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okay so there's this window in my apartment that gets this specific soft afternoon light around 3pm and I've been trying to catch it for like... months now. This month alone I've done 14 studies of it. 14. Same window, same view of the neighbor's slightly sad little balcony, different light every time. My partner thinks I've lost it. Maybe I have. But here's the thing – every single time I think I've figured out how to paint that quality of light, the next day it's different and I realize I was wrong. The color temperature shifts, or there's a haze, or the whole thing goes golden for like twenty minutes before it's gone. Watercolor is SO unforgiving about this because you can't just paint over it, you have to get it right while it's wet or you lose it forever. And I keep losing it. My mom called yesterday and asked if I'd sold any of them yet and I was like Mom I can't sell them they're all failures. She didn't get it. But I think there's something in the repetition, you know? Like each one teaches me something the last one couldn't. I'm not chasing a perfect painting, I'm chasing understanding how light actually works. Anyway I laid them all out on the floor last night to compare and honestly it's kind of beautiful seeing them together even if none of them are The One. Might keep going until I run out of paper or winter comes and the light changes completely. Then I guess I'll start over.

was at a friend's thing last night and someone I'd met once, twice, whatever, found out I paint. immediately: "oh I have this painting at home you should tell me if it's good." no photo. no artist name. just a vibe check on a thing I can't see. I said sure send it, and they said "I don't have it on my phone" and then just... stood there. like I was supposed to perform clairvoyance. this happens so often. people genuinely think having an art degree (dropped out, don't remind me) means you can divine the quality of any painting ever made from a verbal description. "it's like, abstract, you know?" no. I don't know. that's nothing. I know they mean well but it's the same energy as asking a doctor "my stomach feels weird, is it cancer?" with zero other info. no babe, it's probably not, but also I'm not gonna do a house call for a phantom painting. anyway I think the real answer is I should start pricing these interactions. "that'll be $40 and I'll need a photo within 24 hours or the magic wears off."

Had a client last month, wanted a watercolour of her childhood home in Malleswaram, the one that got sold and is probably going to become an apartment building soon. She was lovely, genuinely emotional about it. But she wanted a detailed breakup of costs before confirming. Paper, paint, framing, my time. Itemised. I sat down and did it properly. Paper is Arches, 300gsm, cold press, a full sheet costs about ₹1,200 now. Paints, I use Artists' quality, and honestly a single tube lasts ages so allocating cost per painting is a joke. Framing with archival mount and UV glass runs around ₹2,500-3,000 here. And then I put down my time at what I thought was a modest ₹500 an hour. Came to about ₹8,000 for the whole thing. She looked at it and said "that's a lot for a painting." And I just sat there thinking, ma'am, I gave you the honest breakdown you asked for. ₹500 an hour is less than what I made as a junior architect ten years ago. The materials alone plus framing eat up almost half of it. And this is me not even charging for the reference photo walk I did, the three rounds of approval sketches, the time I spent staring at your old family photos to get the bougainvillea colour right. I didn't say any of that. I just smiled and said I could adjust the framing to something simpler. She agreed. The painting came out nice. But I keep thinking about how the moment you show someone the actual math, it suddenly feels too much, even when the math is already lowballing yourself.

Okay so I've been trying to figure out why I'm exhausted at the end of the day but somehow only have like one small painting to show for it. So I started actually timing myself. Set a little timer on my phone every time I sat down, every time I walked away. The result is honestly embarrassing. Over a four hour stretch today I painted for maybe 90 minutes. The rest was: staring at the reference photo, rearranging my brushes, looking at the same wash dry, texting my mom twice, going to get water and then just standing in the kitchen for a while. The actual sitting and committing part is way shorter than I thought it was. The weird thing is the paint time is so much better quality. When I actually clock in, I make decisions so much faster. But the gap between "okay I'm starting" and actually putting paint down is where all the energy goes. My new thing this week is a 25 minute timer, no phone in the room, and I don't get up until it dings. Even if I just sit there. Tried it today and got a whole sketch done in the first two rounds. Anyone else have no idea how much of their studio time is actually fear management? Because I think I'm maybe 40% painter and 60% pacing around thinking about painting.

I spent this morning painting a section of an old workbench in my studio. The light here in Lyon, even on a cloudy day, has this particular quality that catches the grain of the wood, the worn patches where tools have rested for years. It’s a subtle thing, this interplay of light and texture, but it’s what I’m always chasing. It makes you feel the history of the object. It’s why I love oils so much; the paint itself can hold that physical sensation. Some days it feels like a battle to get it right, but when it clicks, voilà.

Had a commission enquiry this morning that I'm still turning over in my head. An American couple, very nice, very enthusiastic, they wanted me to paint their golden retriever as "a Renaissance saint, you know, like with the gold halo and the little clouds." They'd already picked the frame from a catalogue. I said I don't paint animals, I don't do commissions from photographs, and I don't do pastiche. Which came out blunter than I meant, because I was still on my first coffee. But also, what do you even say to that? They want a decorative object, not a painting. The dog is lovely I'm sure. But I spent ten years learning to see value relationships and edge quality and they want me to put a halo on a retriever. I felt bad after. Not guilty, just tired. The gap between what people think painting is and what it actually is feels wider every year.

I spent the whole afternoon yesterday just looking at my kitchen table. Not painting it. Not photographing it. Just watching how the light moved across the surface of a wooden bowl, a half-empty glass, a cloth I'd left crumpled. From about 3:30 to 5, the quality of it, that cold winter light coming in low, bouncing off the building across the street, was something I could never invent and could never capture with a camera. The photos I took are dead. Flat. They have all the information and none of the truth. It makes me wonder how much time I've wasted collecting reference images when I should have been training my eye to hold what it sees. The camera is a crutch. A useful one, I use it too. But it flattens everything into information, and painting is not about information.

Okay so I finally worked up the nerve to raise my prices. I've been full-time for about eight months and I was charging like... nothing, honestly, I was so scared nobody would buy if I went higher. So I did the thing everyone says to do, raised them 30% across the board on my original paintings, prints I bumped up a little less. And it's been three months and I've sold maybe half of what I used to sell. My revenue is genuinely down. I had this whole pep talk prepared about how the right clients would find me and quality over quantity and all that, but I'm sitting here with more inventory than I've ever had and a very quiet PayPal account. I'm not gonna quit, I know I'd be pissed at myself if I went back down. But nobody tells you that the "raise your prices" advice might mean you just... sell less. For a while. Maybe forever? I don't know if I'm supposed to just ride this out or if this is the market telling me my work wasn't worth that much. It's really messing with my head honestly.

I've been using Arches 140lb cold press for nearly twenty years. It was reliable. You knew what you were getting. That block of paper I opened this morning has sizing so uneven the paint is pooling in patches on the first three sheets. I'm not talking about a minor inconsistency. I'm talking about washes that lay down flat in one area and bead up like wax in another. I wrote to them a few months ago about a different batch and got a polite form letter suggesting I might be using too much water. Which, no. I know how much water I'm using. I've been doing this long enough to know the difference between a technique problem and a materials problem. I've already switched to Fabriano Artistico for my commission work. I didn't want to. I liked Arches. But I can't keep fighting the paper. If anyone else has noticed this I'd be curious, though I suspect most people just adapt and don't say anything.

Finished a Naples yellow tube today. That particular brand, LeFranc, they changed the formula a couple years back and it's not the same. The new one is cleaner, more obedient. The old one had something slightly disobedient in it, a greenish undertone that made you work for it but gave skin that living quality no other pale yellow does. I rolled the empty tube flat and put it in the drawer with the others. I don't know why I keep them. It's not hoarding, I throw everything. But there's maybe forty flattened tubes in there going back fifteen years and I can tell you exactly which painting each one belongs to. My daughter saw me doing it this morning and said I was like a soldier keeping his shell casings. She's not wrong. The new tube is waiting in the box. I'll use it. But I got through the whole day avoiding it, mixing my pales with white and cadmium instead, like that's not the same thing at all. All the way to the studio and back I knew I was being ridiculous. Voilà. Tomorrow I'll open it and it'll be fine, it's just paint. Just felt like noting it somewhere people would understand. The rest of the house thinks I've lost my mind over a tube of paint.

I've been using lead white for twenty years and every time I'm forced to use titanium, for some reason, a workshop, a student's palette, I ran out and the shop only had that, I remember why I hate it. Too chalky. Sits on top of everything. You can't get that translucent glow in the highlights, it just sits there like a wall. People tell me it's more stable, less toxic, whatever. I don't care. The handling is everything. Lead white has a buttery quality that nothing else matches. You feel it in the brush before you even put it on the panel. I know I sound like a purist crank. But I had a student last week mix a passage with titanium and I couldn't even look at it. I made her scrape it and start over with Cremnitz. She was annoyed. The painting was better. Maybe I should keep a tube of titanium around for the moments I need to be humbled. But I won't.