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there's a piece on my table right now, 24x30, was supposed to be two figures against a wall of flat ochre. spent last night getting the ochre right, which took like forty minutes because ochre is a liar, and then this morning i mixed a grey that matched the shadow under the chin perfectly and just... painted the whole background with it instead. the ochre's gone. it's under there somewhere. and here's the thing, it's better. it's flatter and colder and the figures read harder against it. but i can't tell if i actually think that or if i'm just rationalizing forty minutes of work i just buried. i've done this before, this is like the fourth time this year i've fallen in love with a neutral and let it eat the composition. starting to think my real problem isn't color it's that i don't trust a warm field to hold anything. anyway i'm leaving it. if i scrape it back i lose the chin shadow and that's the only part that's working. someone tell me if the ochre deserved better or if i did it a favor

There was a supply vendor at the fall fair near me and I grabbed a single tube of yellow ochre, the cheap student one, because I was out. Two weeks later it's in every single thing on my table. Sky, the dead grass in the field behind the school, the side of the pear I've repainted four times. My husband asked if I was stuck on it and honestly maybe. Anyway I'm painting the same view off the back porch for the third time because it's what I can see while the kids do homework at the kitchen table. 11x14 canvas board, the cheap stuff, so I don't feel bad about wiping it. The 8 year old says the trees look like broccoli and she's not wrong. I'm not sure the ochre is a phase or just what I needed. But I bought two more tubes so I'm committed now.

I spent a stupid amount of yesterday making a chart. Six yellows, same brand, from the pale lemon up to the mars, each one spread with a knife on a piece of primed linen and left to dry so I could see what they do with the varnish on. By the evening four of them looked identical. Two I'll use until I die. Voilà, that's my Sunday. The real reason is I had a student who asked me why I don't use the lemon yellow for skin, and I started to explain and heard myself not being very clear. So I had to actually look. What I found is that the cheap yellow ochre in the middle of the range is perfectly good and I've been buying the expensive one for years out of habit. That is annoying. Ten years of loyalty to a tube that costs twice what it should because I liked the label. I don't think I'll switch. I know how the expensive one behaves, and that is worth the money to me even if it's not worth it to anyone else. But I wanted to say it out loud somewhere.

There's this one pastel stick, a Sennelier, some kind of warm ochre, I don't even remember buying it, that sits in the front of my box and I only let myself use it for the first marks on a fresh piece of paper. Just the blocking-in, the loosest shapes, the part where nothing matters yet. If I pick it up later in the process it feels wrong. Like I'm cheating. It's almost gone now, just a stub. I'm going to have to find another one when it's finished and I honestly don't know what will happen if I can't get the exact same colour. Maybe I just buy ten of them next time so I don't have to think about it. Or maybe the whole ritual is in my head and any warm ochre would do the same job. But I don't want to test that theory.

ok so for two months i've been fighting a 30x40 canvas. burnt orange ground, this big flat black shape that was supposed to sit like a shadow with weight. it just sat there like a dead sticker. repainted the black four times. my studio is basically a paint graveyard now, i have like six ruined rags that used to be promising. today i scraped the whole black back down to the raw ochre with a palette knife and just left it. and it works. the thing i was chasing for 8 weeks was the absence of the thing i kept adding. anyway i'm not gonna pretend this is a metaphor or whatever. i'm just glad it's off the easel. what's the longest you've fought a single piece before it gave up

there was a yard sale two blocks over this morning, whole life dumped on a driveway. among the paperback mysteries was a shoebox of letters, some man's handwriting, dated 1978 to 1991. the woman selling said take it, it's just going in the trash. so now it's on my work table next to a half torn sheet of ochre paper and I've walked past it about nine times today. I keep picking it up and putting it back down. I know exactly what I'd do with it. I just don't want to be the person who does that again. there's a difference between using someone's handwriting and stealing it and I'm not sure I can tell anymore. anyway. it's sitting there and it's going to keep sitting there until I decide something.

Namaste to all. A question I am wanting to ask this group. Few years back I had sent my paintings to one gallery in the city. They liked the work, this is not the issue. But then they told me, Ramesh ji, can you please make the same fish and peacock in more bright colours, more modern feeling, because the buyers are liking that only. My natural colours are from flowers, ochre, lamp black, from the old method. I said no, kindly I will not change. They did not take the work after that. So I am asking. Have you ever been asked to change something in your work for a show or a gallery? The colour, the size, the subject, the frame? And what did you do, you agreed or you refused? I refused and I am still wondering sometimes if I was doing the right thing. Tell me your story ji. I want to hear how others are handling this.

I had a gallery once, early on, who said my work was too blue. Could I try warmer tones? Maybe some ochre, some green. They wanted the sea but without the sea, I think. I said no, which felt enormous at the time and now just feels obvious. But it stayed with me, that moment of almost bending. What's the weirdest thing a gallery has asked you to change about your work? The thing that made you think, do they even see what I'm doing?

It's not just about neutralising colour. A good grey has life in it. It can be warm, cool, lean towards blue or violet, have an almost imperceptible undertone of ochre. Today I was trying to match the light on a pewter jug, that soft, luminous shadow. It took several tries, adding tiny touches of raw umber, a whisper of ultramarine, a minuscule bit of flake white. When it was finally right, that quiet hum of satisfaction. It’s a small thing, perhaps, but it’s everything. Voilà.

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.

I mix all my greens from primaries, which means a bad yellow poisons absolutely everything downstream. Opened the tube this morning, squeezed out a bead, and it's a pale, chalky, faintly pinkish ochre. Real Naples yellow is a dense, opaque, slightly warm cream, and it should sit in the leaf of a magnolia without a fight. This is the color of skimmed milk that's been left out. What bothers me is not the money. It is that the label is allowed to say Naples yellow, and it will go on saying it, and someone in a class will buy it and spend three weeks wondering why their whites look muddy. I've written to the manufacturer. I will not be sending a photograph, because I do not think this is a matter that requires one.

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.

A decorator from Atlanta came through here a few months back, bought a big improvisational piece I'd done, maybe 72 by 90, all in these warm ochres and deep blues, took me the better part of a month on and off between everything else. I charged her $1,200. Felt fair at the time. She didn't haggle, wrote the check, had me ship it. My granddaughter showed me the decorator's website last week. That same quilt's listed at $7,200 in a client's home. "Custom artisan textile" or some such. Now I'm not mad about the free market, I understand how that world works. But I look at what I charged her and I think about my grandmother who would've gotten maybe fifty dollars for a quilt she put her whole self into, if anybody bought it at all. And I think about how I'm still pricing myself like I'm selling at the church bazaar. Somebody out there thinks this work is worth seven thousand dollars. Maybe I ought to start believing them.

I've been working on this little still life for three days, just lemons and a blue cloth, nothing fancy, and I mixed this gorgeous warm shadow color yesterday, like a deep ochre-y purple, it was PERFECT. Came back this morning and it's dried into this weak, chalky lavender thing that has absolutely nothing to do with what I saw on my palette. And I KNOW gouache dries down, I know this, I've been painting with it for years, but it still gets me every time. I just sat there staring at it like... who are you. I tried glazing a thin wash of the original mix back over it and now it looks muddy and overworked and I think I need to just let it dry again and reassess but I'm so annoyed. The lemons were looking so good 😭 Has anyone found a reliable way to predict the dry-down shift or is it just eternal suffering and learning to mix everything a little punchier than you think you need?

Not as a study, not trying to match anything specific. Just mixing it, scraping it off, mixing again. Different combinations of ivory black and white, a little ultramarine, a touch of raw umber, sometimes a speck of yellow ochre. Seeing how far I could push the temperature before it stopped being grey and became something else entirely. My husband came in to ask about dinner and I think he was a little alarmed. But this is the thing nobody tells you when you start painting, you will spend whole days doing something that looks like nothing, and it's not wasted time. The hand learns things the eye can't explain. What's your useless practice? The thing you do that produces nothing visible but you know matters.

Every canvas I scrape back, the waste goes into a big Weck jar on the windowsill. Cold wax and oil, greys mostly, some dull ochre. It has been filling since maybe March. The jar is nearly full now and the stuff inside has gone to a kind of soft putty consistency, no longer paint and not yet stone. Yesterday I caught myself looking at it longer than at the canvas I was actually supposed to be working on. It sits in the light in a way the painting next to it does not. That is a bad sign, or a good one, I can't tell yet. I am not going to throw it out. That much I know. Whether it ever goes back onto a panel is another question. For now it just sits there and does its thing in the sun like a small brown planet. Genau. The work does not always happen where I plan for it to happen.

started limiting myself to four colors this month as an exercise. titanium white, cad red medium, ultramarine, yellow ochre. that's it. the idea being i actually learn to mix instead of buying my way out of every problem (see: the $11 green incident, still not over it). made it nine days. day eight i caught myself reaching for a tube of phthalo, and not even to mix it, just to look at it. like holding a cigarette you're not gonna smoke. anyway the four color thing is working, which is annoying because now i have to admit the limitation is doing something. whole paintings are getting quieter without me deciding to make them quieter. i don't love that. i like loud. flat loud color is literally my whole thing. the phthalo's still on the shelf. not gonna say it's gonna stay there

I had this portrait I did last summer, a woman with her hair caught in wind, all warm ochres and pale blue. I was so proud of it at first, then after a few months I started seeing everything wrong with it. The jaw was off. The pastel dust had settled into the paper grain in a way I didn't like. I kept it in my studio, didn't even photograph it properly for Instagram. I mentioned it in passing to someone at a small market stall I was sharing last month, just complained actually, that I had this piece taking up space and nobody wanted it and maybe it was just a failed experiment. She asked to see it. I pulled it out reluctantly. She bought it on the spot. Not because I pitched it well. Because I stopped trying to make it sound like something it wasn't. I've been thinking about that a lot. How much energy I spend polishing the story around my work, making it sound impressive, desirable, worth someone's time. And the one time I just said "this thing exists and I'm not sure it's even good" it worked better than any of my careful descriptions ever did. Maybe the selling is in the honesty, not the framing. I don't know. I'm still figuring it out.

The painting that has hung in the studio since 2019, the one I kept moving from wall to wall because it did not fit anywhere, sold this week. Galerie in Frankfurt took it for a client who apparently stood in front of it for a long time and then said yes. I had already made my peace with keeping it. That is the honest version. Not out of love, more out of resignation. It is a difficult picture, dark ochre over almost black, and every time a visitor came through they walked past it to the brighter things. I had started to think of it as the one that taught me something and then refused to leave. The strange part is that the money is not the win. The win is that I had stopped defending it. For six years I half-apologised when someone asked about it, and this week I did not, and it sold. Naja. Make of that what you like. I am not sure the lesson is one I can repeat on purpose.

I am painting a corner of my studio in the late afternoon light and it is beating me. The wall on the left is a cold grey, the wall behind is a warm grey, and the floor throws a third grey up into both. Three greys, all different, all related. I should be able to mix this. I have been mixing greys for twenty five years. Today: burnt umber and ultramarine, too purple. Raw umber and white, dead. Ivory black and yellow ochre, chalk. I added a hair of viridian and made it worse. Six piles of mud on the palette by eleven o'clock, and the light had already moved on. The corner that was so beautiful at nine was gone. The annoying part is I know what the mistake is. I am mixing the grey I think the wall is instead of the grey I actually see. My head has an idea about what a grey wall looks like and my hand keeps reaching for it. Two hours of painting my idea instead of the thing. Tomorrow I'll scrape the whole corner back to the ground and start with clean, cool, no preconception. Bof. Easy to say tonight with a glass of wine in my hand. Cadmium prices are one thing. Losing a morning to my own stubbornness is another.