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There's this late Byzantine panel from the Church of the Holy Apostles in Thessaloniki, Christ Pantokrator, standard stuff, and I copied it by hand for a conservation module back in 2004. Six weeks on my knees, matching every tessera, and I got it so close my professor kept it as a teaching example. The joke is that piece ruined me. I can't look at a face in mosaic anymore without measuring the eye spacing against that Pantokrator. Last week I finished a portrait commission, contemporary, abstracted, not even trying to be realistic, and I spent an hour staring at it thinking the left eye is two millimeters too far out. Client won't see it. Nobody will see it. But I know it's there because of a dead Byzantine emperor's face I memorized twenty years ago. Anyone else carry a reference piece in their head like a splinter? Something you studied so hard it rewired your eye permanently.

Yesterday I was working on a study of a single branch of Amelanchier canadensis, and I spent the better part of three hours painting and then re-painting one leaf. The first attempt was technically fine -- the proportions were right, the color was in the right range -- but it was dead. It had no life in it. The edge was too hard, the transition from the green to the reddish tip was abrupt, and I knew I would see it every time I looked at the painting. I painted it out, let it dry, and started again. Better, but the veins were too heavy. Painted it out again. Third time I got it right, and I cannot tell you why the third one worked when the first two didn't. The difference is maybe half a shade in the wetness of the brush, a fraction of a second in the timing of a lift. But you can feel it. My husband came in and asked how my day was. I said good, I finished one leaf. He is used to this by now.

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?

ok so i took my little travel kit down to the park today, first time painting outdoors in years, i've been such a coward about it honestly. and i forgot, i mean i FULLY forgot how brutal plein air is?? like you're fighting the light changing every ten minutes, wind keeps flipping your paper, bugs land in your wet paint, and some kid's mom is standing behind you going "oh how nice" while you're internally screaming because your shadows are already wrong. BUT. i got something. one little study where the light actually worked and i caught the way the jacaranda was dropping purple all over the bench. and i felt like myself again? the version of me that used to sit on the sidewalk outside the studio building and paint whatever. it's messy and the proportions are off but i don't even care. anyway if you've been scared to paint outside just go do it it's terrible and wonderful 👍

She came to my home, sat on the mat, looked at my mother's old painting of Laxmi on the wall and said, "Ramesh ji, can you make her face a little more... you know, like contemporary? Like Deepika or someone." I said, Mata Laxmi? Like Deepika Padukone? She said yes, why not, we have to keep up with the times. I told her I have been painting Laxmi since I was a boy. In Mithila, the goddess has a certain face. The lotus, the elephants, the gold coins falling from her hand, the proportions of these also are fixed by tradition. You cannot just give her a film star nose and call it Madhubani. She said okay but can you at least make the eyes bigger and more modern. I took the order anyway because my daughter's school fees were due. I painted it the way it should be. She came to collect it and said it looks very traditional only. Took it but I could see she was not happy. My wife said, next time, make her wear sunglasses also.

I painted this old house on Wheeler Road maybe three weeks back. One of those 60s bungalows, the kind with the deep verandah and the latticed jali bricks above the door. Sat on the footpath across the road for an hour, the owner's son came out and asked if I was doing it for a project. I said no, just because it's beautiful. He said, "Oh. We're demolishing it next month." Went past today while running an errand. The chajja is already gone. The jali bricks are in a pile by the gate. It took them a week. I have the painting. That's something. But it's sitting in my studio and I keep looking at it and thinking I got the proportions of that verandah slightly wrong, and now there's no building left to go check against. So it just stays wrong forever. That's the part that's bothering me more than the demolition, honestly. That I'll never know if it was my eye or the light. Do other people here live with that? The painting becoming the only record, and no way to verify it?

Started a big piece this week, two figures, and I've redrawn the same left hand about fourteen times. Charcoal, oil wash, charcoal again. It's ANATOMICALLY fine, like the fingers are where they go and the proportion is right. But it's dead. It's a diagram. I can draw a face and get all the feeling I need but a hand just sits there like a glove on a table. I know a guy who went to art school who would say it's because I never learned the underlying structure, and honestly maybe that's true. But I don't want a technically perfect hand. I want the one that looks like it's mid-sentence. The one that's about to reach for something. Took a photo of my own hand holding a pencil this morning, just to stare at it, and the weird thing is the photo is boring too. The hand is boring. It's what the hand is DOING that has the life in it. Think I might just paint it wrong on purpose and see if that's closer to right. Worst case I burn it, I've done that before. 😤

There's this old bungalow off Cubbon Road, been meaning to sketch it for months, kept putting it off. Yesterday my husband told me they've started demolition. I went this morning anyway and sat across the street and painted it while the JCB was just sitting there idle, like even the machine was waiting for something. The painting's not great. I was rushing, and my hand was shaking a bit, and the proportions are off because I kept looking up at the windows thinking this is the last time anyone's going to draw these. It's finished but I don't know what to do with it. Don't want to post it, don't want to throw it. Just sat here staring at it with my chai going cold. Is this just what it means to document a city? You're basically making funeral portraits and calling it a practice?