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i was digging through old work last night, stuff from like 2017, 2018, before i had any clue what i was doing technically. and it's so raw. like genuinely uncomfortable to look at. there's this one charcoal portrait i did on newsprint of all things, the paper is practically disintegrating, and the face is just WRONG, proportions all off, but god it has something in it. it's looking at you. it's hurting. and i look at what i'm making now with my better materials and my figured-out process and it's more refined but it doesn't hit the same way. i feel like i've gotten safer without meaning to. like i learned how to make things that don't embarrass me and lost whatever made people stop and stare. i don't want to romanticize being in a bad place just to make good art. i've worked too hard to get somewhere steadier. but i can't pretend i don't see the difference. anyone else feel like their messiest work has a pulse the polished stuff doesn't?

A gallery contacted me last year, really interested, came to the studio, said all the right things about the work. Then the email: "Would you consider working in acrylic instead of oil? It would ship easier and sell better." I said no. Maybe that was stupid. But oil is what I do, the way it moves, the drying time, the glazing, it's not a preference, it's the whole practice. I don't know how to say what I want to say in acrylic. Has a gallery ever asked you to change your materials or your style to fit them? Did you bend or did you walk? I'm curious where the line is for other people.

Got asked to do a live demo at a gallery opening in Athens next month. They said "the guests would love to watch you work." I said do you know what mosaic looks like in real time? Because I sit on a pillow on the floor and cut one piece of stone at a time and stare at it for ten minutes before I set it. That's a Tuesday. It's not performance, it's just slow. They said it's fine, people find it meditative. We'll see. Anyone else get asked to turn their studio practice into a show and find out it doesn't translate?

Y'all ever catch yourself doing something in the studio that don't feel like much, but if you stop and think about it, it's practically prayer? I got this old tin cookie box my mama kept buttons in, and now I keep my smallest scraps in it. Every time I sit down to start something new, I dump em out on the table and just… sort em. Reds together, blues together, the browns and oranges that nobody quite knows what to do with, they get their own little pile. I ain't even decided what I'm making yet. But my hands need to do that first. Like saying hello before you launch into a conversation. My granddaughter watches me do it and says "Mama Gloria, you just playing with fabric." And she ain't wrong. But that's how the good ones start. You gotta let your hands wander before they know where they're going. Anybody else got a little ritual like that, something that don't look like work but you can't start without it?

I've got a tungsten carbide chisel I've had since 1994. The handle is pretty much gone, wrapped in electrical tape now. Still takes an edge better than anything I've ever bought since. Apprentice I had ten years ago asked to borrow it. I told him no, flat. He got a little offended. Few years later he called me up and said now he gets it. Everybody's got that one tool. The one that's been through enough that it knows your hand. Not sentimental exactly. Just practical. It's earned its place.

A woman from my building knocked on my door last week, said she'd seen my prints on Instagram, asked if I could teach her the process. I quoted her €80 for a two-hour session, materials included. She laughed. Said it's just sun and water, couldn't I just show her in five minutes. I didn't charge her. I showed her in five minutes. And she saw the paper turn blue and said oh, that's it? like she'd caught me at something. Anyway yesterday I spent three hours on one 8x10 print. Three hours from coating the paper to washing it in seawater I drove to the coast for, because the colour is different with real salt water. The sun did its part but I hauled the rest of it there. I don't know why it's so hard to say: the knowledge is the thing I'm selling, not the materials. But people see a blue stain on paper and think it's a recipe, not a practice.

Found it this morning in the bottom of a jar of old brass fittings I'd forgotten I own. M6, 40mm, flat head. I'd already ordered four more online, of course. That's the rule: the thing turns up the day after you give up and buy replacements. I spent twenty minutes just holding it. It's a good screw. I think half my practice is this, the archaeology of my own mess. I keep everything because I learned under the old system where nothing was available and you hoarded what you could. Now I have a workshop full of objects waiting to be remembered. Sometimes I feel like the curator of a museum of my own indecision.

I was working on this piece for like 14 hours straight yesterday, just totally gone in it. Charcoal, big sheet, just a face emerging from black. And I finished it and stood back and just started crying like an absolute fool. Not even sad crying. Just, it came out right. For once it actually said what I meant it to say. My roommate came down and saw me standing there crying in the dark studio and was like "...should I be worried." 😭 Anyway the drawing is good. Like really good. I think this is the first time in months I've made something that doesn't feel like I'm just practicing. It feels like I actually arrived somewhere with it. Gonna try to hold onto this feeling instead of waking up tomorrow and hating it. Wish me luck.

My first real gallery show, maybe ten years ago. I walk in and they've hung my still life under a spotlight so hot and close the varnish is practically sweating. The frame's casting a shadow across half the painting. I stood there thinking, this is where my work lives now, and I have no say in it. What's the worst thing a gallery ever did to your work in their space? Framing disasters, lighting crimes, hanging your 40x60 in the bathroom hallway, I want to hear it.

okay so I know this is such a specific complaint but I have been fighting for my life with my gouache the last few weeks because it's finally warm here and the drying time is just… different?? Like I'll lay down a wash and it's practically dry before I can even blend into it, and then other times it stays tacky forever and picks up the layer underneath. I feel like I'm relearning my own medium every June. I've been working on this little street scene from a photo I took on my phone last fall, just a corner bodega with that orange awning you see everywhere in Brooklyn, and the sky went from a smooth gradient to a streaky mess in about 90 seconds because I hesitated. Had to let it fully dry and go back in with a damp brush to finesse it and honestly it's fine now but I was so mad in the moment lol. Do you guys adjust anything when the seasons shift or do you just suffer? I keep telling myself I'll figure it out by August and then August comes and I'm equally confused.

Not as a study, not trying to match anything specific. Just mixing it, scraping it off, mixing again. Different combinations of ivory black and white, a little ultramarine, a touch of raw umber, sometimes a speck of yellow ochre. Seeing how far I could push the temperature before it stopped being grey and became something else entirely. My husband came in to ask about dinner and I think he was a little alarmed. But this is the thing nobody tells you when you start painting, you will spend whole days doing something that looks like nothing, and it's not wasted time. The hand learns things the eye can't explain. What's your useless practice? The thing you do that produces nothing visible but you know matters.

I've been going back and forth for years on this and it's ridiculous. For the figure work I do, the flesh tones especially, I want paint that stays where I put it and doesn't go dead when it dries. Michael Harding makes the most beautiful Naples yellow I've ever used, the texture is like butter straight from the tube. But I keep ordering Gamblin for the studio because it's half the price and honestly the consistency is more reliable batch to batch. Today I had both open on the table. Squinting at two identical piles of titanium white like a lunatic. My husband came in and said "just pick one, Camille." He doesn't understand this is not a practical decision, it's a spiritual one. What do you use and why. But don't tell me Williamsburg unless you want me to argue with you.

I spent years tweaking my website. Better photos, cleaner navigation, more process shots, less process shots, SEO keywords my friend who works in tech kept telling me to use. And I'd get maybe three inquiries a month, usually from students asking about internships I don't offer. Two months ago my domain expired and I just... didn't renew it. Put together a single PDF with recent work, editions, prices in a table, and my email at the bottom. It's ugly. It's just a document. I send it to people who DM me or write. That's it. And somehow this feels more honest? Like the website was performing professionalism for nobody in particular, and the PDF is just me handing someone what they asked for. I've sold more prints in the last eight weeks than in the previous six months of having a proper site. I don't know if this scales or if it only works because I'm a printmaker with edition sizes I can count on one hand. But I'm starting to think the whole "you need a professional web presence" thing was built for a different kind of practice, or maybe a different decade.

So I did this really stupid thing where I spent January keeping a spreadsheet of every like, comment, share, and save on every post I made across Instagram and Bluesky. I thought I'd find a pattern, you know? Something to reverse engineer. What I found is that the posts I spent hours on, proper process videos, well-lit shots of finished work, thoughtful captions, they got practically nothing. Meanwhile a quick phone photo of my pastel box with the caption "messy desk, trying to start" got triple the engagement. One time I posted a timelapse where I accidentally filmed myself sighing and rubbing my face before starting and people went crazy for it. I don't know what to do with this information. I want to be taken seriously as an artist but apparently what works is showing myself being a mess. Is the answer really just... performative struggle? Because I have plenty of that for free, but it feels wrong to lean into it on purpose.

I find myself drawn to the silence more than ever lately. Trying to make something of the small gaps, the places where the usual marketing chatter just… isn't. It's not about ignoring the noise, but about finding the signal in the quiet. My own practice is very much about this – using found paper, old book pages, and leaving a lot of empty space. It’s about what’s not there as much as what is. Wondering if anyone else finds value in intentionally creating that space online, away from the constant performance.

I have this old hog-bristle flat, maybe a number 12, that I've had since my student days. The ferrule is cracked. The handle is worn down to the bare wood at the grip. And I never fully clean it. I get most of the paint out, but there's always a little dried colour sitting up in the heel, and it stays there. When I dip it in fresh paint, that dried bit rewets and bleeds into whatever I'm mixing on the palette. A ghost of something from two years ago, or ten years ago. I know it's bad practice. I know it changes the colour in ways I can't control. But I've started to think of it as a kind of memory in the brush. Something I didn't intend that still shows up. And sometimes that little impurity is exactly what the surface needed. I have other brushes I treat like surgical instruments. Clean them the moment I stop. But this one I just let be. It has its own life now.

Not a metaphor. I mean actually glued. Cyanoacrylate, which is of course the one that sets before you can blink. Thumb, index finger, and a good solid square of tabletop bonded together like we were meant to be. I sat there for maybe forty seconds just looking at it. Not panicking. Just thinking, alright, this is where I am now. This is the situation. I have committed to this table in a way I hadn't planned. The acetone was three meters away in the other room. I could have rocked and reached. Instead I just sat. Sometimes you make a decision and the decision is: wait. Eventually I peeled myself off. Left a good bit of skin behind. The table doesn't seem to mind. I mention this only because so much of the talk about studio practice is about discipline and flow states and intention. And sometimes it's just, you glue yourself to your own table and you sit there like an idiot for a minute because that's what the moment requires.

It's a single nodding flower on a stem I cut from the garden last Monday. By Tuesday it had started to droop. By Thursday the petals were translucent and the stamens had begun to shed. Today it's practically a study in decay, the sepals are papery and brown at the edges, the stem is soft. I keep painting it anyway. There's a peculiar honesty to painting a specimen as it actually changes, rather than freezing it at its best moment. The color shifts, the structure fails, and you have to decide whether you're documenting the plant or your own attachment to how it looked three days ago. I think I'm doing both. I set up a new page each morning and work from life, not from the previous day's study. It's unsentimental work, or it's meant to be. The flower doesn't know it's declining. It just is what it is.

Honestly the amount of my "studio practice" that is just me physically relocating my entire setup every 45 minutes because the light moved is kind of embarrassing. I have a desk. I have a window. But the window faces east so by noon I'm basically working in shadow and I refuse to turn on a lamp because it changes everything about how I see the washes. So I just pick up my block, my brush jar, my palette and I chase the sun across the apartment like a little lizard. My partner keeps finding random wet paintings on the kitchen table and the bathroom counter and once on the floor by the back door. I have a perfectly good studio corner I am simply not using because the light is wrong and I will die on this hill.

I welded a staircase railing for the art building at a community college in 2004. Not a sculpture technically, but they wanted something that looked like one. Paid fifteen thousand, which felt fine at the time for six weeks work. Twenty years later I still get five hundred dollars a year from that college. They call it a maintenance and consultation fee. Theyve never called me once. Its in the contract my old self signed and I keep meaning to tell them to stop. But I dont. That five hundred is the only passive income Ive ever had in this trade. Everything else was show up, get dirty, get paid, do it again. And I know people online talk about recurring revenue like its something you design into your practice from day one. I never did. It just happened because I wrote a stupid clause into a bid for a staircase.