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Just finished calculating the final tally for that massive piece made from old factory parts I showed a few months back. The raw materials were almost nothing, of course. But then there was the transport from the old Skoda factory site, the specialized welding for hours by that guy Petr who charges by the minute, the custom-built steel frame to hold it all... I looked at the invoice and my first thought was 'Is this a joke?' It came out to 85,000 CZK before I even thought about my own time. Nearly fainted. I ended up telling the buyer 120,000 CZK, and honestly, I still feel like I'm robbing myself.

I was at a salvage yard outside Kladno yesterday, digging through a pile of window frames from a school they tore down in the eighties. The wood still smelled of chalk dust and coal. You can't fake that. You can't buy it. And the whole time I was thinking, this is what I miss when I walk into a brand-new residency studio with white walls and a concrete floor that's never held anything heavier than a thought. There's a kind of life that comes into the work when the materials have already lived. I'm not romanticising poverty. I'm saying the objects carry something. You handle them and your hands know what to do before your head does.

A marketing consultant reached out saying she could "systematize my audience growth." I told her I don't have an audience, I have maybe 400 people who care about industrial salvage installations in Prague. She said that's exactly the problem. So for a month I let her try. She had me post on a schedule, use certain words, track when people engaged most. I did it. Numbers went up slightly. Total new people who actually came to a studio visit or wrote something that showed they understood what I'm doing: zero. The thing is my work takes six weeks to build and you walk through it in ten minutes. You can't optimize that. You can't gamify someone standing in a room full of old factory parts and feeling something. I told her I think the disconnect was that my work is slow and her job is to make things fast. She said I was being resistant. She wasn't wrong. But neither was I. I don't know what the proper social media strategy is for work that takes months and asks for patience. Maybe there isn't one. Maybe the answer is just keep making the rooms and the people who need to find them eventually will.

Just finished the final invoice for that large mixed-media piece. Spent 3 weeks on it, materials were way more than I budgeted (who knew salvaged lace would get so pricey?), and my hourly rate worked out to something like $8 an hour. I’m almost afraid to raise my prices, but this isn’t sustainable. Feels like I'm stealing from myself.

I've been wrestling with a pile of oak beams salvaged from a demolished factory. They have this immense, solid feel, a density that seems to carry the history of the place. Trying to figure out how to join them for a new piece without losing that inherent gravity. Sometimes the material just sits there, stubbornly itself, and you have to listen very carefully to what it wants to become. Or, more often, what it absolutely will not become.

Was painting a pine stand this afternoon (trying to salvage a canvas I started two months ago and abandoned) and I grabbed a flat brush on a whim instead of my usual tiny round. And wow. One stroke and it actually looked like pine needles. Not a hundred fussy little lines that all run together. Just... one confident sweep that did the job. I've been doing landscapes since I picked painting back up and I never even questioned what I was grabbing. Just assumed smaller = more control = better. Turns out I was making everything twice as hard for no reason. Got me thinking what else I'm doing wrong out of pure habit. Anyone else have one of those "wait, THAT'S how you do it" moments way later than they'd like to admit?

Had this block sitting in the drawer since February. A grey heron I started last winter and just couldn't get right, the line of the neck was off, the wing shape was doing my head in, and I'd carved half of it badly and walked away. Swore at it plenty. Pulled it out this morning because I was between things and the kids were at school and the house was quiet for once. Thought I'd just have a look at it fresh, maybe salvage something. Ended up carving the whole bottom half off and re-cutting it. Re-inked it twice. Third proof came off the press and I just sat there looking at it. It's not perfect, the registration is a bit squint and there's a cut I shouldn't have made, but it's alive in a way it wasn't before. The dog came over and sniffed the ink and sneezed all over the print and honestly that felt right too. Sometimes you just need to walk away and come back when you're not trying so hard.