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someone bought the piece I made from my brother's old work shirts. the one I almost didn't put in the show because it felt too personal, like hanging my grief on a wall for strangers to walk past. the buyer didn't know any of that. she just said it reminded her of her dad's shed. all the things he kept that didn't make sense to anyone else. I wasn't ready for how that would feel. like the piece got adopted into someone else's story. like it's not just mine anymore. still crying about it honestly. good crying.

got a cold email from a PR agency yesterday. they found my work through a show I did last spring and wanted to "help me tell my story." i was almost flattered until i read the whole thing. they specifically called out the piece i made from my brother's old work shirts and said i should "lean into the grief aesthetic" because it's "very on trend right now." also suggested i do a tiktok series about "what losing someone taught me about creativity." i stared at my screen for like five minutes. then i deleted it. i know they're just doing their job and this is how marketing works now but something about having your actual life turned into a content strategy made my skin crawl. i'm not a brand. i'm not a grief influencer. i'm just someone who makes things because i don't know what else to do with the weight. anyone else getting these? the ones that make you feel like a product instead of a person?

i was digging through old work last night, stuff from like 2017, 2018, before i had any clue what i was doing technically. and it's so raw. like genuinely uncomfortable to look at. there's this one charcoal portrait i did on newsprint of all things, the paper is practically disintegrating, and the face is just WRONG, proportions all off, but god it has something in it. it's looking at you. it's hurting. and i look at what i'm making now with my better materials and my figured-out process and it's more refined but it doesn't hit the same way. i feel like i've gotten safer without meaning to. like i learned how to make things that don't embarrass me and lost whatever made people stop and stare. i don't want to romanticize being in a bad place just to make good art. i've worked too hard to get somewhere steadier. but i can't pretend i don't see the difference. anyone else feel like their messiest work has a pulse the polished stuff doesn't?

My first gallery show came about because a lady from Birmingham saw my quilts at a church bazaar and wouldn't let it go. She kept calling till I brought some in. I didn't have the nerve to walk into a gallery cold back then, wouldn't have known what to say. What about y'all? Did you walk in and ask, or did they come to you? I know the old way works sometimes but I'm curious how it's happening these days.

I had a gallery once, small, nice enough people, and after looking at my portfolio they sat me down and said, very gently, "you know what sells here, na? Lighter colours. More cheerful subjects. Maybe try that." I understood what they meant. My work is all old Bangalore houses and morning shadows, and I know it's not exactly commercial. But I also couldn't shake the feeling that I'd be painting someone else's idea of what I should make. I didn't go back. Still wonder sometimes if I was too precious about it. Maybe a compromise isn't the end of the world. Anyone else been told to tweak their work for a gallery? Did you adjust, or hold your ground, and do you regret it either way?

i've got this old wooden desk i work on and there's a patch about the size of my hand where the finish is completely gone. worn through from me leaning on it in the same spot for years. i catch myself rubbing my thumb over the raw wood when i'm stuck on something. my brother used to do this thing where he'd wear a hole in the pocket of every pair of jeans he owned. same spot, left front pocket, from carrying his keys the same way his whole life. i think about that a lot when i'm standing there thumbing that desk. i know i should just sand the whole thing down and refinish it. but i won't. feels like destroying evidence.

So I've been doing this thing where I quote what feels scary high, trying to push past the old numbers. Last month a woman reached out about a memorial piece, wanted me to work with her dad's old survey maps, some letters, a few other things. I took a breath and said $1,200. She said "perfect" before I even finished the sentence. Which should feel great, right? Instead I spent the whole week thinking I could've said $1,800 and she would've said the same thing. I don't know where the ceiling is because I've never hit it. I'm just guessing in the dark and every time someone says yes I feel like I lost a negotiation I didn't know I was in.

Three years. Three years this thing sat under my workbench wrapped in old sheets, half-cut, wrong, not working. It's a portrait of my yiayia's hands, she was a seamstress, those hands knew things, and I could not get the light right in the smalti. The gold kept coming out flat, like a coin, not like afternoon sun on old skin. Took it back out two months ago and finally saw what was wrong. Wrong andamento, wrong direction of the cuts. I'd been setting the tesserae like fabric folds instead of like hands. Had to pull half of it out and start again. Sent photos to the client this afternoon. She cried. So did I, a bit, alone in the studio with the cats looking at me like I'd lost it. Anyway. Sometimes the work needs to wait until you're ready for it. That's the thing nobody tells you.

Myself Ramesh. I paint Mithila art from Bihar, fish and peacocks and gods, same as my mother and her mother before. This is our tradition, many centuries old. Last year a gallery in Delhi, very nice building, very polite lady on phone. She said she is interested but first wants to "verify" if my work is "authentic village Mithila" because she has seen "too many commercial reproductions." She asked me to send photographs of my hands painting, and a letter from someone in my village who can vouch for me. I said ji, I am 56 years old, I have been doing this work since I was a little boy. My mother learned from her mother. You can see the natural pigment, the line work. But she insisted. So I sent. Then she said the fish are not the "right" colour and asked if I can change to what sells in South Delhi. I said no, this is Mithila fish, this is how we do. She stopped replying. Any of you had a gallery ask you to prove your own tradition? Or tell you your own art is not "authentic" enough? What do you even do with that.

Every year around this time I lose the light in my studio. The sun shifts, the building across the street blocks it, and for about six weeks I work under a flat grey that tells me nothing. I know it's coming and I still curse it. Today I spent forty minutes mixing a warm grey I could already see I didn't trust, because the light was lying to me. Wiped it off. Mixed again. Same thing. Finally put on a coat of titanium white on a scrap board just to have something true to look at. I don't use artificial light for painting. Never have. So I just wait it out, work on drawings, scrape old canvases, clean brushes I don't need to clean. It's a kind of enforced pause I didn't ask for. Maybe it's good for me. I'll let you know in November.

Was in a church in the old town today, not for work, just wandered in. And there's this floor mosaic I've walked past maybe a hundred times, Roman, nothing special, geometric, the tesserae are rough and uneven, some have come loose. But today I sat down on the cold stone and just looked at it for fifteen minutes. Some woman thought I was having a crisis. I was having a crisis actually. Crisis of admiration. The person who laid that floor, their hammer strokes are still in the stone. Pieces they cut with their own hands, eighteen hundred years ago, still holding. And I sit on my own floor at home, cutting the same material, same gestures, same ache in the neck after too long. I don't know why it hit me today and not the other times. Maybe I needed it to. Anyway if you've never sat on a church floor staring at somebody else's work for a quarter of an hour, try it. Feels strange and good.

I spent this morning walking around a space I was offered for a show in April. Big clean white box. Good light. Totally dead to me. Couldn't feel a thing. I need a room that already smells like something. Dust, damp, machine oil, old wood, whatever. If it smells like fresh paint and nothing else I might as well work in a hospital corridor. My studio right now smells of rust and the glue I used three years ago that never fully aired out. That's what gets me going. I turned the white box down. Found an old engine hall instead. Smells like grease and 1987. I can work there.

I went to a group opening a few months ago, gallery I'd been circling for a while, wanted to see the space, feel the vibe. And the work was... fine. Competent. But the crowd wasn't looking at the paintings. They were looking at each other, looking at their phones, taking photos of themselves taking photos. I stood there with a plastic cup of bad wine and thought, is this what I'm trying to get into? I know galleries are about relationships and sales and all that. But I also remember when you went to a show and people actually stood in front of the work. Maybe I'm old-fashioned. So: what's the moment that made you look at a gallery and think "this isn't quite what I thought it was", good or bad?

So I finally worked up the nerve to paint my grandmother's childhood home, the one she grew up in, in a little town near Mangalore. She's told me about it so many times. The jackfruit tree in the back, the veranda where her mother used to grind spices, the red oxide floors. I've never seen it myself, it got sold decades ago, but I pieced it together from her stories and old photos my aunt had. Finished it last week and showed her yesterday. And she just looked at it for a long time and said "which house is this?" I explained, and she went quiet. Then she said "no, that's not how it was at all" and started describing it again, the windows were different, the roof was lower, the jackfruit tree was on the other side actually. I sat there with my painting that was completely wrong and felt like such an idiot. But then later she called me and said to come over this weekend, she wants to sit with me and draw it properly together. She said "I'll tell you where every brick goes, you put it down." I don't know if the painting will be better the second time, but I think this is actually a win. Just not the kind you frame right away.

Still fuming about this from Saturday. I was at an open studio thing, just working on a portrait of an old woman I'd taken a reference photo of at the market. Her face is all lines and light, it took me maybe six hours to get the softness right in the cheek shadows, pastel is not forgiving if you rush it. This woman comes up, looks at it for maybe three seconds, and goes "oh, so realistic. It looks just like a photo. So where's the art in that then?" I just said "well, the photo is right there" and pointed at my phone. She didn't even look. Just walked off. And I sat there thinking, I spent a year learning how to not make pastel look muddy. I know exactly where every highlight on that face came from. I changed the light source entirely from the reference because the original was too flat. But sure. No art. Just copying, right? I didn't say any of that to her. I just smiled and went back to work. But I keep replaying it. Why do people think realism is just... cheating? Like there's no decision-making involved? Anyway. Just needed to put it somewhere. 😅

had a piece in a small group show last month, nothing fancy. yesterday the gallery emailed me saying a buyer wanted to contact me directly. nice, right? turns out she's an interior decorator. she loves the color palette. she wants to know if i can do something "similar but a little warmer" for a client's dining room. the piece she bought is a collage made mostly from a torn-up book about the 1918 flu pandemic and some pages from my brother's old copy of the odyssey. i worked on it during a two-week stretch where i barely left the apartment. it's about loss and contagion and maybe a little about odysseus being an idiot. but sure. warm tones for a dining room. i can do that. i said yes obviously. i need the money. but i feel weird about it. like i'm selling something under false pretenses even though she owns the actual piece and likes it for her own reasons. maybe that's just what selling art is? you put something dark out in the world and someone hangs it over their sofa and that's fine. anyway i'm going to make the warm dining room piece and try not to resent it. we'll see.

Met a man at the community center show yesterday. He stood in front of my piece for a good long while, this one I'd been working on for weeks, pieced from my grandmother's old housedresses and my aunt's aprons, all those soft faded florals. He looked at it. Nodded. Said how much for this one. I told him. He about choked. Said "that much? My grandmother made quilts for free her whole life. Just gave 'em away." I said well sir, your grandmother probably did it in a time when nobody thought her work was worth money. And she was wronged by that same thinking. But I am not my grandmother in that way. He walked off. And I stood there thinking, that man thought he was telling me something about value. All he told me was that his grandmother never got paid for her gift. And somehow that's supposed to make me lower my price instead of raise it. My grandmother never sold a quilt in her life. She gave them to every child, every cousin, every newborn in the church. And they'd say thank you and put it on the bed and wear it thin. And she died never knowing what her hands were worth. So no sir. I'm not doing it for free. I'm doing it for both of us.

Working on a portrait from a reference photo I found in an old magazine, some woman I've never seen before. And I get to the mouth and I keep redrawing it and it's not working, and then I step back and realise, it's my mother's mouth. The upper lip thinner, the way the corner tucks in. I didn't put it there on purpose. It just came out of my hand. I don't even have a great relationship with my mother. So that's unsettling. Has your hand ever just. Drawn something from your life without asking you first? Like the muscle memory knows things you don't want it to know?

It was at my brother-in-law's place in the 6th. Some woman I'd never met, nice enough, works in tech. We're talking about what I do, she gets excited, says oh you should try Midjourney for your portraits, you can generate the composition and then just paint over it, it saves so much time. I said that's not really how I work. She said no but it's the same thing in the end, the image is what matters. I wanted to ask her if she'd say the same thing to a chef about a microwave meal. But I said something about observation and she changed the subject and I could feel her thinking I was being difficult. The thing is, I spent four years learning to see. Not to copy photographs. To see the actual fall of light across a real face in a real room. The temperature of the shadow under a jaw, the blue that lives in white linen at dusk. If I let a machine decide my compositions, what exactly did I learn? I know we all use reference. I know photography changed painting forever. I'm not a purist. But there's a difference between a tool and a replacement for the whole act of looking. Maybe I'm just old. Maybe in ten years every painter works this way and nobody cares. But I care. I like the slowness. I like being wrong for two hours and then something clicks.

I sat with that all evening after I got home. That quilt took me three weeks, hand-pieced, hand-quilted, every scrap of fabric out of my grandmother's scrap bag and some from my own mama's housedresses I'd been saving. $350 is already low if you figure materials and time. But she patted my hand like I was a sweet old lady doing a little hobby. I didn't say anything to her. I smiled and thanked her and wrapped it up nice. But I been thinking, folks see the quilts and they see me and they think "bless her heart" instead of seeing the work. I been doing this since I was seven years old. That's 56 years. You don't get to call that cute. I raised my prices $50 after that. Felt wrong in my chest but I did it anyway. Anybody else have to fight the urge to apologize for what you're worth?