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I've been looking at my palette knife scrapings lately. You know, the thick little piles of paint I scrape off when cleaning my knife. They dry into these surprisingly complex little landscapes. I'm fascinated by the way the oil dries, the subtle variations in color and texture depending on the pigment. Some are almost like tiny, cracked desert surfaces, others have a waxy sheen. It's a reminder of the physical life of the paint itself, beyond the image I'm trying to create. Perhaps I should start collecting these little beauties.

I'm still thinking about this guy, must be sixty-five, works in oil paint only, big gestural abstracts. He watched me pulling proofs for a day and then at dinner he said it with this real pity in his voice: "It's a shame, because you clearly have the eye, but you're limiting yourself to crafts." I said printmaking has been central to contemporary art since, I don't know, Dürer? And he said Dürer was a painter who also did prints. Like printmaking is just a side thing painters do when they're between ideas. The thing that gets me is the hierarchy. Oil painting = serious. Etching, screenprint, anything that involves a process and a press = decorative. It's so nineteenth century. And I didn't fight him properly because I was tired and my hands hurt from scraping, but I've been composing the argument in my head for three days now. You know when the perfect retort arrives too late?

Had a gallery owner on the phone today, wants me in their spring group show. Flattering, fine. Then he asks, casual, like it's nothing, if I could "streamline" my process a bit, maybe work on a couple of panels at once so I'd have more pieces ready. Streamline. As if the drying time of linseed oil is a scheduling problem I should negotiate with. I paint maybe four or five serious pieces a year. That's not a shortage of effort, that's the pace the medium demands. You can't rush an oil painting the way you can't rush a pregnancy, and nobody asks a pregnant woman to streamline her gestation for the spring calendar. I told him I'd have two, maybe three. He went quiet. Then he said that might be "tight." Bof. I'd rather show two honest paintings than five rushed ones. I've seen what rushed looks like on a gallery wall, and it smells like varnish over regret.

I found a tube of Naples yellow in the back of my paint box today, the old Winsor & Newton with the lead warning still on it. It's been there since before my daughter was born. Fourteen years and the paint is still good, still buttery. Paint outlasts most things if you care for it. People think oil paint is finicky, that you need the perfect medium or the temperature has to be right. The truth is a tube of paint will sit quietly for a decade and then give you exactly what you need the day you need it. I used it for the sunlit wall in the painting I'm on and it went on like a gift. I don't clean my brushes as well as I should. But I close every tube properly, every single time, and I think that's the discipline that matters. The small one, the one you can actually keep. Anyway. If you're reading this, go look at the oldest tube in your box. See if it's still got something in it.

Went to restock on Arches paper today, expensive enough that I have to talk myself into it every time, and the guy ringing me up sees the blocks and goes "oh wow, you're brave, I could never do watercolor, too stressful, I don't have the patience." And I just stood there with my debit card out like 🙂 ok. Because what do you even say to that? It's not the first time I've heard it and it's always framed like I'm doing something weird and self-punishing instead of just... painting. Like it's some extreme sport. I don't go to the oil painting aisle and tell people they're brave for waiting three days for paint to dry. I know he meant it kindly. I know. But I'm so tired of watercolor being treated like the masochist's hobby when it's literally just the medium I fell in love with. Nobody tells a guitarist they're brave for playing acoustic. Anyway I bought the paper and went home and painted the same window I've painted forty times and it still came out wrong so maybe he had a point honestly

Years ago I had a gallery owner in Paris tell me, straight-faced, that figurative oil painting was "a hard sell" and maybe I should think about making something "more contemporary." I was young and I nearly listened to her. I didn't, thankfully. That's the one that still irritates me, because it wasn't about whether the work was any good. It was about her wanting an easier wall. What's the most clueless thing a gallery has ever said to you about your work? The line that made you realize they weren't going to get you, ever?

Last night at a friend's birthday, a woman looked at a picture of my latest interior on my phone and said, "Oh nice, what app do you use for that filter?" I said none, it's oil paint. She laughed. "No really, which one?" I had to open the actual file on my phone and zoom into the craggy impasto under the lamp to convince her. Even then she just said "wow, that's very realistic" in a tone that meant she still thought I'd run it through some AI thing. I don't even know what bothers me more. That paint is now assumed to be a filter, or that I spent four years in an atelier learning how to do with my hand what a phone does in half a second, and nobody can tell the difference anymore. The rendering was never the point. It was never about fooling anyone. It's about the light sitting in the paint itself and knowing exactly why it got there. Bof. Maybe I'm just old. But I put the phone away and changed the subject, and I felt the whole evening cool by a degree.

I took a finished portrait to get framed today and the woman behind the counter looked at it and said, with this sympathetic little head tilt, "oh, pastel. that's a shame, it's such a fragile medium, isn't it. not really archival." And then she showed me their "serious" framing options for oil paintings. I stood there holding my piece like a fool. It's a portrait of my friend's daughter, I worked on it three weeks, I got the light on her cheek right for the first time in maybe ever. And this woman just... dismissed it with one sentence. I didn't say anything smart back. I just said "oh" and let her frame it in something basic and left. And now I'm home and I'm so annoyed at myself for not saying anything. But also, what do you even say? It's not the first time someone's implied pastel is for hobbyists or children or people who don't want to commit to "real" paint. I keep thinking about that word. Fragile. Like my work is inherently less because of the dust on my fingers. Like the softness of it means it's weaker. Anyway. I'm going to keep using pastels because I love them. But I wish I'd said something. 😅

I was approached by someone who wants a portrait of their prize-winning poodle. They saw my work and said they 'loved it'. Then they offered me 200 euros. Two hundred! For an oil painting, detailed, custom work. They went on to say that 'art should be accessible'. Accessible? My tubes of Cerulean blue alone cost more than that. Bof. I told them the price for a serious portrait starts at 1500. They haven't replied. Good.

I ordered some new tubes of Williamsburg oil paint, the good stuff, and the delivery driver just left them on my doorstep. In the sun. For hours. The heat here in Lyon has been brutal, and I can only imagine what that cadmium red has gone through. It's infuriating. Do they not understand that paint is sensitive material? C'est pas possible.

When I'm down, I open the drawer where I keep old tubes that are nearly finished. Not the good ones, the ones I'll never be without, the dregs. Each one smells different, and it brings back the studio I was standing in when I used it up. The Naples yellow from my teacher's atelier, that one smells of turpentine and dust and his pipe. The raw sienna I squeezed the last of while my daughter was teething, I can still place the year. No one warns you that oil paint keeps memory better than you do. You think you're the one doing the remembering, and then you uncap a tube and you're twenty-nine years old again.

Was picking up a new tube of titanium white today and this older gentleman starts chatting me up at the counter. I mentioned I paint in acrylic and he got this look on his face like I'd told him I color with crayons. Said, and I quote, "acrylic is a shortcut, you can just paint over anything and start again. Oil is real painting, watercolor is real painting. You can't hide in those." And I just stood there holding my six dollar tube of paint like a child who got scolded at school. I should have said something. I've been painting for six years, I sell the odd piece, I put in real hours. But I just nodded and paid and left. Here's the thing though. The "you can fix mistakes" argument gets me every time because it makes it sound like the fixing is free. Like I haven't spent whole evenings scraping off a sky that refused to work or layering the same green seven ways until it finally looked like grass instead of swamp. Fixing a mistake in acrylic is still two hours of work, it just doesn't require a respirator and a month of drying time. Anyway. I don't know why this one got to me. Maybe because I'm tired. Maybe because I've heard some version of it a dozen times and it never gets less annoying. My painting is mine and it doesn't need a gatekeeper's blessing. But man, I wish I'd said something smarter than standing there with my mouth shut.

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?

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.

two months ago i got in my head about "the algorithm" and paid someone $500 for a 90-minute zoom where she told me to: film myself painting (i hate this) use trending audio (i'm 33) post 3x a day (i will simply die) do a "bts" of my sketchbook (it's just bad drawings, that's the whole point) i tried it for a week and felt like i was performing having a personality instead of having one. my engagement went down. i wanted to quit painting. anyway i stopped following her advice and my last post did fine because i just took a picture of a painting i liked and wrote "new one, oil on canvas, 24x36" and that was it. 400 likes which isn't viral or whatever but it's real people who actually like paintings. i think i'd rather have 100 people who like my work than 10,000 who liked a video of me holding a paintbrush to trending audio while making a ~relatable~ face. the math might not math on that but my brain feels better.

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.

First gallery that showed any interest in my work, early in my MFA. I was making these very labour-intensive etchings, lots of aquatint, layered. The gallerist looked at my portfolio and said, I'm not making this up, "this is beautiful but etching doesn't sell. Do you work in oil?" I didn't. I'd never painted. I said no and we never spoke again. Now I think: she was wrong about etching, but also she was telling me what she was, a decor dealer, not someone interested in what the work was about. Took me a while to learn the difference. What's your gallery red flag story? The thing that told you immediately this wasn't your person.

I bought one of those expensive daylight easel lamps last winter because everyone swears by them, and yes, the colour is consistent, you can work at midnight, fine. But I took a painting outside yesterday afternoon for the first time in months, proper northern light, overcast, the real thing, and I wanted to cry. Everything I'd done under that lamp looked colder and harder than I thought, all these blue-grey shadows I'd been trusting. The warmth was gone. So now I'm back to working only during daylight hours like some kind of farmer, and the lamp is gathering dust. Maybe they're fine for people who paint digitally or whatever, but for oil, for actually mixing what you see? It's not the same and it cannot be the same. I don't know why I thought it would be.

My gallery's new person keeps asking for process content. Behind the scenes, time-lapse, work in progress. I understand the logic, short clips of me scraping back layers get ten times the reach of the finished work. The problem is the work itself. A large painting of mine sits on the wall for weeks between sessions because oil and cold wax needs to cure before I can build the next layer. There is nothing cinematic about watching me wait. I could film myself scraping and smearing and make it look dynamic, but that would be a lie about how it actually happens, and I am not interested in performing a fake version of my own work for the algorithm. I did a ten second reel of the palette knife going through wet wax last week because I felt I had to. It looked great. It is the least honest thing I have done in years. The finished painting, the one that matters, will not be ready until March and nobody will watch it dry. Am I wrong to resist this? Sometimes I think the medium itself is becoming the enemy of the marketing. Then I remind myself I did not spend twenty five years learning to layer oil so I could make satisfying looped videos about it.

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