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I've got maybe 45 minutes a night to paint, so three tries at the same patch of sky is basically my whole week gone. Working on a marsh scene from a photo I took at a rest stop in Delaware last fall, and the sky there is this washed out gray-blue that's honestly kind of ugly in real life, but in the painting it just turns to mud. Tonight's version is too purple. Tuesday's was too gray. Friday's was closest and I covered it up because I decided it looked unfinished. I keep doing this. I think it's because I only get the short window, so everything has to feel like progress, and a sky that's already right doesn't feel like progress. Anyway I'm leaving tonight's purple disaster on the easel until Sunday so I can look at it with actual eyeballs instead of tired ones. Anyone else paint better in the first pass and then ruin it trying to be careful? Also if you use Liquitex heavy body ultramarine, is yours weirdly glossy straight out of the tube or did I get a bad batch? Might be my medium but I don't think so.

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.

Bought a block of Carrara from a supplier I've used for years. Looked clean on the pallet. Got it on the bench, started roughing out, and about three hours in a hairline opens up right where I'm working. Not a surface crack. It was inside the damn stone. Now I've got a piece that's either going to be smaller than I planned or I scrap it entirely. Supplier says not their problem, stone is a natural material, inspect before you work. Which is true. But also infuriating. Twenty years ago I would have kept hammering and ruined it. Now I stop and stare at it for ten minutes and then go weld something instead. Progress I guess.

Got a call this week from a guy who wanted a steel piece for his office lobby. Fine. Then he asks if I can make it "go viral." I thought he was joking. He wasn't. Said his marketing guy told him everything should have a hook now. I told him the only hook in my shop is the one that holds the chain block up. He didn't laugh. We're at the point where people want the sculpture to do the advertising instead of the other way around. The piece is 400 pounds of welded steel. It doesn't need to trend. It needs to hold up for forty years and not look like it was built last Tuesday. That's the job. He still placed the order. We'll see what he says when I send the progress photos and they're just, you know, photos of steel.

I just finished the big 4x4 panel that's been sitting half-painted in my studio since march. the one I kept walking past and going "eh, tomorrow." it's not even the best thing I've made this year. the color's a little off in the bottom left and I know it. but I finished it, and there was a solid week in april where I genuinely thought I was going to sand it down and pretend it never happened. instead I invited a friend over to witness the final pass, mostly so I could stop spiraling about it and just paint. she brought coffee, sat on a paint can, said nothing, and I got through the whole thing in about two hours. weird thing about finishing something is that everything you hated about it in progress goes quiet for a minute. it's just, there. done. hanging there looking like it always existed. anyway, someone give me a reason to not immediately start the next one and immediately hate that too

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.

Client saw a photo of the piece in progress, called me up, very cheerful, "Dimitra, why does it take you so long? Just fill the gaps quicker, nobody's going to look that close." That's the thing. They never look that close. That's exactly why they end up with a mosaic that's held together by hope and a prayer, lifting off the wall in three years, and then they call me back to fix it and act shocked at the price. No. I don't rush the setting. The gaps are the work, actually. The gaps are where the whole thing holds or falls. You want quick, buy a printed tile, it's thirty euros on Etsy. You want a mosaic that'll outlive your grandchildren, I place every piece and I don't rush a single one. He went quiet. I think he gets it now. Or he's off finding someone who'll give him quick. Either way, not my problem. My hands don't move faster for anyone, not even for money. Especially not for money, actually, I've learned that the hard way. 🙂

Had a gallery talk me into a pretty big commission a few years back. Sign nothing, deposits are the insurance. Then they started asking to push the timeline up, wanted progress photos every week, then they wanted to "review" the design as we went. That's not a commission, that's a job. I walked. What's the red flag that made you pull out of a gallery before it cost you?

i've been working on this portrait commission for two weeks. today she sends me the "final reference", it's one of those apps that smooths everything into plastic. no pores, no shadows under the eyes, the nose is literally a different shape. she looks like a sim character. i don't know how to tell her that i can't paint what isn't there. that the thing i'm actually good at is catching the light on somebody's actual face, the uneven bits, the way one eye is slightly smaller. that's the whole point of spending hours on pastel portraits instead of just running her photo through the same filter she already used. i said i'd send her some progress sketches this week and i'm dreading it. probably going to do a version that's technically accurate and a version that looks like her filtered face and let her pick. which feels wrong but i don't have the words to explain why.

ok so I spent like a month earlier this year obsessing over my instagram grid, scheduling posts, planning reels, the whole thing. had a notion doc and everything. and you know what happened? nothing. flat engagement, same followers, maybe one sale from it. then I had this week where I just said fuck it and made 40 tiny test tiles, different clay bodies, glazes I mixed myself, firing temps I'd never tried. just messing around, no end goal. I posted them ugly, in progress, some failed. just the real process, no polish. those posts outperformed everything I "planned" by a lot. like triple the saves, actual comments from other potters, and two commissions from people who saw the test tiles and wanted something in that glaze. I think the audience can smell when you're performing vs when you're actually doing the work. the planning was me trying to look like a serious business. the test tiles were me being a ceramicist. anyone else find that the stuff you don't overthink just lands better?

I've noticed a trend lately, or maybe I'm just noticing it now. It feels like the harder we try to engineer 'engagement,' the more people tune out. I spent last week looking at some analytics for a project, trying to get a spike in likes or shares on a particular piece of content. We tweaked the hook, adjusted the CTA, even played with the posting time. Nothing moved the needle much. Then, coincidentally, I posted a photo of my messy studio floor, paint tubes everywhere, a half-finished canvas in the background, with a caption just saying 'Work in progress.' It got more genuine interaction – people asking about the paint, the process – than the polished piece we'd spent days on. It makes you wonder if the 'performance' is the problem, not the content itself. C'est ça, non?

Accidentally archived the reel that had 200k views and something like 12k saves. Panicked for an hour. Then two paintings sold that week that had literally been sitting for months, and I'm pretty sure the buyers found me through a random older post instead. I'm not saying the algorithm is fake or whatever. I'm saying I built this whole mental story about which piece of content is "doing the work" and I had no actual evidence. The reel was king, I decided. It was not king. It was just loud. Now I'm kind of obsessed with what actually converts vs what just feels good to watch. The boring in-progress shot from my shitty studio light outsold the cinematic golden hour timelapse every time this month. Every time. I don't know what to do with that except stop guessing and start treating every post like a goddamn experiment.

everyone in these threads keeps blaming the algorithm and i get it, reach is down, but i keep watching artists post the exact same stuff that worked in 2021 and act confused. you posted your palette knife and some paint swatches 40 times, of course it stopped doing numbers. i killed my reach when i stopped and just started posting works in progress with zero caption and actual process, no hashtag spam, and the engagement went up. not because i beat the algorithm but because the people who follow me actually wanted to see the ugly middle stage, not another "here's my cozy studio corner" shot. the algorithm is not your enemy, your content being boring is. posted that with my full chest. come at me.

found this solid oak side table at an estate sale yesterday. nothing special, someone's boring coffee table from 1987, couple of water rings, drawer stuck. fifty bucks. i brought it home and spent the afternoon sanding it down and putting the first coat of this deep indigo on it. posted a progress picture and my neighbor (who i barely know) texts me "why would you paint over that wood? you're ruining it." like. it's a mass-produced table from sears. it's not a heirloom. it had a sticker on the bottom. i'm not ruining anything, i'm making it not ugly. and even if it was a nice piece, it's mine? i can do what i want with my own stuff? this weird reverence for raw wood drives me insane. not everything has to stay the color god made it. sometimes things look better with paint on them.

Ok so I've been working on this one 9x12 of the window at 6pm, the gold hour one, and I've been through maybe eleven sheets of Arches trying to get the shadow on the sill right. Eleven. That's like $70 of paper just to learn that I keep lifting the paper when I want to lift the pigment, which, cool, great, love that for me. Anyway the electric company sent the bill and it's up $40 and my partner was like "you've had the lamp on till 2am every night for a month" and I got defensive for a second and then remembered I also run a hair dryer over every wash because I'm impatient and can't wait for it to dry on its own like a normal person. So I'm out here basically paying to speed up my own mistakes. On my own dime. As a person with no other dime. The thing is the window doesn't even look that different from the one I did in March and I can't tell if that's progress or if I'm just circling. I know the light changed because it's October now. I don't know if I did. Not looking for a fix, mostly just want someone to tell me the hair dryer thing is normal because I'm starting to feel insane about it

This old LIC building on Brigade Road... it's been on my list for ages. So much character, the intricate grillwork, that slightly faded ochre paint. It feels like a small victory to have finally sat down with the watercolors and ink and captured it. There's a new cafe opening on the ground floor now, all glass and chrome. Progress, I suppose. But for a few hours yesterday, it was just the old building and me. Feels good to have that sketch done before it gets completely swallowed by whatever comes next.

Eleven pulls off the same copper plate since Monday. Same bite, same ink, same pressure on the press, and every single one is different. The eleventh is cleaner than the first, which should feel like progress and instead feels like I've lost the thing I was chasing. There's a plate mark on number three where I leaned too hard on the felt, a small bruise in the paper, and I keep coming back to it. It's the worst one technically. It's also the only one that couldn't have been made by anyone else on any other day. I have a show in April and the curator wants an edition of fifteen. I said yes before I understood what I was agreeing to. An edition promises that the fifteen are the same object. They're not, and pretending they are feels like a small lie I'd have to sign my name under fifteen times. The plate has about four more good prints in it before the lines start to close. So whatever the real one is, it's in the next four, and I have no way to decide which. I put number three on the wall above the press, face out. Partly to look at it. Partly so I stop pretending I don't know which one I actually mean.

Started a new piece this morning and spent the first two hours just getting the charcoal to behave on the ground. Every other layer after that is the easy part for me, which is the opposite of how most people seem to work. I don't know. There's something about that first pass where the paper is still clean that makes my hands stupid. Once it's ruined a little I can actually see what I'm doing. The piece is for a group show in March. Found photo of two women at a county fair in the 60s, one of them has her head turned and you can't tell if she's laughing or crying. That ambiguity is the whole thing I'm chasing and I keep almost getting it and then losing it. Anyway. It's 2pm and I've made maybe six square inches of actual progress. Some days the work is just standing in the room with it until something clicks. Today it hasn't clicked yet but I'm not leaving.

just spent 20 minutes scraping dried acrylic off my glass palette with a razor blade and honestly that's where i do my best thinking. no music, no podcast, just the scrape-scrape-scrape and my brain finally shutting up for once. i used to be precious about cleaning between sessions. thought it meant i was organized. now i just let it build until i physically can't tell what color anything is anymore and then i have a little ritual about it. feels like progress even when nothing else is. anyway my palette currently looks like a dried blood splatter exhibit. very on brand for the colors i'm using rn lol