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This morning I was mixing indigo from the neel we had dried since last winter. The powder was fine, I added the gum arabic slowly, little water at a time, same way my mother taught me forty years ago. But the colour came out thin. Washed out. Not that deep blue-black I need for Kali's hair. I sat there stirring and stirring, adding a pinch more pigment, and I thought, maybe it is me, not the neel. Maybe my hands are not feeling the consistency the same anymore. My daughter, she is learning from me now, and she said "Papa, just use the tube colour, nobody will know." But I would know. I ended up using that wash anyway. Thin layers, built up slowly. It took two hours more than it should have. The result is different, lighter, a little uneven, but maybe that is also okay. Not everything has to be the same as what my grandmother did. She also had days when the neel didn't cooperate, I am sure. Anyone else have materials that suddenly stop listening to you? Or is it just my old hands. 🙏

My apologies ji, but today the natural pigment for the blue colour is just not listening to me. I am mixing and mixing, using the same process my mother and grandmother taught me, but it is coming out dull, not the vibrant indigo it should be. This is the colour for the peacock's neck, you see, and it must be just so. Perhaps the humidity is too high in Madhubani today? It is frustrating when the materials themselves seem to have a mind of their own.

Sometimes I am just mesmerized by how the soft pastel dust catches the light in my studio, especially late afternoon. It hangs in the air like a little bit of magic. Today I was working on a portrait, trying to get this one particular expression right, and I got lost just watching the pastel particles dance in the sunbeams. It's probably silly, but it's one of those small things that makes me feel so happy to be doing this. Even when the face I'm painting is fighting me. Does anyone else get distracted by the little studio phenomena?

A student in my beginner botanical class yesterday insisted she could paint a Rosa gallica from memory, without a reference, using a brush that was barely damp because she wanted to "feel the energy of the flower." The result looked like a cabbage that had been in a disagreement with a stapler. I try very hard not to be prescriptive. I believe there is room for many approaches. But there is a difference between artistic freedom and refusing to learn the basic mechanics of how water and pigment behave on paper. You cannot will a wash into existence through sheer self-expression. The water has to be there. The pigment has to be mixed. These are not negotiable. She was genuinely disappointed when it didn't work, and I felt for her, but I also felt for the rose. They are not symbolic abstractions. They have a specific number of petals arranged in a specific geometry, and that is where the beauty lives, in the accuracy, not in the approximation.

A foreign buyer came to my village last year. A German lady, very polite, through a cooperative. She saw a Sita ji painting my grandmother did in the 1980s, natural pigments, fine line, the old Maithili style that takes weeks. She wanted to buy it. I told her price, 8,000 rupees. She smiled and said "for local art, that seems high." Then she offered 500 rupees. I could not speak for a moment. 500 rupees for something my mother's mother sat on the floor painting, grinding her own colours from leaves and stone. I told her no, sorry, this painting is not for sale now. She looked confused. I think she thought I would bargain. But some things you do not bargain over. This is the problem we have with folk art. People see our work as "charming" or "ethnic" and they think the price should match a souvenir. You cannot buy a Madhubani painting for the same as a refrigerator magnet. My daughter worked three days on a single fish motif last month. Three days. The pigment alone I have to source from Patna now because the local suppliers for certain minerals have dried up. I am not angry at the lady. She did not know. But I am tired of explaining that this art has a price. My time, my mother's time, my grandmother's recipes for colour. It is not decorative. It is our history.

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.

Myself Ramesh. I paint Mithila art from Bihar, fish and peacocks and gods, same as my mother and her mother before. This is our tradition, many centuries old. Last year a gallery in Delhi, very nice building, very polite lady on phone. She said she is interested but first wants to "verify" if my work is "authentic village Mithila" because she has seen "too many commercial reproductions." She asked me to send photographs of my hands painting, and a letter from someone in my village who can vouch for me. I said ji, I am 56 years old, I have been doing this work since I was a little boy. My mother learned from her mother. You can see the natural pigment, the line work. But she insisted. So I sent. Then she said the fish are not the "right" colour and asked if I can change to what sells in South Delhi. I said no, this is Mithila fish, this is how we do. She stopped replying. Any of you had a gallery ask you to prove your own tradition? Or tell you your own art is not "authentic" enough? What do you even do with that.

Myself Ramesh, I was finishing a large piece for a client in Delhi. It depicted the marriage of Shiva and Parvati, very detailed work with natural colours on handmade paper. For weeks, my eyes were glued to the fine lines, the tiny figures. When it was done, the client asked for the final price. I calculated everything – the cost of the paper, the pigments which are becoming costly now, my time spent over many days and nights. When I told him the figure, my own hands started to shake a little. It was a good price, a fair price for the work, but still, it felt very high for me. We are not used to such figures in Madhubani, you see. He paid without any question, thankfully. But I am still thinking about it.

There's this moment in a watercolor where everything is still possible, the paper is wet, the pigment is doing its own thing, you haven't screwed anything up yet. It's like a little high honestly. And then you have to actually make decisions and commit and that's where I start second-guessing everything 🙃 I caught myself today intentionally rewetting a page three times before I even put paint down. Just... stalling. Because the potential feels safer than the painting. Anyone else do that thing where the idea of the painting is almost better than the painting itself? Or is that just me being weird about commitment lol

I have been trying for months to make nice reels about Mithila painting. The process, the natural colours, the meaning of the fish and the peacocks. Good lighting, proper background, all arranged. My son helps me with the editing. And these posts, they get some likes, some comments saying "beautiful art ji," but not much more. Then last week my son took a photo of me at six in the morning while I was mixing pigment. I had not even bathed. Old kurta, hands stained with lampblack. The photo is not good, blurry, bad angle. I told him delete it. He said no, let me post. That blurry photo got three inquiries from young women in Patna and one from Delhi who want to learn. They said it looked "real." One said she could see I was actually doing the work, not performing. So now I am thinking, all the effort I put into making things look nice for Instagram, maybe that is the wrong thing. Maybe the people who want this art are looking for something that is not polished. But this is strange for me because in Mithila painting, we spend hours making every line perfect. The whole point is precision. But online, they want the opposite. I am not sure what to do with this information. Keep posting the blurry morning photos or go back to the proper videos? Both feel wrong in different ways.

Sold a 160 x 200 cm painting last week that I painted in 2019. It had been sitting in storage, first at the gallery, then in my studio, then back at the gallery. Five years. The buyer paid €4,800. The gallery takes 50%, so €2,400 to me. Sounds fine until you add up the materials: the Belgian linen, the oil, the cold wax, the pigments, the panels I had built for the stretcher. That's maybe €350 for a painting that size, depending on how many layers I burned through. Then the storage costs, I pay €180 a month for my studio, plus a separate small unit for older work. That painting took up wall space that could have held newer work. Hard to calculate exactly but it's not nothing. So €2,400 minus €350 materials, minus let's say €150 in storage over five years, minus transport to the gallery twice, minus the opening night I stood around drinking bad wine and making conversation. Per hour of actual labour? I don't even want to know. And this is a good outcome. The painting sold. Many don't. I'm not complaining exactly. I knew what I signed up for. But when students ask me about making a living as an artist I don't know what to tell them anymore. The math has never been worse and the rent has never been higher.

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.

I've been looking at my palette knife scrapings lately. You know, the thick little piles of paint I scrape off when cleaning my knife. They dry into these surprisingly complex little landscapes. I'm fascinated by the way the oil dries, the subtle variations in color and texture depending on the pigment. Some are almost like tiny, cracked desert surfaces, others have a waxy sheen. It's a reminder of the physical life of the paint itself, beyond the image I'm trying to create. Perhaps I should start collecting these little beauties.

Like, I'll get a video of me just doing a really simple wash technique, something I thought was pretty straightforward and maybe helpful, and it'll get like, 100 views total. Then I'll post a sped-up video of me painting my cat, Bartholomew, looking super derpy, and it blows up to 10k. Bartholomew, of all things! haha. I'm not saying cats aren't great, but it's so hard to tell what the platforms actually want or if they're just messing with us. It makes me wonder if all the effort I put into explaining the pigment mixing or the paper buckling is just… wasted on them? It’s frustrating because I want to share the skill of it, you know? Omg, anyone else feel like they're just throwing paint at a wall and hoping something sticks with the algorithm gods lately?

I had this whole thing planned out for today, I was gonna paint this corner of my studio where the afternoon light hits this dumb little ceramic donkey my mom got me at a flea market, and I mixed this perfect warm gray for the shadow side, really felt good about it, and then I walked away to let it settle for literally two minutes and came back and it was already cracking. Gouache is such a brat sometimes. Like alright fine I guess we're starting over?? And I KNOW it's because I didn't work the pigment back enough before I put it down, I was too excited, I rushed it. I do this every time I'm really into a piece. My partner says I need to slow down but like, the thing is when I'm excited about something I just wanna GET IT DOWN you know?? And then the materials are like nope sorry try again. Anyway I'm re-mixing and I'm gonna be real patient about it this time lol. The light's still good for another hour or so. We'll see if I learned my lesson.

Last year in Madhubani, marriage season was coming and a family from Darbhanga came to me. They wanted a large Mithila piece for the wedding wall, traditional, with the sun and moon, the fish, the bridal procession. I told them ₹8,000 for the whole thing, handmade paper, natural colours from my own stock, ten days' work minimum. They said they would think about it. Next week I heard they went to a younger fellow in the next lane. He does the work too, learned from his aunt, but he charges ₹4,000. He uses poster colour, not geru and rice paste. And the paper is machine-made. But it is half my price, so they went to him. I am not angry at the boy. He is feeding his family. But this is the thing, when your own neighbour will do it for half, the customer does not see the difference between handmade pigment and a tube from the market. They see two paintings that look somewhat same, and they pick the cheap one. My son tells me I should raise my prices even more, because the people who understand the difference will pay. But the people who understand the difference are fewer every year. The ones coming to buy are often new money, wanting a "Mithila painting" to hang on the wall like a thing, not knowing what they are looking at. So I am stuck. ₹8,000 is already not much when you count the grinding of the colours, the preparation of the paper, the days of sitting. But I cannot compete with ₹4,000 and poster colour. And I don't want to compete that way either. How do you hold a price for the real thing when the market does not know what real means anymore?

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.

I finished a portrait commission last week, a three-quarter figure, and I finally sat down to calculate the material costs. I knew it was going to be high, but seeing it laid out was something else. The pigments alone, mostly expensive earths and cadmiums, came to nearly 200 euros. That's not even counting the linen canvas, the mediums, the solvents, the varnish. And this is for a painting that I can sell for, what, 4000 euros? It feels absurd. The sheer amount of time and skill you pour into something, and then you look at the price of lapis lazuli and think, 'this is what I'm fighting against.' Bof.

I mixed a big batch of cadmium red deep with a little burnt umber and a touch of cold wax medium last Tuesday. Laid it down in a broad band across the bottom third of a 180 x 140. Looked right. Earthy but alive. Yesterday I walked in and it had gone brown. Flat and dead. Not dried differently, the mixture itself seems to have settled or separated or just decided to be something else overnight. This happens to me more than I'd like and I still don't fully understand the chemistry. The pigment particles are heavy, I know that. Maybe the cold wax lets them migrate in ways I'm not accounting for. Or maybe I'm just not mixing thoroughly enough. But I stir it for a good five minutes, scrape and fold. I'm wondering if other people have a colour they love that reliably betrays them after a day. And if you've found a fix that isn't just mixing fresh every session because at this scale that gets expensive fast.

For thirty years I have been buying my green pigment from the same man in Darbhanga. He passed away last month. His son is there but the colour is not the same, too bright, like a plastic toy. So this morning I went out myself and picked neem leaves and some others I know, dried them in the sun, ground them with a little copper on the stone. Took me three hours to get a shade I would call right. My hands are green. My daughter was laughing at me. But when I put it on the paper it is the colour of the peacock's neck the way it should be, not that chemical thing. I know most people will just buy a tube. But this art was never about convenience. The colour has a memory when you make it yourself.