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I sharpen my own chisels. Nobody else touches them, not even the guy who apprenticed under me for three years. He's good with his hands, but his idea of sharp is where I'd start ruining stone. People don't get it. They think a chisel is a chisel. The edge is everything. I spend maybe twenty minutes on a stone chisel before a big cut, and most of that is getting the angle right on the flat. You can feel it in your wrist before you make the first strike. Dull is safer than bad, but neither one does the work. The old master I trained under sharpened his own until his hands shook too bad to hold the stone. Then he had me do it, but he watched every pass. Never said a word. Just stood there until I got it right. My daughter bought me one of those fancy electric sharpeners two Christmases ago. It's still in the box. Some things you don't hand over to a machine.

How did the first gallery actually happen for you? I don't mean the first show, I mean the first time a stranger who owned a wall said yes. Mine took two years of dropping in. Same guy, month after month, I'd show up with photographs and he'd tell me to come back with something better. I was 28, thought I was too good for it, but I kept going back because my old master told me that's how it worked. One day he finally walked my studio and picked one piece. Never explained what changed. So what was yours? Did you cold-call, get introduced, have someone see your work somewhere by accident? I'm curious if anyone actually gets in through the front door anymore.

I bought a little slab and muller during my atelier years because the old masters did it and I was insufferable. Ground up some vermilion from pigment powder. It's beautiful, obviously, that weight, that warmth, nothing else like it. But the powder gets everywhere. You breathe it. You're dusted in it. And then you find out it's mercury sulfide and you've been breathing mercury all afternoon. I still have the slab. I use it maybe once a year for a specific warm note I can't mix. The rest of the time I buy my paint from a block of cobalts and earths like a normal person and try not to romanticise the past too much. Some things were better left to the apprentices.

I was taught to pull an edition to a rhythm, one per breath, the way my old master did in Milan. But the breath thing never worked for me, I sped up, I got sloppy. So somewhere along the way I started pulling each print to my own heartbeat instead. Not counting, just feeling it in my chest and timing the pull to it. It has genuinely ruined me for standard editioning. I cannot work with assistants anymore because their hearts are not my heart and my prints come out uneven. Which is probably the whole point, if I think about it too long, which I do. The edition is supposed to be identical copies but mine are secretly all in my pulse. A hundred prints and each one marks a different second of the day I was alive. Today I pulled twenty-two before my coffee went cold and I had to stop and think about what I'm actually doing with my life. Not the work. The method. Are any of us doing anything else.

Six months on one piece of granite. I don't usually work that slow. Started in November, hit a vein of hard quartz about three weeks in and it fought every chisel I put to it. Nearly scrapped it twice. Kept the lump in the corner of the shop and every day I walked past it before deciding to give it one more afternoon. Pulled the last tool off it this morning. No polish, left it the way it came off the stone. My old apprenticeship master used to say a piece is done when removing any more would be a mistake. This one is that. It's not going anywhere fancy. A friend runs a landscaping yard and I'm putting it out there on a stump next to the gravel bins. See if anyone touches it. That's the real test, who stops to run a hand over it. My daughter said I'm being stubborn about the gallery stuff again. Maybe. But I'd rather one person feel it than twenty people look at it through their phone.

There's a window in my studio, north light, looks out onto the courtyard wall. I've painted it twelve times over the years and I'll paint it again this winter. Same window, same wall. People think this is a lack of imagination. It isn't. It's the opposite. The light behind the courtyard wall changes with the hour and the season and the weather in a way you can't fully hold in your head until you've tried to put it down on canvas and failed. I've failed eleven times. The twelfth was close, so now I'm irritated. My old atelier master used to say a subject isn't finished when you've painted it, it's finished when you've stopped learning from it. I thought that was sentimental at twenty. Now I hang my whole practice on it. Anyway, the light today is doing something particular with the damp on the wall, that grey-green you only get in Lyon in November. I should be at the easel instead of typing this.

Welded a stainless piece back in April, a column about seven feet. Ground the welds down smooth, the whole surface looks like one piece of metal until the sun hits it a certain way low in the evening and every joint shows up like a scar. Can't see a thing at noon. I keep going back and forth on whether to rework it. My old apprentice master would have said the weld is honest, leave it. The gallery crowd would say leave it too but for the wrong reasons, they'd call it a narrative about process. Both of those are excuses. The truth is I don't know if it's a flaw I can live with or a flaw I'm too tired to fix. Some days it looks like the best thing I've made. Other days it looks like a mistake I charged someone for. Anyone else have a piece where the fault line only appears in the wrong light? How do you decide which mistakes are part of the work and which ones are just yours?

I still use the same daylight lamp I bought in 2002, when I was finishing my master's thesis and needed to see specimen slides at odd hours. It's an old Ott-Lite, the kind with the curved neck and a bulb that takes several seconds to warm to full brightness. It has a crack in the plastic housing from when I knocked it off a shelf in 2007. The switch is held together with a strip of electrical tape. I have tried newer lamps. I own two very good LED full-spectrum lights that cost considerably more and render colour more accurately on paper. They sit in a cupboard. Every so often I take one out, set it up, work under it for an afternoon, and then put it back. The next morning I am standing at my desk, switching on the old lamp, waiting those few seconds for the light to settle, and it feels like the work can begin. I know this is irrational. I do not care to examine it too closely. Some things are simply part of the landscape after long enough, and to change them would be to change the room itself, not just the light.

Had a new student yesterday, first day, and she walks in and says "how do you breathe in here?" I told her open a window, and anyway we're only in oils two days a week, the rest is drawing. She looked at the rack of drying canvases like they were going to get her. I remember being that age and convinced the fumes would rot my brain. Now I've painted in studios that smelled of turpentine for thirty years and honestly the only thing that's happened is I can't stand the smell of fresh linen. Priorities shift. But it made me think about how we guard the young ones. My atelier master smoked a pipe while he ground his own lead white. We've come a long way from that and I'm glad. Still, there's something in me that misses the old seriousness about materials, the ritual of it. These days everyone wants water-soluble oils and quick-dry mediums and I get it, I really do, but paint takes the time it takes. You can't fix patience with a product.

I have been buying my painting paper from the same small place in Bhagalpur since I was a young man. My mother also used to get from them only. This paper is hand-made, khadi, you can feel the fibers with your fingers, the way it takes the natural color is different from anything machine made. For Mithila work this matters very much because the line work is everything, the paper must hold a fine line without bleeding, but also it must have some tooth, some roughness for the color to sit on. Last month I ordered my usual stack. And it came, and I thought maybe I received a bad batch. But I used it for three pieces now and it is not the same. The surface is smoother. Too smooth. The water-based colors are sliding instead of settling. The line is fine but the paper does not grip the pigment like before. I called the shop and the man told me their master craftsman retired and the new man is trying to "improve" the process. He said this like it is good news. I am sitting here with a half-finished fish motif on this new paper and the tail is not right. The color is not sitting where I put it. It is not the paper's fault maybe, it is my hand not trusting the surface. But how many years to learn a new paper when you already know one for twenty years. I do not want to start again. I want the old paper back. Has anyone else faced this with a material that changed without warning? Not a brand reformulation but the actual hands that made it, the knowledge that left. How do you decide whether to adapt or to find a new source altogether.