Search

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.

the tube's got maybe a fifth left and i still can't throw it out. something happened to it about a year ago, it went chalky, and now every mix i make with it comes out looking like a laundromat wall. but here's the thing, i know where it goes. i can mix with it blind. so i keep squeezing it and pretending. new one arrived tuesday. cadmium, same brand, and it's loud in a way that's honestly kind of upsetting. i did two hours of studies with it and hated every square inch, which i'm choosing to read as a sign it's working. anyway the dead tube is still on the table. it's not sentimental, it's that throwing it away means admitting i spent a year painting around a color instead of fixing it. which, now that i type that out, is probably also a thing i do with other stuff lol

i mix a lot of color at once, like way more than a single painting needs, because rematching a color two days later is the worst part of this whole job. nothing kills a session faster than trying to rebuild a specific orange from memory at 11pm. so now there's a shelf. twelve jars. and from a normal distance they are all the same orange. up close, four of them are actually that orange, three are muddy because i got impatient and added black too early (again), and the rest are... cousins. i labeled them with masking tape and my handwriting has fully deteriorated, so half the labels just say "warm?" and one says "NO". the annoying part is i use all of them. i'll reach for the muddy one on purpose sometimes because it reads flatter and i like that. so i can't even throw them out and call it growth. anyway i'm buying more jars. not a question, just logging 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

ok so my easel has been at the exact same angle and height for like two years and last night i could not sleep so i decided this was the problem with my work. not the composition, not the fact that i've painted the same three colors for a month. the angle. so i moved everything. flipped the whole thing around so i'm now working against the window instead of with it, which means the light hits wet paint from the side and every single mark looks like garbage. you ever make a change to your setup at 1am and wake up with a studio you don't recognize and a weird sense of dread about it. that's where i'm at. anyway i'm gonna give it a week before i admit it was fine the way it was. drop your setup, or don't, i'm not your dad

so i finally finished this 30x40, big flat color thing, took me about 11 days of actual work. quoted 1100. felt fine about it until i started adding up materials tonight. canvas was 68, the good one. paint, and i use a lot of it because flat color means no cheating with glazes, easily 70 bucks of paint. brushes i destroy, say 20. varnish, whatever. so like 160 in materials, which means 940 for 11 days. that's 85 a day. i could go work at a coffee shop for 85 a day and not have hand cramps. and the worst part is 1100 already felt like a lot to ask, like i had to justify it. i said it out loud to someone and immediately went "well, for me it's a good price" like i was apologizing for existing. ngl the gallery thing is what gets me. if it sells through them that 1100 becomes 550, minus my 160, and now i'm at 35 a day. cool. cool cool cool. i'm not raising it this time because it's basically sold, but the next one of this size is 1600 and i'm already dreading saying that number out loud.

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.

did the math last night because rent is due and i was avoiding opening the bank app. since january i've bought 14 tubes. used 4 of them. the other 10 are sitting in a drawer like little expensive witnesses. the stupid part is i know exactly why. buying a new color feels like starting a new painting, and starting a new painting feels better than finishing the one on the easel that's been fighting me since march. so i buy the tube, feel a little hit of promise, put it in the drawer, go back to the same six colors i always use. anyway the drawer is now a graveyard of good intentions and i'm still on the same six colors. not really a complaint. more of a confession.

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.

bought a single tube of pyrrole orange on a whim because the shop had it on clearance and now i can't paint with anything else. every color i own suddenly looks muddy to me. spent the whole afternoon re-mixing everything around it and my "skintone" is just straight up clown makeup at this point. this is how it always goes. one new tube and the whole system collapses. i have like 40 dollars worth of paint i'm now suspicious of. anyway if you see a painting that's just orange with a face drawn on it, that was my afternoon.

not a discipline thing, it's laziness that got out of hand. phthalo blue, titanium white, a cad red i've been nursing since march, that yellow ochre, burnt umber, black, and a green i mixed once and never fully cleaned off the glass. that's it. it's a gross little green too. i keep meaning to scrape it. the annoying part is the work's gotten better. like i stopped reaching for the new tube and the paintings got tighter. i don't know if that's a real thing or if i just got good at making one painting over and over and calling it a series. also my water cup has a skin on it. i know. it's been sitting since tuesday because i told myself i'd come back after lunch and then i didn't come back until today. anyway if you have a color you've been avoiding because you "don't like it" that's probably the one.

Went to the art supply place on my lunch break, 40 minutes I don't really have, to get one tube of burnt sienna. Mine is a sad flat metal corpse, I've been squeezing it with pliers like a crazy person. Guy working there spends ten minutes telling me I should try their house brand instead, it's basically the same pigment, half the price. I said no thanks, I know how the real one behaves when I thin it. He says, and I quote, "they're all made in the same factory." Maybe they are. I still walked out with the expensive one and now I'm annoyed at myself for being the person who pays double for a label, and also annoyed at him for assuming I don't know my own paint. I've been using this color for nine years. I know exactly how it dries and how it looks over a wet sky. Anyway the sky on the piece on my easel is now the right color and I'm still thinking about it at my desk. Guess that tells you something.