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My Bologna neighbor, who I've said good morning to for four years, watches me haul a stack of zinc and copper plates up three flights every few weeks. Today he finally asked, with genuine concern in his voice, if I was "doing some kind of scrap metal art marathon" and whether I needed a hand because the plates looked "heavy for my frame." I thanked him and said no, it's printmaking, it's etching. He nodded slowly and said, "Ah, like the recycling." Not the worst interpretation. Honestly some days that's exactly what it is. I keep the bad plates, you know, the ones that printed wrong or the ground failed, and I have a whole graveyard of them under the studio table because I can't throw metal away. It's a hoarding problem disguised as ecological conscience. So maybe he's not wrong. The marathon part I can't defend. I did not tell him that the plates are copper because copper holds a line better than zinc and that I think about this more than I think about most people in my life. Some conversations stay at the door.

Took a cardboard box of torn paper out to the curb this morning, old failed washes I finally gave up on. Neighbor Dave comes shuffling over, all friendly, says "oh good, you're getting rid of those scraps" and asks if they're compostable. They weren't scraps. They were a week of work I'd already mourned and buried. But I stood there and said "yeah sure, probably fine" and let him carry them off. I don't even know why that's stuck in my craw. He wasn't wrong. They were going in the trash either way. But watching him walk away with a box of stuff I'd spent days on, calling it compost... felt like someone grinding out a cigarette on a photo of your dead dog. which is dramatic but you know the feeling. Anyway I'm not speaking to him for a while. He won't notice. that's the part that gets me.

painted a 9-foot mural for a coffee shop last spring. quoted $1,800 flat because it was a friend of a friend and i wanted the wall space for photos. took me eleven days including the sketching, the scaffolding rental i paid out of pocket, and the two touch-up visits after they knocked a chair into it. worked out to $4.60 an hour after materials. my neighbor's teenager makes more babysitting. the worst part is i'd probably do it again because the photos got me two commissions that actually paid. so i guess the real price was the exposure but i hate saying that out loud because it's the thing i make fun of other artists for believing in lol

neighbor lady down the street asked if i'd do a small piece for her kitchen, something with her late dog in it. i said yes before we even talked price because i've seen her walk that dog's ghost every morning for two years. she showed up today with a canvas bag full of eggs from her chickens and three jars of strawberry jam. said money's tight but she wanted to pay me something real. i hung the little painting on her wall and she cried. not the loud kind. just stood there with her hand over her mouth. i've been paid in worse ways for better work. this one's gonna sit with me for a while.

I spent most of the day on my hands and knees on the studio floor, basting a queen-sized top, and I'll tell you what, my knees are talking to me tonight in a language I don't much care for. Used to be I could sit cross-legged on that floor for hours and pop right back up. Now I've got a little foam pad and I still have to grab the chair to get vertical. Grandbaby laughed at me and I laughed right back, but it's the truth. The quilt itself is coming along fine. Scraps from my mama's old housedresses and a batch of blue shirt fabric my neighbor gave me after her husband passed. She said she couldn't bear to look at his shirts anymore but couldn't throw them out either. So they're becoming something warm instead of something sad. That part's good. I just wish basting didn't have to happen on the floor. Somebody needs to invent a way to pin three layers together at a table. I'd buy one.

I've been chasing the same patina off and on since the late nineties. Liver of sulfur, ferric nitrate, cupric nitrate, a few things I won't name because the neighbors would get nervous. Never quite get the green I'm after. Muddy, or too blue, or it flakes off in a year. Yesterday I finally got close on a small piece. Did the same thing I've done a hundred times, except the shop was at 46 degrees and it took forever to dry. That humidity swing did more than any chemical change I've made. Twenty years of tinkering and the answer was I was rushing the drying. Wish I could say I felt smart about it. Mostly I feel stupid for not trying that in 2004.

I was cutting pieces this morning for a new top, just simple squares, nothing fancy, and I caught myself holding the cloth a certain way, the way she did. She'd take a scrap and turn it over slow, feel the weight of it between her fingers before she'd say yes or no to it. I don't remember learning that. It's just in my hands now. I think about her a lot lately. She'd be 106 this year if the Lord hadn't called her home. She never saw a single one of my quilts hung in a gallery. But I tell you what, she'd probably look at one of those white walls and a price tag next to it and just shake her head, then go back to piecing together a dress from feed sacks for one of the neighbor kids. That woman could make something beautiful out of nothing. That's where I got it. Anyway. Just something I was thinking about while I sewed today. What's a thing you caught yourself doing that you got from somebody way back?

Took me forty-five years and a divorce to say it out loud but here we are: if someone hands me a theme and a deadline, my brain turns off like a switch. I stare at the wall. I cut and reset the same piece of stone six times. I produce something technically fine that I don't care about. Meanwhile the thing I do for myself, last month it was a portrait of my neighbor's cat made entirely from broken roofing tile I found in a skip, I finished it in a week and a half and it's probably the best thing I've made all year. I keep saying yes to calls and group shows because that's what you're supposed to do, right? Get your work out there. Network. But I think I'm done pretending I function that way. I'll take the solo slow route even if nobody sees it for a while.

ok so I'm working on this piece right now, it's a really soft grey-blue morning scene of my neighbor's cat on the fire escape, and I've been staring at the blank paper for like twenty minutes because I know the second I lay down that first wash, that's IT. there's no undoing it. you can lift a little but you can't un-wet the paper. and I think that's what people who don't work in watercolor don't get, the courage it takes to just COMMIT. every other medium you can paint over, scrape back, repaint. watercolor holds the record of every choice you made. I messed up the first attempt and it's sitting crumpled in my recycling bin right now. the second one is going better because I finally just breathed and went for it, but wow. my heart was actually pounding. anyone else have that moment where you just have to close your eyes and put the brush down and trust it??

the dining table is covered in a layer of charcoal dust and there's a dried puddle of matte medium on the corner i keep meaning to scrape off. the only natural light is from a window that faces my neighbor's brick wall. i used to be embarrassed about it. like i needed a real studio to be a real artist. then i spent a year paying $400/month for a windowless basement room i shared with three other people and realized i just wanted to be home. the tradeoff is i have to eat dinner on the couch every night and my nice plates are in a box somewhere but honestly? i make more work now than when i had the "proper" space. something about not having to pack everything up and commute to it.

That old Singer from the 50s, my grandmother's machine, it's still right there in the corner of my studio. She bought it secondhand when I was a little girl and it's sewn every quilt I ever made, every dress for every child, every hem I ever turned. It's got a sound to it, a kind of whir and thump that's as steady as a heartbeat. The light flickers sometimes and I have to jiggle the cord just so. My granddaughter keeps telling me to get a new one, a modern one that does all the fancy stitches and whatnot. And I tried one, a couple years back, borrowed a neighbor's. Made a whole afternoon of it. And I couldn't stand it. Too quiet. Too smooth. Felt like the machine wasn't talking back to me. I know people say tools are just tools. But I don't know. That old Singer knows my hands. It's got my grandmother's prayers still in the metal somewhere. Anybody else got a tool they just can't swap out?

Three months wrestling this block. Seven hundred pounds of limestone. Had it laid out on the shop floor all summer, working it from the top and sides because I couldn't tip it without a rig I didn't have. Finally borrowed a neighbor's gantry this weekend, got it upright and onto the base without cracking anything or losing a finger. It's not finished. But it's standing. That's a different thing than lying down. When you work flat you're making a drawing in stone. Standing up, it starts talking back to you. Whole different set of decisions now. Took a photo of it in the afternoon light through the shop door. First time it's looked like a real piece. Might post it later if I don't talk myself out of it.

found this solid oak side table at an estate sale yesterday. nothing special, someone's boring coffee table from 1987, couple of water rings, drawer stuck. fifty bucks. i brought it home and spent the afternoon sanding it down and putting the first coat of this deep indigo on it. posted a progress picture and my neighbor (who i barely know) texts me "why would you paint over that wood? you're ruining it." like. it's a mass-produced table from sears. it's not a heirloom. it had a sticker on the bottom. i'm not ruining anything, i'm making it not ugly. and even if it was a nice piece, it's mine? i can do what i want with my own stuff? this weird reverence for raw wood drives me insane. not everything has to stay the color god made it. sometimes things look better with paint on them.

okay so there's this window in my apartment that gets this specific soft afternoon light around 3pm and I've been trying to catch it for like... months now. This month alone I've done 14 studies of it. 14. Same window, same view of the neighbor's slightly sad little balcony, different light every time. My partner thinks I've lost it. Maybe I have. But here's the thing – every single time I think I've figured out how to paint that quality of light, the next day it's different and I realize I was wrong. The color temperature shifts, or there's a haze, or the whole thing goes golden for like twenty minutes before it's gone. Watercolor is SO unforgiving about this because you can't just paint over it, you have to get it right while it's wet or you lose it forever. And I keep losing it. My mom called yesterday and asked if I'd sold any of them yet and I was like Mom I can't sell them they're all failures. She didn't get it. But I think there's something in the repetition, you know? Like each one teaches me something the last one couldn't. I'm not chasing a perfect painting, I'm chasing understanding how light actually works. Anyway I laid them all out on the floor last night to compare and honestly it's kind of beautiful seeing them together even if none of them are The One. Might keep going until I run out of paper or winter comes and the light changes completely. Then I guess I'll start over.

Okay so I've been painting the sash window in my bedroom basically every week since like March. Same view of the brick wall and the neighbor's fire escape, same frame, same corner of my desk in the foreground. And at first it was a warm-up thing, you know, something easy to do before I got to the real work. But now I have like 40 of them and I think it might be the most honest thing I make. The light is never the same twice and every time I think I've nailed the way it bounces off that peeling paint, the angle's off by noon and I have to start over. I had a critique last week where someone was like, "why the same window, don't you get bored" and I didn't have the words for it in the moment. But it's not about the window. It's the pressure to always be producing something NEW and different and maybe I'm just stubborn but there's something about committing to one stupid subject until you actually understand it. My professor in school used to say restrictions are a gift and I rolled my eyes so hard but here I am, 40 paintings of one window, more confused and more in love than ever. Is anyone else doing this? One subject you keep returning to that you can't explain to people? I feel a little crazy about it and I'd like to know I'm not alone haha.

Spent a month on a welded steel piece. Ground every weld down until the seams disappeared. Sanded and sealed it. Put it in the yard to check the shadow line and my neighbor's dog knocked it over, bent one of the legs out of square. Straightened it the next morning. You'd never know it happened. But I caught myself thinking about it differently now. That little accident is part of the thing now, whether anyone can see it or not. Point is, I spent 30 hours on a seam nobody's going to inspect and a dog changed the piece in two seconds. I keep thinking about that ratio and I don't know what to do with it. It's not a complaint. It's just the truth of making things, and the online version of it is a circus. Probably won't even post the piece. The photo won't show what the work was. It never does.

Back when I was still doing a lot of fabrication work for other artists, a friend asked me to weld a gate for his backyard. Nice guy, helped me move a block of granite once. I quoted him basically materials plus a couple hundred for my time. He was happy, I felt good about it. Five years later he wanted a matching gate for the front. Expected the same price. Then his brother heard about it. Then a neighbor. Then I'm the guy who does cheap custom ironwork for an entire neighborhood and every one of them thinks I'm gouging when I finally say no. That was the last time I did a friends-and-family price on anything. Cost me more in aggravation than I ever saved in goodwill.

Not sculpture exactly, but close enough. Neighbor's property line needed a wall after a bad washout. I told him I'd do it for the cost of materials if he left me alone to work. Took all summer between other jobs. Dry-stack is a different kind of patience. No mortar to hide behind. Every stone has to lock in on its own weight. You spend half the time flipping rocks trying to find the face that wants to sit where you need it. Then you tap it in with a hammer and it either rings solid or you pull it back out. Laid the capstone this afternoon. It's four feet high, thirty feet long, and it'll be there after I'm gone. That's the part that still gets me after all these years.

Had a little handheld radio on the shelf by my worktable for years. Played NPR or whatever local station came in clear. It died three weeks ago and I just never replaced it. Didn't even realize until today that I've been working in silence the whole time. And the work's been better. Honestly a little jarring to admit that. I thought the noise was helping me concentrate but apparently it was just company. Now I'm wondering what else I've got in here that I think I need and actually don't. The room is really quiet now though. My neighbor two units over is a woodworker and I can hear his saw through the wall sometimes. That's probably enough.

Everyone in this channel talks about their beautiful light and I'm over here with a window that looks at a brick wall three feet away. When the sun hits, the whole room goes orange and the bricks glow like embers. I've lived in it long enough that I can tell the time of day by the shade of the mortar. Also zero distraction. Can't watch birds, can't stare at neighbors. Just me and the wall and whatever mess is on the table. I used to have a studio with a view of the river and I got nothing done for six months, just watched boats go by and felt romantic about it. Turns out my brain needs a brick wall. Who knew.