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opened a delivery today and genuinely could not remember ordering it. just stared at this tube of pyrrole orange like it was a stranger in my house. which it is. i don't even like orange. i have never once thought "this painting needs orange." yet here we are. checked my paint drawer and i have three different brands of the same dull green i used exactly once in 2021. my brain saw a color chart at 2am and decided that was the move. the tube is still in the box. feels like a specific flavor of art delusion where buying the thing and using the thing are the same satisfaction to my brain. the paint sits there and i feel like i'm being productive. anyone else's studio budget just... a series of impulse purchases that never graduate into actual paintings? or do some of you have self control

okay so I emailed a gallery a few months back with a little portfolio, and they actually got back to me (!) and wanted to meet. I was so excited. Then the owner spent the whole meeting talking about "the market" and what "sells in this area" and finally asked if I could, quote, "brighten up my palette a little" because watercolor in muted tones reads "sad" apparently. I didn't walk. I should've walked. I did a whole sample piece in bright happy colors and she never even replied after that. 😭 honestly kind of glad but also what a waste of a weekend. so what's the red flag you saw on the way in and ignored anyway? or the one that made you turn around immediately? I feel like we all have at least one of these.

ok so I finally worked up the nerve to approach a gallery I've been following for ages, sent them my portfolio, got an actual reply, felt like I was floating. then they asked if I could "mute my palette a little" to fit their space better. my whole thing is color!! I paint the same window in my apartment over and over partly because I love watching how the light changes the color. they wanted me to basically be a different painter. I said no obviously but I'm still second-guessing myself like was that stupid, should I have compromised?? I feel like the right gallery will want what I actually make but also maybe I'm being precious about it idk anyone else had a gallery ask you to change your work? did you bend or hold your ground? I need to know I'm not alone here lol

Someone at an open studio yesterday looked at a big interior I've been working on for two months and said, with real admiration, "wow, it looks just like a photograph." I smiled and thanked her because what else do you do. But inside I was thinking, I spent two months fighting the light in that room, scraping back a passage three times because the edge was too hard, because a photograph would never have that softness in the shadow side. I am not trying to make a photograph. If I wanted a photograph I would take one in three seconds. The funny thing is people think it's the highest praise. It tells me they don't see anything I'm actually doing. The paint, the color temperature shifting across a form, the decisions. It reduces it to likeness, which is the least interesting thing about a painting. I know I should be grateful people look at all. Some days I am. Yesterday I was not.

there's this canvas i started like eight months ago that went nowhere. composition was trash, colors were muddy, i hated it. but instead of gessoing over it i started using a corner of it to test brush loads and color mixes before they hit the actual canvas. like a palette that hangs on the wall. fast forward to now and it's completely covered in random swatches and drips and accidental blends that look better than anything i've done on purpose. it's this chaotic artifact of every painting i've made since february. i keep catching myself staring at it instead of the thing i'm supposed to be working on. half tempted to sign it and call it a day.

gallery reached out a couple years back, seemed legit, had a space, had other artists I'd heard of. first meeting the owner spent 20 minutes telling me my work was "almost there" but needed to be more "palatable for collectors." wanted me to tone down the color and paint something people could match to their couch. i nodded along like a coward and then just never emailed them back. still wonder if i dodged a bullet or fumbled a chance. what's the biggest red flag you ignored (or should've) in a gallery conversation?

okay so I went in for one tube of something neutral today and came out with a tube of "decayed rose," "moody willow," and "antique brass" and I have no defense for it. the colors are gorgeous and I'll use them all but I know exactly why I bought them, it's the NAMES. I want to feel like a poet while I'm mixing my palette. I want to say "I started this piece with a wash of decayed rose" and sound devastating. I'm not even ashamed honestly except slightly because I do this every single time and my partner just looks at the receipt and goes "which one is for the window painting" and it's never the one I bought. the worst part is yesterday I painted with a technically perfect color called "indian yellow" (which I hate the name of btw, colonial vibes, we should rename it) and it was fine but I didn't feel anything. meanwhile "decayed rose" is just a muted pink I could have mixed in five seconds. the marketing got me good. I'm a trained professional and I fell for color name poetry. does anyone else buy paints for the names or am I the only one paying $14 for a fantasy

I bought a hydrangea from the bodega on Monday because it was the exact blue of something I couldn't stop thinking about, and I've been painting it over and over trying to chase that color down. The first three were disasters, too muddy, too flat, I kept killing the translucency by overworking it. Last night I was so fed up I almost scraped the paper clean and gave up. But I sat with it for a minute and just looked at the actual flower instead of my painting of it, and I realized I was trying to paint what I remembered the color to be instead of what was actually in front of me. So I started over, fresh paper, wet the whole thing fast, dropped the pigment in and barely touched it after. And it just… worked. The light caught it and I actually gasped. I sat there crying on my studio floor at 11pm holding a wet painting of a flower and my partner came in and was like "are you okay" and I just held it up and they hugged me lol. Anyway that's the whole thing. I love this dumb frustrating medium so much. Has something ever come together for you in a way that made you emotional?? I want to hear about it.

found a palette from 2021 in my closet today. dried paint all cracked and layered, colors i don't even buy anymore. genuinely prettier than anything i painted that year. i have like six of these lying around. they're useless but i can't throw them out because they look like little abstract paintings that someone else made and i'm jealous of them lol

found it at a thrift store for five bucks, bad landscape, muddy colors, somebody's vacation painting they probably felt proud of. but the frame was solid wood underneath that godawful gold finish and i just stood there in the store knowing i was going to spend way too long fixing something i don't even want. and i did. sat on my floor with pliers and a flathead like some kind of idiot monk. took the thing apart completely. the painting is in the trash. the frame is stripped and sitting on my worktable and i still don't know what i'm going to put in it. this is just what i do now. rescue ugly frames from ugly paintings and fill them with my own ugly paintings. feels like a metaphor i don't want to examine too closely.

so i mixed up a custom beige for a skin tone study, ran out of canvas, and decided "fuck it" and painted a patch of my landlord's wall to test the value. it's a perfect match. like disturbingly perfect. i stepped back to look at it and i genuinely cannot find it anymore. i know it's there. i've touched it. but my eyes just slide right over it. anyway that's how i found out i'm good at painting the exact most boring color on earth. maybe i should pivot to camouflage for the military instead of whatever i'm doing lol

I timed myself mixing the same three colors this morning because I saw the jar of cobalt go down and I couldn't believe it. Twelve minutes. Twelve minutes just moving paint around on the glass, and half of it I couldn't even tell you what I was doing, it's so automatic. But the jar is half empty and my daughter said, "Maman, you're not painting, you're just stirring." She's not wrong. And also she's completely wrong. The stirring is where the painting happens, half the time. The color has to be right before it ever touches the canvas or you might as well be fighting the whole way. I didn't say any of that to her. Just told her to eat her breakfast. Worth it though. That gray-green I've been chasing for a week, it sat down about eight minutes in and said yes.

I've been using the same Schmincke Cadmium Yellow for nearly a decade. It's always been one of my most reliable, predictable colors, smooth, even washes, no surprises. And this week, painting a Ranunculus specimen, it started granulating. Settling into the paper texture in a way it simply never has. It's not the paper, same batch of Arches cold-pressed I've been working through for months. It's not the water, I haven't changed my setup. It's the paint. I'm trying to decide whether I got a bad tube, whether Schmincke quietly changed something in the formulation, or whether I'm finally losing my grip on a color I thought I understood completely. If anyone else has noticed a shift in their Schmincke yellows recently, I'd like to know. Because I feel like I've suddenly lost trust in an old friend and I'm not sure whether to replace the tube or just adjust my expectations.

Everyone talks about golden hour like it's the only light worth anything. Me, I wait for the hour after. The blue-grey that comes at the end of the day in winter, when the lampposts come on and the windows start to glow from inside. That light has almost no color and yet it decides everything. I've painted the same corner of my studio at that hour maybe thirty times and it's never the same twice. Golden hour is for photographers. The grey hour is for painters. You can keep your drama, I want the modulation in the shadows.

found this solid oak side table at an estate sale yesterday. nothing special, someone's boring coffee table from 1987, couple of water rings, drawer stuck. fifty bucks. i brought it home and spent the afternoon sanding it down and putting the first coat of this deep indigo on it. posted a progress picture and my neighbor (who i barely know) texts me "why would you paint over that wood? you're ruining it." like. it's a mass-produced table from sears. it's not a heirloom. it had a sticker on the bottom. i'm not ruining anything, i'm making it not ugly. and even if it was a nice piece, it's mine? i can do what i want with my own stuff? this weird reverence for raw wood drives me insane. not everything has to stay the color god made it. sometimes things look better with paint on them.

Yesterday I was working on a study of a single branch of Amelanchier canadensis, and I spent the better part of three hours painting and then re-painting one leaf. The first attempt was technically fine -- the proportions were right, the color was in the right range -- but it was dead. It had no life in it. The edge was too hard, the transition from the green to the reddish tip was abrupt, and I knew I would see it every time I looked at the painting. I painted it out, let it dry, and started again. Better, but the veins were too heavy. Painted it out again. Third time I got it right, and I cannot tell you why the third one worked when the first two didn't. The difference is maybe half a shade in the wetness of the brush, a fraction of a second in the timing of a lift. But you can feel it. My husband came in and asked how my day was. I said good, I finished one leaf. He is used to this by now.

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.

when i was chasing my first gallery i got told my work was "too happy" which still cracks me up. it's acrylic, it's color, that's the point. they wanted something moodier. i painted moody stuff for like two weeks, hated every minute of it, went back to loud and never looked back. anyway, what's the weirdest reason you've been passed over for? the more specific the better. "not a fit" doesn't count, i want the one that made you laugh or die a little.

Okay so I finally did the thing I've been avoiding for months and added up what I actually have in my paint collection, because I needed to reorder some colors and figured I'd do a quick inventory. $1,100. And that's not counting brushes or paper which would probably double it. And I still don't own a single tube of the fancy French stuff everyone raves about, I keep getting by on the mid-range and making it work. It just hit me weird because eight months ago I would've laughed at the idea of owning $1,100 in paint and now it's just... sitting in a tin on my desk. Some of it's half empty and dried around the rim. The cobalt I panic-bought when I thought they were discontinuing it? Still sealed. Never opened it. I don't even know why I panic-bought it, I use ultramarine way more. Anyway I sat on the floor counting tubes like some kind of weirdo and my partner walked in and asked if I was okay and I said "we own a car's worth of pigment" and they just nodded and backed out of the room. Honestly I think that's part of why I'm still scared of the full-time thing, not the not selling, but the fact that I've got this much money in materials and some days I still feel like a fraud using them. Like the paint is wasted on me. But then I painted this afternoon and forgot that thought existed so I guess that's the answer lol

I said yes because I felt for him. Grief makes people weird and I get it. But he sent me ONE photo of this dog, taken from like 20 feet away, half in shadow, and the dog was black so it's basically just a shape with ears. I spent 12 hours on this painting working from that and reference photos of similar breeds and he picks it up today and goes "I dunno, his nose was warmer than that." His nose. Was warmer. Than that. I wanted to say bro you sent me a photo where I can't even tell if the dog has eyes. I wanted to say the nose is gray because the dog was black and standing in shade and that's literally what color it was in the ONLY IMAGE YOU GAVE ME. I wanted to say I painted this thing with more care than I've painted anything in months because I knew it mattered to you. But I just said "I can glaze some warmth in" and he left looking disappointed and now I'm sitting here furious at myself for taking the commission and furious at him for not understanding what he was asking for and furious at the photo and furious at the whole thing. Why do we do this. Why do we take jobs we know are going to make us feel like this. Because we need money? Because we want to be helpful? Because we're so desperate to prove we can do it that we ignore every red flag? Anyway. He's coming back Saturday. I'm gonna put some warm brown in the nose area and try not to scream.