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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

Not a growth tactic, more a survival measure. For years I answered everything the day it arrived, and the day it arrived was usually a morning I had planned to work. One email about a group show in Antwerp and the whole morning gone, because after answering I am no longer in the painting, I am in the correspondence about the painting. So since March I answer on Tuesdays. Everything. Piles up, I read them Tuesday morning with coffee, answer in one go, and the rest of the week the studio door is shut properly. What surprised me: the fairs and the institutions do not care. They wait a week. Two commercial galleries dropped me off their list of people to ask for things, which honestly I count as a gain. One collector I have known for eleven years wrote back after nine days and said it was a relief, he had assumed he was the only one drowning. The thing it did not fix: the actual selling. Being unavailable makes you slightly more interesting to some people and simply absent to others, and the others are the ones with the money in the room. I have not solved that and I am not pretending the calendar solved it for me. But I have had eight uninterrupted weeks in the studio since March, which is more than the whole of last year, and the work is better for it. That is the whole of my marketing strategy at the moment. A closed door on Wednesdays.

So the hare block I'd been chipping at since Tuesday, grand, three proofs off it, fourth one and I'm pulling it and there's a great big gouge straight through the near ear. Went at it with the 3mm when I should have had the 1mm in. Sure look. It's a week's work gone in a second. And here's the thing that has me slightly worried about myself. I wasn't even annoyed. Stood there looking at it like a fella watching rain. Twenty years of this and I'd normally be kicked around the workshop for an hour, dog hiding under the bench. There's a bit of me that thinks a ruined block is nearly a relief. It's decided for you. You can stop carrying it around in the head, all the small things you were going to fix on the next version, the shoulder that wasn't right, the line under the belly I knew was too fussy. Gone. No more versions. So I've one block left in the drawer that's big enough for a hare. And I'm not carving the same one. Going at the whole thing different, more black, less messing about with the hatching. Might be rubbish. Might be the best thing I've done since the heron. Anyway there's a gouge mark about three inches long living in my head now and I'd say it'll be in the next print somewhere whether I like it or not.

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.

Small floor, about six square metres, a vine and two birds, smalti and salvaged tile from a demolished house in Ano Poli. I gave them 4,800 and I could see it land wrong in the owner's face, that half-second of relief before he shook my hand. He would have paid 7. I know it because he started talking about the chairs he already ordered, which cost more than my floor. I did the whole job. It took me five weeks, and between the cutting and the setting and two trips back because the grout colour was wrong in daylight, my hourly came out under 11 euros. Less than I paid the boy who carried the sand up. Here is the part people don't want to say out loud. It was not his fault. He said yes to the number I said. The number was mine. I priced the fear of hearing no, not the work. Since then I write the number, then I sit with it one full day. If nobody has fainted, I raise it. Next floor is 8,000 and I already feel sick about saying it. I will say it anyway.

I spent four months on a piece for a small hall in Brno. Two hundred and forty kilos of scrap, doors from a demolished panel block, a whole wall of bicycle rims. I welded my thumb twice. The opening was the usual, people standing at the edges nodding at it like a horse they aren't sure they want to buy. Then a man in his seventies walked in, didn't look at anything, and cut straight across the middle. Right through what I'd built. He was going to the table with the wine. And I felt this relief, because for four months I'd been arranging the thing so it would be looked at, and he just used it as a shortcut. That's the whole job, I think. I've been making corridors for thirty years and I only noticed it this week. No point. I just wanted to say it out loud somewhere.

There is a box under my work table. A 1930s Swedish school atlas, a ledger from a shipping office, a stack of letters someone kept for forty years, all of it too good to cut. Some pieces are so brittle that lifting them is a decision. I bought the atlas eleven years ago. I have used two pages from it. The thing is, you cannot collage with paper you are afraid of. Torn edges need a hand that does not hesitate, and a hand that hesitates makes a soft, apologetic tear you can see from across the room. So the box sits there and I work around it with the ordinary paper, the newspapers and receipts and the offcuts I do not care about. These are often better anyway. That is the uncomfortable part. Last week I finally cut into the atlas. Two pages of Jämtland. It was fine. The borders held, the tear went clean, and the piece is better for it. But I did not feel the relief I expected. Mostly I felt that I had spent eleven years keeping a box of paper instead of a box of work. Not sure what to do with that. The box stays, obviously.

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!

I've had a draft in my notes app since last April. Fourteen months of "we love the work, we're just figuring out the calendar." I checked their site maybe twice a week like it was a weather app. Sent it last night. Just: thanks, I'm pulling the pieces back, good luck with the fall show. Took me longer to write those two sentences than it did to make the smallest one. I keep waiting to feel like I won something. Mostly I just slept okay for the first time in a while, which is probably the win. Anyway the work comes off the wall Saturday and goes back in the flat file with everything else that nobody's looking at. There's a kind of relief in that I didn't expect.

did a mural last month for a cafe, 2400 flat. felt like a bag at the time, biggest single number anyone's handed me for paint. then i actually added it up. two days of prep and priming, four days on the wall, one day sealing and touch ups. seven days at like ten hours because you can't exactly stop halfway up a ladder. so 70 hours. minus 380 in paint and rollers and the sealer and the lift rental, minus parking in that neighborhood which was somehow 90 bucks. came out to like 27 an hour. my old design gig was 45 and i didn't have to breathe fumes for it. i was so happy when they said yes to 2400 that i didn't blink. that's the part that gets me. i underbid myself by being relieved. and the mural's nice, genuinely, so now i'm the guy who does murals for 2400. anyway if you're in the same boat the tell is this, you get a number and you feel relief instead of doing math. that's not a yes, that's a flinch.

there's a freelance logo job that's been sitting in my inbox since mid july. client wanted "warm but corporate." i opened the file like nine times and closed it every time. tonight i actually did it. eleven minutes. sent the invoice at 1:40am. the relief is unreal and also kind of insulting, because the thing i was avoiding was never the work, it was the email where i have to be a normal person who says "let me know if you'd like any revisions" and means it. the work was nothing. it's always nothing. anyway rent is now theoretically handled. going to go paint something that doesn't have to be warm OR corporate.

Started pulling the boxes down in March. Four of them, mostly paper: a pay stub from 2009, a parking ticket, a birthday card I wrote him in shitty handwriting, two photos of a kitchen nobody lives in anymore. They've been in my studio since he died, moving from shelf to shelf every time I needed the space. Today I drove them to a framer. Just for one piece, not the whole archive. A photograph with a water stain spreading up the left side. I asked him to float it, no mat, so the stain and the torn corner sit there in the open. He said most people want that cropped out. I said that's the part I want. On the drive home I had the radio off and I felt something I did not expect. Not the sad thing. Relief. Like I'd finally let one small object out of my custody. I don't know yet if that's a win or if it's me giving something away that I'll want back later.

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.