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Spent three hours this morning arranging a bowl of lemons and a blue cup on my kitchen table, and then I didn't paint the bowl or the cup at all. I painted the shadow they threw across the tabletop. That's the whole painting. Just grey-blue shapes and one bone of light where the cup sat. I do this thing where I'll build the perfect setup and then abandon the actual objects because the shadow is more interesting. The lemons were so yellow and pretty and I left them out of it entirely. My partner came in and was like "why did you even bother" and honestly I don't have an answer. The shadow was just saying something the lemons weren't. Is this a real practice or am I just avoiding committing to a subject?? Because I feel like I'm circling something with it but I can't name what. Also the shadow moved by the time I finished so now I've got a painting of a shadow that doesn't exist anymore. That might be the most honest part of it.

Working on a portrait of my neighbour's daughter, toned grey paper, and I've been circling the same problem for two evenings now. The face is fine. The eyes are actually good, which never happens, so of course I am afraid to touch anything near them. The problem is the shadow under the nose. It's too hard. There's a clean dark shape with a crisp edge and it reads like a moustache, or like she's been in a fight. In life that shadow is soft and it wraps, and I know this, and yet I keep drawing it as a shape instead of a transition. What I noticed tonight is that I do it because a soft edge feels like I haven't decided anything. Like I'm being vague and cowardly. So I press harder, and I make a decision, and the decision is wrong. Tried going back in with a kneaded eraser and a fingertip and it went grey and muddy, so now the whole area is duller than the rest of the face and it pulls the eye straight to it. Which is the opposite of what a shadow should do. If anyone has a trick for softening a pastel edge without lifting the paper tooth, I will take it gladly. Otherwise I'll be here tomorrow with the same nose.

I have a small head study on the easel, a young woman turned away from the window, and the shadow under her left cheekbone has been wrong since Tuesday. I wiped it out again about an hour ago. Fourth time. What I finally understood is that I was painting the shadow too warm because I kept looking at it against the lit side of the face instead of against the background. The moment I squinted and compared the shadow to the grey behind her shoulder, it went cold immediately. Of course it did. Anyway I got it. It's a small thing and nobody who looks at the finished painting will ever know that patch was touched four times, but I sat back and just looked at it for a while with my tea going cold, and it was finally the right shape and the right temperature both at once. That's the whole win. Nothing finished, nothing sent anywhere. Just one square inch of cheek in the north light this evening that is now true. I'm curious how many of you paint the value first and the temperature second, or the opposite. I've been trying to do both at once my whole life and it keeps not working.

I've been going through the last few boxes I still had in storage. Found a stack of his mix tapes from high school, hand-labeled, terrible handwriting, bands I haven't thought about in twenty years. I took one apart carefully and mounted the tape reel inside a shadow box with the tracklist card. Just the thing itself, no embellishment. It came out better than I expected. It's not for sale, I think. Maybe I'll keep it for myself. Felt good to work on something that wasn't trying to be anything. Just a record of someone existing.

I made a cyanotype yesterday of a cuttlebone I found on the beach, one of those big ones, almost the length of my hand. Laid it directly on the paper with some torn fishing net over it. Exposure was good, the sun was strong, but when I washed it the shadows all went muddy. The cuttlebone reads as a dark blob instead of having that honeycomb texture it has on the surface. I think I underwatered my chemistry. Or maybe the paper was too dry when I coated it. I've been using a cotton rag paper I'm not as familiar with and it seems to drink the emulsion differently. I've been staring at it for an hour. Part of me wants to call it a bad print and toss it. Part of me thinks there's something in the flatness, like the sea at dusk, all that detail pulled under. But I don't know if I'm just making peace with a mistake. How do you tell the difference between a flaw that works and one that's just a failure?

I almost didn't post the quick one. Just a sheet of paper pinned to the wall, still damp, the blue not even dry, my hand shadow in the corner because I grabbed my phone and shot it before the sun moved. Three minutes, maybe. The other one, the one I arranged, waited for the right light, reshot three times, brightened the shadows in editing, that one got a dozen likes and a polite comment from my aunt. The damp one got shared around, someone wrote to ask if I'd teach a workshop, and a gallery two cities over emailed asking to see more. I keep trying to tell myself the lesson is to post more of the honest in-between moments. But the real one might be worse: I can't tell what anyone will care about, and my own judgment about my work is basically useless. I like the pretty photograph. Everyone else wanted the wet paper and the shadow of my hand in the corner.

I've been fighting a landscape for three weeks. Barn, treeline behind it, low sky. Every time I got to the shadow side of the barn it turned to gray soup and I kept blaming the paint, bought a new tube of burnt umber like that was going to fix anything. It was the water. Not the jar, the actual water in my brush. I was rinsing, wiping, rinsing, wiping, and still carrying a wet brush into the dark mix. So I'm basically adding a teaspoon of tap water to every shadow and wondering why it looks chalky. Tonight I wiped the brush on my jeans (sorry jeans) until it was just damp and the shadow went down like it's supposed to. Three weeks. I sat there feeling like an idiot and also weirdly thrilled. Anyway if you're a rinser like me, try the jeans thing. My 11 year old told me it's "kind of gross" so I'm passing it along. Also the sky in this one has been repainted four times and it's still not the sky I see in my head. Some paintings just want to fight.

I've been working on this little still life of lemons and a blue pitcher for about a week now, evenings only. And I kept fighting with it, mixing the same shadows over and over, couldn't get them to sit right. Last night I finally looked up and realized my lamp had shifted and I'd been painting with the light coming from the exact opposite direction than where I started. The shadow side was lit, the lit side was shadowed. For a WEEK. I just sat there for a minute and laughed at myself. Re-set the lamp, and honestly it's coming together now. Anyone else have a moment like that where the problem wasn't the painting at all? Because I think I need to hear I'm not the only one who paints for six days under the wrong light.

There is a patch of wall behind the left shoulder of the figure I am working on, and I have been fussing over it for days. This morning I finally got the value right. Then ate lunch, came back, and the whole corner had gone dead. Everything around it was carrying the picture and I had flattened it by making the wall too interesting. Scraped it back to the ground with the palette knife. Two hours of glazing, gone in about forty seconds. What bothers me is not the time. It is that I knew. Somewhere under the fussing, I knew the wall was supposed to be a nothing, a place for the eye to rest before it hits the hand. I painted it anyway because it was satisfying to paint. That is the whole trap, non? We paint the parts we enjoy painting instead of the parts the picture needs. Anyway. Tomorrow I start again on the wall, and this time the wall will be boring on purpose.

Sitting in my studio with a small interior I've been working on since the start of the month, a woman at a table with morning light coming from a window behind her left shoulder. The whole thing is nearly done. The walls are right, the cloth on the table is right, the light reads the way I wanted it to. And her hand on the table is dead. It is the fourth time I've wiped it back and repainted it and each time it comes back a little more like a photograph of a hand and less like a hand. Here is the specific problem. I can build the form fine. Palm, knuckles, the taper of the fingers, all correct. What I can't find is the edge. The place where the light side meets the shadow side. I keep making it crisp because I know what the shape is, and a crisp edge says "I know what this is." I don't want her to know what it is. I want the light to have made it. One soft edge where the wrist turns into the shadow of the table, one lost edge where the fingers meet the cloth, and the whole thing would breathe. I know all this. I've taught it. And I still paint a hand like I'm describing it to a police sketch artist. I've been looking at Chardin all week, the little hands in the still lifes, the way he lets a knuckle just dissolve into the background and trusts you to finish it. It is a kind of confidence I don't have yet at this size. At a big scale I can be loose. Small and I get nervous and tidy. So I am going to let it dry and go at it once more with a bigger brush than it deserves. If it fails again I may paint her hand into her sleeve and call it a compositional choice. Not really. But it's been that kind of week.

Working from the mirror again, which I should know better than to do at 44 because the model keeps sighing and wanting lunch. The problem is the left hand. It's resting on the chair back, half in shadow, and it is correct. Proportion fine, values fine, edges where they should be. It looks like a hand carved out of soap. There is no blood in it. I've repainted it four times now, each time a little more carefully, which is exactly the wrong instinct. Careful is what killed it. The rest of the figure has some looseness in it, the shoulder especially, and this hand sits there like a piece of taxidermy glued on. I think the trouble is I painted it from the shape instead of from the light. I was drawing a hand, not looking at what the shadow was doing to the knuckle. So tomorrow I'm going to take a big brush and a lot of medium and destroy it, and hope the destruction leaves something alive behind. Voilà the plan. It has worked before and it has failed before. If anyone has a reliable trick for the moment when a passage is technically right and completely without life, I'll take it. Otherwise I'll report back from the ruins.

The portrait on my easel has been through four jaws now. Not the whole face, just that one line from ear to chin, and each time I lift it off with a kneaded eraser and start again I tell myself this is the last time. The third attempt was the good one. I know because I looked at it the next morning before I'd had coffee, and it read properly, that slight heaviness under the jaw where the light turns. Then I decided the shadow was too cold and went over it. It's grey now. Flat. The bone has gone out of it and I can see the paper starting to give where I've worked it, that slight shine you get on Canson when you've been at one spot too long. So I'm not asking how to fix it, I know I need to leave that area alone and put the shadow back with a light touch of a warmer stick. What I want to know is whether anyone else does this, going back into the one part that already works. Because I do it constantly and I have started to think it is not perfectionism, it is that I don't trust that the good version was mine. Like I got lucky for ten minutes and I need to prove it by ruining it. Anyway. New sheet tomorrow, I think. This one has had enough of me.

Some months ago I bought a proper copy stand and a pair of daylight-balanced lamps, and I started photographing finished sheets with a macro lens instead of holding them up to a window and hoping. The results are honest. You can see the granulation in the cerulean, you can see where the pencil underdrawing sits under the wash. I was rather pleased with myself. What I did not anticipate is that the honest photograph does not travel. On a small screen, a correct botanical sheet, evenly lit, on white paper, reads as flat and slightly grey. The overexposed window snap with a bit of shadow across the lower third got three times the engagement, because the shadow made it look like a thing in a room rather than a document. I have not gone back to the window snaps. But I have started taking one deliberately imperfect photograph per finished piece, a corner of the desk in shot, and posting that instead. It is a small dishonesty of framing rather than of colour, which I can live with. I am curious whether anyone else has found the line between showing the work accurately and showing it in a way people will actually look at, and whether the second thing has cost them anything.

there's a piece on my table right now, 24x30, was supposed to be two figures against a wall of flat ochre. spent last night getting the ochre right, which took like forty minutes because ochre is a liar, and then this morning i mixed a grey that matched the shadow under the chin perfectly and just... painted the whole background with it instead. the ochre's gone. it's under there somewhere. and here's the thing, it's better. it's flatter and colder and the figures read harder against it. but i can't tell if i actually think that or if i'm just rationalizing forty minutes of work i just buried. i've done this before, this is like the fourth time this year i've fallen in love with a neutral and let it eat the composition. starting to think my real problem isn't color it's that i don't trust a warm field to hold anything. anyway i'm leaving it. if i scrape it back i lose the chin shadow and that's the only part that's working. someone tell me if the ochre deserved better or if i did it a favor

Three weeks on the same interior and I finally see what's wrong, which of course means taking the whole lower left back apart. The problem is my darks have no air in them. Every shadow is doing the same job, reading the same note, and it flattens the whole composition no matter how nice the light is on the table. I know the old trick, I learned it twenty years ago. The shadow under the chair is not the same darkness as the one behind the curtain, even if your squint says they're equal. But somehow when I'm actually mixing I keep defaulting to one comfortable dark and then convincing myself the values differ enough. They don't. On the canvas they're all cousins. What actually broke it for me: I stopped mixing and just laid in three separate darks neat, no blending, let them sit for a day. And suddenly the room had depth it never had while I was fussing. The lesson is embarrassing because I teach this. I say it out loud to students every week, trust the separate masses, don't unify too early. And then I go do the opposite on my own easel because I'm impatient and I want the painting to look finished sooner than it is. Curious if anyone else has a particular habit they know better than and still commit. Not asking for advice, I know what to do. Just want to know I'm not alone in the stupidity.

Found a photo of my grandfather's workshop tucked in a box of stuff my mom finally gave up. Grainy, probably 1960s, the bench is covered in things I can't identify. Tools, jars, something that might be a clamp. I've built three separate pieces around that photo now and every single one has a different kind of light in it. The original has none at all, it's just flat flash shadow. My brain keeps inventing light that isn't there because I want the room to feel a certain way. The last version is maybe the worst. Technically fine. Dead. I think I'm overworking the sentiment. I want the viewer to feel something I can't actually name, so I keep piling on. Wondering if the honest move is to just reproduce the photo flat and let it be flat. Let the sadness be the boring shadow version instead of the cinematic one. Anyone ever hit this, where you keep romanticizing a source image and the work gets worse for it?

Okay so I'm on the phone with my mom tonight, right, and she asks what I did today. And I genuinely could not give her a straight answer. Because the honest version is: I spent four hours on one 4x6 inch study of the same corner of my bedroom, repainted the shadow behind the radiator like six times, ate a sandwich standing up while staring at it, and then scraped it all off and started over. And I said "painted" and she said "for eight hours?!" and I heard the pause where she's doing the math on rent and groceries. And I love her so much but man. How do you explain to someone that a wash you'll never sell took four hours and that time wasn't wasted? That the whole afternoon was just my hand learning how wet to make the paper so a shadow sits right. Like nobody clocks the hours that go into the invisible stuff. The actual painting is 20 minutes. The other 7 hours and 40 minutes is just... convincing the paint to do what I already saw in my head. Anyway I'm not mad at her, I'm mad that I couldn't say it in a way that didn't sound like "I stared at a wet piece of paper for eight hours." Cause honestly. That's also kind of what it is. 😭 Anyone else have the "so what did you DO today" conversation with a family member and just absolutely whiff it?

Small thing but I've been chasing this stupid window in my apartment since like March and today it actually did what I wanted. For anyone new: it's the west-facing one over the fire escape, the light comes in around 4pm and turns everything this gross beautiful orange and I've done it over and over trying to get the shadows to stop looking like mud. Gouache on hot press, 9x12, so there's basically no room to hide. I've been glazing the sill wrong this whole time, laying it too wet and letting it bloom, and this morning I just... didn't. Left it alone. Painted the shape once and walked away from it. Which for me is a huge deal because my whole problem is I keep going back in. Sitting here looking at it and it's not perfect but the chair leg is actually IN the light now instead of sitting on top of it, if that makes sense?? My partner came home and said "oh that's the good one" and I almost cried at the sink lol. Eight months of no café paycheck and THIS is what I'm celebrating, a chair leg. Anyway nobody in my family really gets why this is a big deal so I'm telling all of you instead.

I am on the eleventh version of the same woman's face. Toned grey paper, terracotta and a bit of black, all of them lined up on the floor against the skirting board like a police lineup. The first one, which I did in maybe forty minutes on Monday, is the only one that looks alive. Numbers two through eleven are technically better. Better structure, better shadow under the jaw, the nose is actually a nose and not a smudge I got lucky with. And they are all dead. Flat. Like I drew the anatomy and forgot to put a person inside it. I don't know what to do with this information. Do I stop at the quick one and trust it? Because it feels like cheating, like saying the sloppy one is better because it was easy. Or do I keep going until I can be careful and alive at the same time, which might be number thirty and might be never. Frustrating week. Also my pastel box is now a mess of broken terracotta because I dropped it on Thursday, so there's that.

ok so for two months i've been fighting a 30x40 canvas. burnt orange ground, this big flat black shape that was supposed to sit like a shadow with weight. it just sat there like a dead sticker. repainted the black four times. my studio is basically a paint graveyard now, i have like six ruined rags that used to be promising. today i scraped the whole black back down to the raw ochre with a palette knife and just left it. and it works. the thing i was chasing for 8 weeks was the absence of the thing i kept adding. anyway i'm not gonna pretend this is a metaphor or whatever. i'm just glad it's off the easel. what's the longest you've fought a single piece before it gave up