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client wanted a "fun tropical" illustration for a juice label, so i'm staring at an actual banana on my desk trying to mix that yellow. and it doesn't exist. it's like seven yellows at once depending on the light and half of them are somehow green and a little bit purple in the shadow. mixed something i was happy with, walked to the kitchen, came back, it was mustard. sat down again and it looked right. so either my lighting is cursed or i'm the problem. anyway i painted the whole thing too orange because i got annoyed, and honestly it's better than what they asked for. not telling them that. freelance is going great, can you tell

I did the math on a recent sale because I was trying to convince myself it was worth it. Large oil and cold wax, 160 x 200 cm, worked on it for about six weeks on and off. Gallery takes 50%, which is standard here. Fine. Then: stretcher bars and canvas, oil, cold wax medium, pigment, about €280 because I don't buy cheap canvas. Transport to Berlin in a hired van because it wouldn't fit in my car, €120. Insurance for the transit. The opening, where I bought drinks for a few people and we all went to dinner after, and I picked up the bill because the gallery director looked at me and I knew I was supposed to. That was about €340. So €4,200 becomes €2,100 after commission. Subtract €740 in costs I can track. That leaves €1,360. Then maybe six weeks of work, but not full-time weeks, so call it 18 days. That's about €75 a day. And I haven't paid tax on the €2,100 yet. I don't know what to do with this information. The painting is sold. The collector is happy. The gallery wants more. And I'm sitting here thinking I should feel good and instead I feel like I ran a small business that lost money on a job. Which I did, if I paid myself minimum wage. The problem is the painting wouldn't exist without those weeks. I can't separate the time from the thing. And the gallery can't sell a painting they never see. And I can't get the painting to Berlin for nothing. So the costs are real and the math is bad and I don't have a solution. Just the numbers.

There is a particular kind of stupid I only do in oil. This morning I had a half-figure drying on the easel, the shadow side of the neck needed to go cooler and softer, and instead of just taking the gray already sitting there I mixed a fresh one. Lead white, a touch of raw umber, viridian. Beautiful. Put it down. It was the same gray. I'd spent fifty minutes arriving at the thing I could have reached across the palette for. My old teacher in the atelier would have caught it in three seconds and made me scrape it off as punishment. He used to say the palette is a conversation you're already having, stop shouting over it. I thought that was just cruelty at the time. It's not. It's the whole job. Anyway the neck is better now. I kept the second gray, used it on the ear. Waste not. The other thing, and this is less charming: I've started noticing I do this more when I'm avoiding the actual problem in the painting, which is that the whole pose is a little too polite. The figure is sitting too nicely. I keep fixing the neck because I don't want to admit the composition needs to be broken open, and it's going to cost me a week. Voilà.

I've been using Sennelier oil sticks for years. Usually reliable, a bit soft in warm weather but nothing you can't work around. The one I bought last week, a raw umber, came out of the tube with the consistency of toothpaste that's been left uncapped all night. Crumbly, dry, almost no oil feel at all. I had to break it up and mix it with stand oil just to get it to stick to the knife. I emailed the supplier. They said it's a known issue with a batch from the summer. No recall, but they'd replace it if I sent photos. Which I did, but I'm stuck on the fact that they knew and still shipped it. That's three tubes of paint I've had problems with this year across different brands and I'm starting to wonder if the supply chain issues everyone talked about in 2022 are still showing up now as rushed batches and bad checks. Anyway. The raw umber is fine now after the intervention. But I shouldn't have to doctor a Sennelier stick like it's cheap student grade. Anybody else hit a dud batch lately or is it just me.

I've been working on this little still life of lemons and a blue pitcher for about a week now, evenings only. And I kept fighting with it, mixing the same shadows over and over, couldn't get them to sit right. Last night I finally looked up and realized my lamp had shifted and I'd been painting with the light coming from the exact opposite direction than where I started. The shadow side was lit, the lit side was shadowed. For a WEEK. I just sat there for a minute and laughed at myself. Re-set the lamp, and honestly it's coming together now. Anyone else have a moment like that where the problem wasn't the painting at all? Because I think I need to hear I'm not the only one who paints for six days under the wrong light.

I spent six hours on a plate of a tulip last week, drew it from a specimen, got the venation right, the petal overlap, the sheen. Then yesterday I was rinsing brushes and glanced at it and saw the thing has six stamens per flower. Tulips have six, so that part was fine. The problem is the leaves. I painted the leaves as if they clasp the stem neatly at ground level, which is what everyone draws, and it's wrong. A tulip's leaves wrap high up the stem, one cupping the flower itself. I have painted dozens of tulips in my life and never once got this right because the convention is so strong that you stop seeing the plant. Nobody has said anything. That's the part that bothers me. I'd honestly rather someone had caught it. It means the people looking at it are looking at tulips-from-memory, not at the actual flower, and that's the whole point of what this discipline is for. If we all keep reproducing the same comfortable mistake, we might as well be painting from our heads and saving ourselves the greenhouse fees.

I have a half-figure on the easel, a woman turned slightly away, one hand resting on the back of a chair. Almost nothing else decided yet. The hand is the problem. First pass I painted it thin, straight into the wet ground, no drawing underneath worth keeping. It was loose and a little clumsy and it read. Then I decided to take it seriously. Redrew it properly, measured it against the head, corrected the knuckle, gave it a real structure. Dead. Third time I chased that structure and overworked it worse. Fourth I wiped back to the ground and did it again fast, and it came out almost exactly like the first. What I keep circling: I know the anatomy, I know why the first one worked (the edge of the forearm got lost in the shadow, so the eye finished the shape), and I still could not paint it that way on purpose. The knowledge gets in front of the seeing. So the question I have no answer for, and I'd like yours: when you finally see what the good version was, do you paint it again clean, or do you scrape the whole thing and let it happen once? Also, for the record, I am not wiping the hand a fifth time. That is what I told myself this morning and I have already caught myself looking at the rag.

So I brought a piece to my local group on Saturday, 16x20 acrylic, marsh grass at low tide with a strip of water in the back. I was actually happy with it, which is rare for me. One of the women there (she's mostly watercolor, does lovely work) said the whole thing sits flat because my grass in the foreground is the same level of detail as the grass way in the back. I'd never thought about it that way. I just painted what I saw, which is that marsh grass looks like marsh grass everywhere. Spent Sunday night going back through my reference photos and, ok, she's not wrong exactly. My close grass is a little crisper but not much. Thing is I don't know if I want to start sharpening foreground blades because I've seen paintings where that gets fussy fast and looks like a photo someone traced. Anyone else run into this? I don't want to spend my one free evening a week redoing a painting that maybe is fine.

So this is a small one, 9x12, a barn at the edge of a field I drive past on the way to my daughter's swim practice. I've painted the roof four times now. I wiped it off twice with a wet rag, scraped once, painted over it once. The problem is I keep making the roof too even. Like tile, when it should read as corrugated metal with rust eating into it. Every time I lay the lines in I make them all the same distance apart and the same value, and it looks like a barcode. My brain knows better and my hand still does it. The thing I'm actually stuck on: do I fight it and keep the corrugation visible, or do I just push the whole roof back into shadow so the eye doesn't go there at all and let the light sit on the field instead? Second option feels like cheating, but I've been on this roof for three evenings after bedtime and I'm starting to resent the painting. Also I'm working with a Mars black I mixed with a little burnt sienna for the rust and it keeps coming out orange in a way that looks like a pumpkin. Might be the paint, might be me.

I've been mixing the same terre verte and lead white for three days trying to get a shadow on a white tablecloth right. This morning I scraped the whole thing off in frustration and started again. The palette ends up this mess of grey-greens and dirty creams, paint built up at the edges, turps everywhere. My husband came in and said "are you okay in here" like he was checking on a hostage situation. But the thing is, when the palette looks like that, when it's genuinely ugly and you don't care because you're inside the problem, that's when the painting starts to come right. The nice tidy palettes are for people who haven't started yet.

My gallery's new person keeps asking for process content. Behind the scenes, time-lapse, work in progress. I understand the logic, short clips of me scraping back layers get ten times the reach of the finished work. The problem is the work itself. A large painting of mine sits on the wall for weeks between sessions because oil and cold wax needs to cure before I can build the next layer. There is nothing cinematic about watching me wait. I could film myself scraping and smearing and make it look dynamic, but that would be a lie about how it actually happens, and I am not interested in performing a fake version of my own work for the algorithm. I did a ten second reel of the palette knife going through wet wax last week because I felt I had to. It looked great. It is the least honest thing I have done in years. The finished painting, the one that matters, will not be ready until March and nobody will watch it dry. Am I wrong to resist this? Sometimes I think the medium itself is becoming the enemy of the marketing. Then I remind myself I did not spend twenty five years learning to layer oil so I could make satisfying looped videos about it.

I've been on the same portrait for almost three weeks now. Not the whole portrait, the jaw. Left side, the shadow under it, where it turns toward the neck. There is a specific thing I want there, a softness, and I keep getting it and then losing it in the next stroke. Soft pastel is unforgiving in this one way that keeps humbling me. You can't glaze over a mistake and pretend. You lift it with tape, you go back in, and the paper is a little more tired each time. I'm on Fabriano Tiziano, the grey, and at this point that whole corner has been worked so hard it's gone shiny. New pastel slides off it. So now the fix is to stop, and I don't want to stop, because stopping means admitting I have to start this one again. I know the problem is that I'm painting the jaw from thinking instead of from looking. But that's the easy sentence to write. The hard part is that I can no longer see which of the five versions was the true one, I've stared so long. I put it against the mirror and it looks fine. I photograph it and it looks dead. Which do you trust? For what it's worth the ear on that side finally works. Small mercy.

Had a gallery owner on the phone today, wants me in their spring group show. Flattering, fine. Then he asks, casual, like it's nothing, if I could "streamline" my process a bit, maybe work on a couple of panels at once so I'd have more pieces ready. Streamline. As if the drying time of linseed oil is a scheduling problem I should negotiate with. I paint maybe four or five serious pieces a year. That's not a shortage of effort, that's the pace the medium demands. You can't rush an oil painting the way you can't rush a pregnancy, and nobody asks a pregnant woman to streamline her gestation for the spring calendar. I told him I'd have two, maybe three. He went quiet. Then he said that might be "tight." Bof. I'd rather show two honest paintings than five rushed ones. I've seen what rushed looks like on a gallery wall, and it smells like varnish over regret.

I pulled an old still life out of the rack this week. Pears on a copper pot, I painted it around 2015, and it always bothered me that the far edge of the pot went dead. Hard line, no atmosphere. So I set up to retouch it, scraped just that passage down, and repainted it. Now the problem is the mark itself. The new paint is confident, it turns, it sits in the light the way it should. But next to the older paint it looks young. You can feel the ten years in the difference. My hand is not the same hand. The retouch is technically better and it does not belong to the painting. I know there are ways to age a surface, varnish layers, glazes. But that's cosmesis. The real question is whether you can put a new mark into an old painting and have it be honest, or whether it always stays a transplant. I left it half done. Not sure I want to finish.

finally caved and got a tube of golden heavy body instead of my usual liquitex basics and i genuinely didn't think it would make this much difference. the pigment load is absurd. i used half as much and got twice the coverage. feels like i was fighting my materials before and didn't even realize it. problem is now i have 30 tubes of mid paint i don't want to use and a wallet that's about to get a lot lighter lol. this is how they get you.

Kept a lemon on my windowsill and painted it three times, same light through the morning, same canvas size. First two are correct. The form is right, the color is honest, the drawing is fine. And they're dead. The third one has a shadow edge I let stay softer than it should be and a highlight slightly too pale, and suddenly there's air in it. I've been thinking about that all week. My students keep coming to me with work that is technically right and soulless, and I keep saying things like push the values, trust your eye, and then I go do the same wrongness-correct thing myself and catch it only on attempt three. The problem isn't that the first two have mistakes. The problem is they have no mistakes. A painting needs at least one deliberate wrongness in it, one place where the truth submits to what the paint wants. Where do you each keep yours? I mean that seriously, not as a trick. Name the spot in your own work where you lie on purpose and it works.

A woman came by the studio this afternoon to look at a small panel I did in March. Copper pot, two pears, the corner of a linen cloth. Nothing ambitious, I painted it in two sittings and mostly to work out a problem with the shadow side of the pot. She stood in front of it a long time. Then she said it was her grandmother's kitchen and her eyes went. I did not know what to do with my hands, so I made tea badly and we sat on the two good chairs with the painting between us on the easel. She bought it. That is not really the win. The win is that for about ten minutes I stopped calculating: whether the price was right, whether the gallery would have wanted it, whether a small panel even counts as a serious painting. She was looking at the thing itself. That is what I have been chasing for twenty-five years and I forget it constantly, sometimes for months at a time. Anyway the wall where it hung is empty now and I keep glancing at the nail.

Had a student this week, third year with me, technically very good. Clean edges, correct values, the drawing underneath all correct. And the paintings are dead. Nothing wrong with them. That is the problem. So I made her do an exercise: take a canvas already dry, a study she liked, and scumble dirt over it. Grey, ochre, a scraped-down mess. Then find the painting again in the wreck. She looked at me like I had insulted her mother. Honestly I might have. But by the end of the session she had a shoulder and a bit of wall that were more alive than anything she has painted in a year, because she could not control it anymore, so she had to look. I did the same thing to myself at her age and I hated it. What I think now: technique is what lets you get away with the accident, not what prevents it. You cannot smear your way out of not being able to draw, the drawing has to be there underneath or it is just a mess with a mood, but the drawing alone is a recipe for marble. Anyway she is furious with me and she will come back Thursday. Both things are correct.

Not the same colour at all from one brand to another. I bought a tube of Blockx to try and it's chalky, totally dead next to the W&N. Old Holland is beautiful but it's a different temperature entirely, much greener, not what I want. And the W&N themselves, I heard they reformulated some of their range a few years back. I don't even know if the new tube would be the same thing I've been using. I keep it for one specific passage in a painting I've been working on and off for months, the edge of a porcelain bowl catching the late afternoon light. Every time I squeeze out a pea-sized amount I feel like I'm stealing from myself. This is the kind of problem that sounds ridiculous if you don't paint. But you paint, so you know.

A gallery person told me in October that my account was "quiet." She meant it as a problem. So I did the experiment backwards. Turned off comments for six weeks. Posted maybe nine times, all photographs of work in progress, no captions longer than a line, no questions, no "which one do you prefer," nothing. Just the painting and where it was in the process. A shoulder blocked in, the shadow under a bowl still wet. I sold three pieces in that stretch. Normally I sell one every two months, and two of the three buyers messaged me privately to ask about the glaze, not to say anything nice. One of them was a man in Bordeaux who had never commented on anything in his life. He just watched. Six weeks of watching and then he wrote me a paragraph about the vermilion in the drapery. I am not saying comments are worthless. I am saying I had confused being talked about with being looked at, and those are not the same muscle. When the comments were on I would check them. Thirty times a day, honestly. And every check pulled me out of the painting and into the performance of the painting, which are two different rooms. Bof. Maybe it works differently if you are selling something other than a slow object. But I am not going back.