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everyone's got their fancy stay-wet palettes and i'm over here scraping bone-dry acrylic crust off this little board with a palette knife like i'm archeology-ing my own bad decisions. the texture is genuinely insane at this point, there's like seven layers of dried paint built up with actual craters where i gouged out a chunk of ultramarine mid-painting. i know i should just sand it down or toss it but honestly i'm attached. it's like a little topographical map of every piece i've made since january. you can see the exact week i went through a burnt umber phase. tell me you also have a cursed palette you refuse to retire

After a decade of charging what I thought was reasonable, 800€ for a 40x50cm oil, I finally did what my husband's been telling me to do for years and raised them to 1,100€ for the same format. Same canvas, same hours, same me. Just finally stopped apologising for what I ask. I lost one client. A woman who'd bought three paintings from me over the years, always asked for a small discount, always got one. She sent a polite email saying she couldn't justify the increase. I wrote back, equally polite, that I understood completely. And honestly? The relief of not painting for someone who sees your work as something to bargain over is worth the lost sale. The other clients didn't blink. One said she'd been waiting for me to raise them. That stung more than the loss, in a good way. I know the numbers are different for everyone, different city, different medium, different audience. But I wish someone had told me ten years ago that the fear of losing clients is usually worse than the reality. The ones who value what you do will stay. The ones who don't were already costing you more than they paid.

I've been thinking about endings lately. I've been with the same gallery for nine years now, and it's been a good run, but I've seen more than enough colleagues walk out over things that should've been caught early. Money that never reconciled, shows that got quiet, work returned with damage nobody owned up to. I'm curious about the other side of it: what made you finally pull your work from a gallery? Was it one clear incident or a long slow build of small things? And did you regret it, or was it a relief? For me, the closest I came was over a show where the framing was done poorly without my consultation and then the gallery charged me for it. I stayed, but I learned to put framing in writing. I sometimes wonder if leaving would have been the better lesson.

Cut a piece of limestone wrong this morning. Not a big deal, a flat relief panel, I can take it down and rework the surface. But the stone keeps it anyway. You can grind it flat, sand it level, and the crack is still in there, waiting to open back up on the next pass. Been thinking about that all day. There's no undoing a cut. You can only go deeper past it. That's the part of this work that never changes, no matter how good your tools get. Everybody wants to talk about the moment of creation. Nobody talks about the hours spent living with the mark you didn't mean to make. This panel is 24 inches wide, four hours in, back to a flat surface now. The steel is waiting on the bench for the next piece. Different problem entirely, at least until I cut that wrong too.

Instagram keeps nudging me toward Reels. Like literally, the app is begging. But pastel portraits are slow, they take hours, there's nothing to film. I tried once, filming my hand smudging for 15 seconds, and it felt so fake. Like I was performing the process instead of doing it. Meanwhile the still photos of finished faces get a fraction of the reach they used to get, even two years ago. I know the algorithm wants engagement and watching a hand move gets more of it. But I don't want to become a person who makes content. I want to be a person who makes pictures and posts them when they're done. I keep going back and forth on it. Is this stubbornness going to cost me? Or is everyone else just exhausted and the boring photo accounts actually feel like a relief now? Curious what other slow-medium artists are doing about it, because the advice online is all "post 3 times a day" and I cannot imagine having that many finished things even in a month.

A collector came to the studio last month, saw an interior I'd finished weeks earlier, wanted it. I named my price, nine hundred euros, which for me is honest but not bold. They said yes immediately. And instead of relief I felt guilty, like I'd overcharged, like I should have said eight hundred if I was being fair. Sit with that for a second. I'm doing a thing I've trained twenty-five years to do, at a price that nets out to about forty euros an hour before materials and studio costs, and the guilt lives in me because they didn't flinch. I keep a ledger of every finished painting, hours, materials, price. It's brutal reading. Nine hundred sounds like real money to people who don't know the hours don't end when I stop painting. The stretching, the varnishing, the framing, the emails, the schlepping. Everyone who pays for the painting pays for approximately one painting's worth of unpaid work around it. I know what the actual answer is. Raise prices until the flinch comes from the other direction. I've added maybe ten percent in three years. I'm scared of the ceiling because I don't know where it is, and the collector who says yes too fast terrifies me more than the one who negotiates. Anyway the painting is gone now and the guilt faded. But I keep thinking about what it would feel like to name a price and not apologise internally for it.

OMG you guys I actually did it. That big commission for the hotel lobby? The one I've been talking about for weeks that was making me so anxious I could barely sleep? It's boxed up and gone to the shipper. I almost cried when I handed it over, not gonna lie, it felt like saying goodbye to a piece of myself after staring at it for so long, but it's done. It's such a relief, I can finally breathe and maybe even paint something just for me again. I think this calls for pizza tonight haha. So happy it's out of my hands and on its way!

Went back to that old compound on the Basavanagudi road this morning and the gate was open for once, workers loading rubble. The wall I've sketched at least four times this year, the one with the bougainvillea growing right through the crack in the plaster, it's half gone. They let me stand there and finish anyway. Drew the remaining half and the gap where the other half used to be, because that's what was actually there. I don't know what I'm supposed to do with these. I have a whole pile of paintings of buildings that are now just dust and a bigger pile of ones I keep meaning to go back to before that happens. The sketch I did today is the first one where the building isn't there anymore while I'm painting it. Strange feeling. Half grief, half relief that I got there in time for at least half of it. Anyway. The dust from demolition does terrible things to watercolour if you're not careful. Note to self: keep a cloth in the bag, not just the one for brushes.