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Spent a good chunk of yesterday afternoon reorganizing all my acrylics by color family instead of the chaotic system of "whatever shelf had room." Looked so satisfying. Took a picture. Felt very accomplished. Today I needed my raw umber and I stood there for a solid 30 seconds staring at this neat rainbow of bottles like I'd never seen paint before in my life. Could have grabbed it in 2 seconds from the old pile. My 8 year old said "so you made it worse" and honestly she might be right. Anyone else's attempts at organization backfire this badly or is it just me?

the freelance logo job I took to pay rent is due tomorrow and instead I've spent the last three hours sorting my paint tubes by "vibes" which is just code for color families I made up. there's a pile for "weird browns" and a pile for "aggressive greens" and neither of them is helping me finish this logo. the logo is fine. the logo has been fine since Tuesday. I just refuse to close it. anyway the green section of my wall is looking incredible if anyone needs inspiration, absolutely free of charge, unlike my rates which I keep accidentally undercharging.

Took on a piece last month I had a bad feeling about from the first call. Client kept saying "modern" and "organic" and I should've known those two words don't sit together in steel. Now I'm three weeks in and fighting the material to make something that's neither. My own fault. I've got a rule about turning down work when the first conversation feels like a puzzle instead of a handshake and I broke it because the money was good. The honest part: the fabrication is fine. It'll hold up. That was never in question. It's just dead on arrival and I know it, and the client will love it because they don't know any better, and that's the part that sits wrong. Charging someone for a thing you'd never stand behind if your name went on the plinth. Anyway. Ten more days and it's out of the shop. Next time I remember why I made the rule.

spent sunday afternoon reorganizing my pastel box because i couldn't take the chaos anymore, half the sticks were broken, all mixed together, that layer of dust that gets everywhere. felt very adult about it. now i sit down to work tonight and i have no idea where anything is. i used to just dig around by feel and somehow find the exact grey i wanted. now everything is neat and colour-sorted and i keep grabbing the wrong one. my hand doesn't know where to go. maybe the mess was part of the process. 🙃 anyone else's system fall apart the second you try to organize it?

A woman wants a 4 metre mosaic for a hotel lobby in Halkidiki. Deposit was good money, more than I made in the whole of 2013. She has a Pinterest board. She sent it twice. I went to see the space on Monday. Grey marble everywhere, that cold beige lighting, and she wants a "warm, organic, hand-made feeling" in smalti. Smalti in a lobby with no daylight is money thrown into a hole. By year two it reads flat and dead and my name is on it. So I said no. Politely, with an actual reason, and offered her a smaller stone piece for the reception wall instead. Half the money. She hasn't replied. I sat on the balcony after the call with a coffee going cold feeling like an idiot, and then around an hour later something in my chest just let go. Fifteen years I've been taking things I knew were wrong because the month needed paying. I'm not doing it anymore. I'd rather grout a bathroom floor. Also my left thumbnail is black again from a bad hammer strike. Unrelated. Or maybe not.

i realized today that my "studio organization system" is just. piles. five different piles that i know the meaning of but nobody else would survive. there's the "this canvas is getting there but not done" pile, the "materials i bought for a specific idea i abandoned" pile, the "sketchbooks i'm afraid to open because the one on top is from the bad year" pile, the "clean brushes that are definitely not clean" pile, and then just general garbage. it works until it doesn't. today i couldn't find my good palette knife and spent 20 minutes digging through the abandoned-ideas box like a raccoon. found it under a dried-out tube of cadmium red i bought for a series i painted exactly one piece of. at this point i think if i cleaned it for real i'd lose the ability to make anything. the entropy is part of the process. or that's what i tell myself lol

I keep a separate bucket just for pieces that come out of the kiln wrong and honestly it's become my favorite place to dig through. Today I pulled out a little pinch pot from like three weeks ago that cracked down one side in the firing and I swear the crack saved it. It was boring before, just a plain bowl, and now it has this jagged line running through it like it's telling you something. I glazed over the edge of the break and it looks intentional. It might have been the best piece I made all month and it was a failure. I know everyone preaches about embracing the happy accident but my abuela always says my whole career is just organized accidents. She's not wrong. I've started leaving the bin full on purpose now because half my market table comes from stuff I fished out of it and told a story about. The kiln does what it wants. You just have to be paying attention when it happens.

A few months back I got tired of hearing myself say that social media doesn't matter, so I did the thing I said I'd never do. I paid one of those agencies. Fifteen hundred euros for a month of "organic growth strategy." They sent me a plan that was basically: post every day, use these hashtags, engage with bigger accounts, tell your story more. The only concrete change was that I started posting my work with the same three hashtags as everyone else, and my feed became a wall of pictures of paint that said nothing. I do have a story. It's just not a tidy one, and it doesn't fit in a caption alongside a grid flourish. I cancelled after three weeks. The one useful thing that came out of it was noticing I'd stopped enjoying preparing a canvas. That was never supposed to be content. That's the part I keep. So bof, lesson learned the expensive way, but at least the money bought me that clarity. What's actually working for you right now, or is everyone else also just shouting into the same three hashtags?

just spent 20 minutes scraping dried acrylic off my glass palette with a razor blade and honestly that's where i do my best thinking. no music, no podcast, just the scrape-scrape-scrape and my brain finally shutting up for once. i used to be precious about cleaning between sessions. thought it meant i was organized. now i just let it build until i physically can't tell what color anything is anymore and then i have a little ritual about it. feels like progress even when nothing else is. anyway my palette currently looks like a dried blood splatter exhibit. very on brand for the colors i'm using rn lol