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I cut all my paper with a butter knife I found in a parking lot three years ago. Not the good one I got from my mother's kitchen, not the exacto blades I have a whole box of. This dull piece of cheap silverware that someone dropped and never looked back for. It tears the edges in these uneven ways I can't reproduce on purpose. I've tried. I've tried dragging the exacto along the same angle, pressing harder on one side. Nope. Only the parking lot knife does it right. Yesterday I nearly lost it at a flea market, left it on a table while I was digging through a box of old photographs. Ran back panicking like it was a dog. The lady running the booth saw my face and just said "you okay honey" and I had to explain that yes, the butter knife is fine now, thank you. I don't know what that says about me but it's probably not good.

Went to the yard this morning for a sheet of 3/16" hot rolled for a commission. Loaded it myself, strapped it to the rack, got it back to the shop. Pulled the wrap off and the surface is pitted and scaly the whole way across. Not a few spots. The whole sheet. Guy at the counter told me it's how it comes now. That's not how it comes. I've been buying steel since before some of these yards had a computer, and you used to be able to get a clean sheet without paying cold rolled prices for it. So now I either grind it down, which is half a day and burns through discs, or I drive it back and argue with a kid who wasn't born when I started this. I'm grinding it. I'm not spending another two hours in the truck to be told I don't know what I'm looking at. Worst part is the client wants a brushed finish on the exposed face. You can grind pitting out or you can have a surface, but you don't get both. I'll figure it out. Just annoyed.

Okay so I've been doing the full-time artist thing for 8 months now and today I shipped my first actual commission. Not a print, not a little piece at a market, an actual person who messaged me asking me to paint their grandmother's garden. Their GRANDMOTHER'S garden. There were reference photos of this old rose bush and a rusty bench and I spent three weeks obsessing over getting the green right because greens are the devil honestly. Anyway I sent it off this morning and then I just sat in my car outside the post office and cried a little. Not sad crying. Just like. Oh, this is real now. Someone trusted me with their memory and I didn't mess it up. My dad died when I was 19 and I painted my way through that whole year, and I kept thinking today about how painting someone's garden feels like the exact opposite of that. Like here's a thing that's still alive and growing and someone wanted me to hold onto it for them. And the grandma apparently cried when she saw the photos I sent before shipping, which made me cry again. My partner just handed me a towel and said "this is your whole personality now huh" and he's not wrong. Not really asking anything, just wanted to tell people who'd get it. What's the last thing that made you cry in a good way?

Ok so I need someone to tell me I'm not being insane here. I got my first real gallery yes back in the spring (still cannot believe I'm typing that, I cried in the parking lot haha) and it was the best day. Like genuinely. Then... nothing. Emails take two weeks to get an answer, the show date keeps sliding, and last time I asked a totally normal logistics question I got a one-line reply that felt like it was typed by someone already walking away. And here's my actual question because I keep going back and forth on it: how long do you wait before you check in again, and how many times is too many before you're "the annoying artist"? I've landed on roughly every two weeks and one follow-up max, but I have literally no idea if that's pushy or way too passive. My partner says I'm being patient, I say I'm being a doormat, we've had this fight twice. Also part of me wonders if the quiet is just... how galleries are? Like a slow-cooking thing where no news is fine news? Or is silence the polite version of "we changed our minds"? Tell me your actual follow-up rules, and if you've ever had a gallery go dark on you, what happened. Did it come back around or was that the end? genuinely asking because I've rewritten the same check-in email four times and I need to just send the thing 🙏

ok so I've been going back and forth on this for months and I want actual opinions from people who've done it more than me. When you're cold approaching a gallery you've never talked to, do you just walk in with a portfolio and hope the person at the desk is in a good mood? Or do you email first and wait three weeks for a reply that never comes? I did the walk-in thing once. Drove 40 minutes, hyped myself up in the parking lot, walked in, and the woman at the front was SO nice and then told me the owner "handles submissions" and to email. Which I did. Never heard back. And then I sat in my car for like 15 minutes feeling like I'd been rejected by the receptionist, haha 😭 But honestly I still think the walk-in might be better?? Because at least they've seen your face?? Or is that just me being naive and wasting gas money. Tell me your actual method and whether it worked, because I'm 0 for 2 right now and starting to think I'm doing it wrong. also if you're a "walk in and ask to see the space first, talk about the art later" person, I need to know why, because that scares me more than anything

Went to the art store for a bottle of matte medium and came out with a tube of phthalo turquoise because it was 40% off and I have zero self control. I don't even paint water. I paint fields and parking lots and the occasional pear. It's been sitting on my table for a week and I keep picking it up. There's something about a full tube you haven't touched yet. Anyway I squeezed out a little dot of it last night and now I'm fighting the urge to put it in everything, which is exactly how you end up with a green landscape, which I don't want. Does anyone else buy a color and then spend weeks trying to figure out where it goes, instead of admitting it was just pretty at the register

ok so this is going to sound small but I just put down a deposit on a shared studio space and the whole thing came out of my "actual painting sales" money and not my savings or the little bit my partner quietly covers when I'm short. Which means for the first time since I quit the café eight months ago, the work paid for a thing the work needs. the space is tiny, like a converted closet in a building full of woodworkers down on the east side, and it smells like sawdust and turpentine which honestly is the best smell on earth. there's a skylight. A SKYLIGHT. I've been painting the same window in my apartment for a year and a half because it's the only decent light I have and now I get actual north light for six months. anyway I sat in my car after signing the papers and cried a little bit which is embarrassing to type out but there it is. my mom called me while I was still in the parking lot and I couldn't get the words out right so I just said "I got the closet" and she started crying too. we're a family of criers, it's a whole thing. the terrifying part is now I have a monthly bill I didn't have last week. but the good terrifying. I think. ask me in march haha

turned off comments on all my posts for a month as an experiment. not out of principle, i was just tired of moderating "do you do pet portraits" on a painting of a parking lot. results, since i know someone will ask: dms went up maybe 30%. actual inquiries, like people asking about a piece with a number attached, went from basically nothing to four in four weeks. sold two small ones off a story reply. the comment section was never where the money was, it was where the free labor was. the downside is reach tanked, obviously. a couple posts that would've done their normal 2k got maybe 600. i don't care as much as i thought i would. the algorithm punishes you for closing the door and then the people who actually wanted in just... knocked somewhere else. anyway i turned them back on for a commission piece because the client wanted to see reactions and now i'm back to deleting "AI?" six times a day. genuinely not sure which version i like better.

Had a piece ready for welding last month, a big steel armature that needed a structural weld I couldn't do in my own shop. Got a quote from a foundry I've used before for $600. Dropped it off. Picked it up and the invoice was $1,200. Foreman said the job took longer than expected because of the wall thickness and they had to re-jig the setup. No call to warn me, no authorization. Just the work done and the new price. I paid it because the piece was already in my truck and the client deadline was two weeks out. But I sat in the parking lot for five minutes first. That's the part I keep thinking about. Not whether they were right or wrong. Just that I sat there and decided to eat it because restarting somewhere else would have cost me more than the difference. Still don't know if that was smart or weak. Probably both.

Our library does a little community show every spring, nothing juried, you just sign up for a 4 foot panel and hang whatever. I'd been planning to put in the marsh piece I did in October, the one that actually came out the way I wanted. I hung two others instead. Both were ones I nearly painted over. A small still life of the kids' cereal bowls from last summer that I hated for months because the light is flat and the left bowl is honestly a little lopsided, and a scrappy plein air thing from the parking lot behind the rink in February where I got the cold sky right and the tree wrong. I don't fully know why. I think I'm tired of only showing the ones that behave. The cereal bowls especially, my 11 year old walked past the table while I was varnishing it and said oh that's the actual morning. Anyway it's up until the 22nd. I keep catching myself wondering if anyone will say anything about them, which is a stupid way to feel about two paintings I almost threw out. The marsh one can go to the fall fair.

okay so when I was fresh out of art school I walked into this small gallery downtown with a whole portfolio folder, no appointment, no email, just vibes and hope, and the owner literally didn't look at a single piece. Just told me to "send something through the website" while staring at her laptop. I was so crushed I almost cried in the parking lot haha. it took me two more years and honestly the break I finally caught was so random, a friend of a friend's cousin was having a show and told the curator about me. no big pitch, no cold email genius moment, just someone saying my name in a room. SO what actually worked for you?? did you email and get lucky, walk in somewhere, get referred by someone, or did you have to do something totally embarrassing first? I need to hear the wins and the wreckage honestly, because I'm convinced everyone got in through some weird back door and nobody talks about it 😭

Not for a piece, or not exactly. I was looking for something to collage and ended up reading them instead. He kept everything. A hardware store receipt from 2007, $4.19, one item, no idea what. A parking stub from a garage that's been a parking lot of rubble for six years. The one that got me was a gas station receipt with his handwriting on the back, just a grocery list. Milk, batteries, toothpaste. That's it. That's the whole archive of a person, a list of things he meant to buy on a Tuesday. I don't know what to do with them. Gluing them down feels like throwing them out with extra steps. Leaving them in the box feels worse.

driving home from a drop-off with a big framed piece in the back seat. some guy in the lot sees me reversing slowly, and instead of waiting, he leans on his horn, rolls down his window and starts waving his arms like he's landing a plane. so i stop. because what else. then he gets out and comes over and says "you're too close to that truck, let me guide you." i didn't ask. i was fine. there was a full car length. he stands behind my bumper shouting "little more, little more, okay stop, you're good" and i do it just to end it. then he pats the back of my car like it's a horse he just calmed and walks off. never even a thanks, or sorry for the horn, nothing. just my daily reminder that men will insert themselves into a situation i had fully handled and then take credit for my own parking job. should have just waited him out. next time i'm sitting there with my hazards on until he leaves.

Got a commission for a plaza in an office park that emptied out during covid and never really filled back. Fourteen floors of glass, maybe thirty cars in the lot. I welded the figure anyway because a job is a job. It's a standing form, steel, about eight feet. The leg-to-hip joint has bothered me since the second day. Structurally it's fine, it'll outlast the building. But the bead sits heavier than I wanted and I keep telling myself nobody will get close enough to care. Then I drive by and I stop the truck every time. I know the answer. I know it's grinding it out and redoing it. I've told apprentices the same thing for thirty years. Just haven't pulled the trigger yet, and it sits in the shop mocking me while the plaza waits for a piece nobody's going to see anyway. Maybe I'm just looking for a reason not to cut into it. Or maybe the real reason is I know once it's right I won't have an excuse to keep driving by.