden ones. Weird how that works. Anyway the frame is a warm grey and it looks better than the painting deserves, which is probably a sign I should just frame more of my work and stop hiding the drawer. Maybe that's the real brave thing. Not the chalk. 🙂

I've been going through the last few boxes I still had in storage. Found a stack of his mix tapes from high school, hand-labeled, terrible handwriting, bands I haven't thought about in twenty years. I took one apart carefully and mounted the tape reel inside a shadow box with the tracklist card. Just the thing itself, no embellishment. It came out better than I expected. It's not for sale, I think. Maybe I'll keep it for myself. Felt good to work on something that wasn't trying to be anything. Just a record of someone existing.

A question I keep turning over, because I have done both and come to a firm conclusion. Early on I did the walk-in. A small gallery in a town I was passing through, a folder of mounted sheets, and the owner was perfectly kind and entirely uninterested. Nothing came of it, and I spent the rest of the afternoon annoyed at myself rather than at him. Since then I have sent a short, careful email with three images and a link, and let the work wait. Two of my three representation enquiries that went anywhere began that way. I also keep the folder ready on the off chance. That is not the same as marching in with it. The reason I ask is that there is a certain kind of advice floating about that insists on the personal touch, that the walk-in shows initiative, and I have never once seen it work in the way people claim. I would happily be told I am wrong. Perhaps it depends on the sort of gallery. So: which one do you do, and what did it actually get you? I am more interested in the failures than the successes, if I am honest.

A friend from the old logistics job, someone I genuinely like, asked me to make her something for her mother's 70th. Something small. She said she'd pay for materials. So I did. Torn paper and a wash over a photo of her mum's old house on Rua do Almada before they knocked it down. I framed it. And when I handed it over I said no charge for the work part, because it was for her mum and because I'm an idiot. Turns out that was 40 hours. Not 40 hours of pure magic either. 40 hours of me redoing the roof line because the paper kept lifting, and driving to the framer twice because they cut the mount wrong. She gave me 60 for the materials. Materials were 90. I didn't say anything and I'm still thinking about it a month later, not because of 30 euros. Because she'll tell people she got it for free and now the next person assumes that's the price. Anyway. I'm not writing this to be told I'm too soft. I know. I'm writing it because I finally worked out my rule and it's late: materials up front, and the labour is a gift only if I'm the one who chose to give it. If I offered it out of guilt on the doorstep that's not a gift, that's me avoiding an awkward minute. No idea how to walk the 30 euros back with her though.

Started the big charcoal at 8, meant to just tighten the shoulder line, and then I look up and it's 10:40 and I've drawn and redrawn the same left hand maybe eleven times. Erased it so hard there's a hole in the paper now. Real hole. You can see the wall through it. And here's the thing, the hand is the best it's been. Not because I got it right, because I finally stopped trying to get it right. Around the ninth pass I quit measuring and just put down what the arm was DOING, the weight of it, and it landed. Of course it did. Soon as I stopped auditioning it. But now the paper's torn and I have to decide if I lean into the hole or mount it and pretend it's not there. Part of me wants to leave it. The drawing survived something, you know? The hole is part of the sentence now. Anyway I've got charcoal under my fingernails and I smell like fixative and I've got to go buy more paper. What do you all do when the surface gets wrecked but the piece is finally alive. Fix it or let it show.

A former student's mother asked me to paint her Helleborus niger in flower for a birthday gift. She is a lovely woman, she has been generous with my classes, and I said two hundred and eighty pounds before I had thought about it at all. That is the whole trouble, of course. I said a number to be kind rather than a number to be paid. It arrived in October. I made three drawings before I was satisfied with the arrangement, painted it twice and discarded the first attempt because the greens had gone muddy at the edges, and then spent the better part of nine hours glazing the white petals so they would read as white on white rather than as flat paper. Twenty two hours in total by the time it was mounted and wrapped. I worked it out afterwards, as one does, and it came to less than thirteen pounds an hour, before paper, before paint, before the frame she asked me to recommend. The painting is good. That is the difficult part. She will hang it and it will be correct and quiet and it will not occur to her that it was ever anything other than a favour, because I priced it as one. I have told myself the lesson is simply not to quote in the moment. What I actually think is that I have never once worked out a friends and family price and had it come out fair, and I keep doing it anyway, which suggests the problem is not arithmetic.

Group show in Berlin, 2019. Curator with a good reputation, well-known space, the whole thing sounded serious. She said there was no budget for artist fees but the exposure would be valuable. I was between shows anyway so I said yes like a fool. I built a room installation. Three weeks of work, rented a van to drive materials up from Prague, stayed in a friend's flat but still bought food and beer for two weeks, paid an assistant for two days of help mounting things. I kept receipts out of spite, I think. Total cost to me: 38,400 CZK. About 1,500 euros then. The exhibition got a mention in Artforum online. One collector came through and later commissioned a small piece. That commission paid 800 euros. So I lost 700 euros and gained a line in a newsletter nobody remembers. I tell young artists this story now and they nod and then they still do the same thing. I did it too when I was their age. Maybe you have to learn it yourself.

He's a carpenter, didn't say that the first day, just picked up the heron and off he went. This morning the door opens and there he is with the thing in his hands, framed in ash with a little float mount, beautifully done. Not for sale, he said, just wanted to show me. Wanted me to see it done right. Stood there in the studio with my coffee going cold and him telling me about cutting the mitres and choosing the ash because the grain matched the bird's leg. I swear to god I nearly had to look out the window for a minute. You spend so much time alone with the carving, staring at the same line for two hours wondering if it's too deep or not deep enough, and then something like that happens and you remember the whole point is it leaves your hands and goes out into the world and becomes part of someone else's. He'd put as much care into the frame as I put into the print. That's a lovely thing. Anyway I told him next one's on me. Which it will be, but sure I'll probably end up trading him a set of blocks for a bookshelf or something, that's how these things go.

got approached by a small gallery recently, pretty excited about it, then they drop that I'd need to frame and float mount everything myself before it even gets to them. not even a discount through their framer. just... figure it out. I get that small spaces don't have big budgets but framing a whole show is like a thousand dollars minimum on the low end. felt like a test? or maybe that's just how it works and I'm naive. what's the weirdest thing a gallery asked you to cover that made you go wait what