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Cleaning out a drawer and found a sketchbook from 2019, before the divorce. Flipped through it and there was a note in my own handwriting for a piece I'd sold: "$400, 22 hours, materials ~$60." Worked out to about $15/hour and I just sat there with it for a minute. The worst part isn't the number. It's that I remember being proud of that price at the time. Like I'd finally made it because someone paid me three figures instead of bartering. I charge triple that now and still flinch every time I say it out loud. But I'd rather flinch than go back to being that proud of $15 an hour.

I spent nearly two weeks not painting. Not because I was busy, which I was, but because I kept telling myself I'd only start once I went to the art store and got proper cold-pressed paper. The good stuff. Something deserving of the sketch I had in my head. Finally today I was in front of the stationery shelf in a random supermarket near my mother's place, of all places, and they had these thin spiral-bound sketchbooks. Rough cartridge, ghost of a grain. The kind schoolkids use for drawing class. Ninety rupees or something. Bought it out of spite, basically. And I sat on my balcony this evening and painted the water tank on the neighbour's roof, just the tank and the wires and the late light hitting the wall behind it. Nothing ambitious. It took me forty minutes and the paper buckled a little where I overworked the wash, and the whole thing has that cheap-paper fuzz that I used to hate when I was in architecture school. I'm honestly a bit in love with it. That fuzz has a texture you can't get on the fancy stuff. Funny how the good paper became another excuse to not work. I'm going to give myself permission to ruin a few more of these cheap books before I even think about touching my nice blocks again.

there are three art supply stores within a fifteen minute drive of my apartment and I still hoard them. it's pathological. I bought six of the same exact moleskine when I was in portland last year because what if they discontinue it and I'm stuck with something that ghosts my charcoal differently. the worst part is I only fill maybe two a year. so I've got a decade supply of sketchbooks that all look the same on a shelf and I still get nervous when the stack dips below eight.

There's a house on Hutchins Road, the pale yellow one with the carved wooden brackets under the balcony, and the board went up last Tuesday. I'd been meaning to draw it for maybe three years. Kept saying next weekend. So I went on Wednesday morning with my book and a flask of chai, fully prepared to be shooed off. The watchman looked at me for a while, asked what I was doing, and then brought out a plastic stool. Two hours. Nobody else came. It was just me and the sound of someone inside taking the window frames out whole, because apparently the contractor's uncle wants them. I've posted maybe forty finished paintings this year. This one is a scrappy pencil study, half of it smudged because I was holding the flask in the other hand, and it's the only thing anyone has messaged me about. Four people asked which house it was. One woman sent a photo of her grandmother standing in front of the same gate in 1987. I don't fully know what to do with that. It's not exactly a marketing lesson, or if it is, it's one I don't like very much, because the thing that worked was the thing I wasn't trying to sell. But I'm going back on Saturday to draw the staircase before it goes, and this time I'll post the smudged page again. Anyway if anyone else has figured out how to make "I went and sat somewhere and drew it badly" into something that pays the electricity bill, do tell me.

Small thing, but it's been sitting with me all week. I've been sketching at the old market near Avenue Road for months now. Same three vegetable sellers, same crates, same blue tarpaulin. And every single time someone walks into my frame I do the same cowardly thing: I look down, wait, and hope they move off. Which means three years of urban sketching and my sketchbooks are full of beautiful empty streets that don't exist. Anyway, Thursday I just drew the man. Sat down on the low stone step, ink first like always, and instead of waiting I just caught him where he was, mid-argument with the auto driver about parking. Took maybe forty seconds. His shoulders are slightly wrong and I gave him one leg too many folds in the lungi, but he's there. He's in the drawing. The odd part is the whole page came alive after that. The crates stopped being an exercise in perspective and started being a place where something happened. I don't know why it took me this long. I think some part of me was treating people as interruption rather than as the actual subject. Architect habit maybe, buildings don't fidget. Anyone else here guilty of the empty-street sketchbook? Or is it just me being a coward with a pen 🙏

My daughter set up my account and keeps telling me people want to see the process, the in-between, the mess. I get it, that's how it works now. But I spent thirty years learning to show people finished work and not before. A piece isn't a piece until it's out of the shop and on its feet. Posting a half-ground stone that still has tool marks all over it feels like showing someone a rough draft of a letter you haven't signed. She's got a point though. The numbers on the finished pieces are fine. The sketchbook photos do better. I don't like it but I'm not stupid. Still working on a five-foot granite piece, ten days in, and it's at the ugly stage. The one where you wonder why you started at all. That's the part she wants me to post. I keep telling her no one needs to see me sweat like that. Maybe she's right and the sweat is the part people actually connect with. I wasn't raised to show the sweat. You just did the work and let it stand.

There's this tiny chai shop near Shanti Nagar double road, been there for maybe forty years, tucked between a jewellery showroom and a building that's already been sold for redevelopment. I've been meaning to paint it for months but kept putting it off, too many people, too much traffic, too self-conscious to sit there with my sketchbook. Finally went this morning at 6am. Sat on a plastic stool, ordered chai I didn't even finish, and painted for two hours while the guy who runs the shop kept peering over my shoulder and saying "akka, colour kammi" meaning I wasn't using enough colour. He wasn't wrong. Came home and finished it on the table. And I don't know, I just sat there looking at it and felt something I don't feel often, like it actually came out the way I wanted. The light, the shadows from the awning, the old board with the faded name. Took a photo, sent it to my husband, and he said "that's the one" without me even asking. I never know how to take compliments on my work. But I think I'll frame this one. For myself.

I went back to a street in Malleswaram today. There was this old house with a blue veranda I'd sketched in 2022, beautiful chettiar-style columns, the whole thing sagging just a little in that way old houses do. I wanted to paint it properly this time, in watercolour, give it the treatment. Pulled up to the spot and it's a construction site. Apartment going up, probably 14 floors from the look of the pit. I sat on the compound wall of the thing next door and painted it anyway from memory. Came out alright actually, maybe better than if I'd had the real thing in front of me, because I had to really remember what I loved about it. Weird feeling, documenting things as they disappear. But I'm glad I have that old sketchbook at home. At least someone drew it.

My first proper gallery meeting here, the man was perfectly nice on email, and then I reached the place and he walked me through his own kitchen to get to the "gallery space." Which was one room at the back of the house. I still showed him my sketchbook, still said yes when he offered a wall. Lasted one show and I spent six weeks chasing him for the two paintings that sold. I've got better at reading it now, but I want to know what yours was. The sign you saw and ignored because you wanted it too much. Mine was the kitchen. Tell me something worse so I feel better about it, na? 🙂

Went back this morning to the old house on the corner near Sunday market. The one with the chajja that's been drooping for years. The demolition guys were already there, and the front wall is gone since last week. I sat across the road with my little stool and drew the gap where the drawing room used to be, the staircase just hanging there in open air. Thing is, I've painted that house maybe six times over the last two years. Every time meaning to catch it before this exact morning. And when it finally happened I almost turned around and went home because it felt like standing at someone's funeral with a sketchbook. But I forced myself to sit. Twenty minutes. The plaster dust kept drifting over my palette. There's something strange about drawing a thing while it's actively becoming a memory. The sketch isn't even good, honestly. But I'm glad I did it instead of driving away. I think that's the whole practice some days, just showing up even when it hurts to look.

two years it's been leaning against the wall in my studio, face turned away like I couldn't stand to look at it. this landscape I started right after my brother died, trying to paint the place we scattered his ashes, and it was just... bad. muddy. overworked. I couldn't touch it. today I finally pulled the staples out. ripped the canvas off the frame. just let it crumple on the floor. and then I cut out the only part of it that worked, maybe six square inches of sky, and glued it into my sketchbook. like a little window. the rest went in the trash. felt like I could breathe again.

My parents put their house on the market last week. The one in Malleswaram where I spent 26 years. My room, the jasmine creeper over the gate, the terrace where Amma used to dry mango pickle in summer. Someone's going to tear it down and put up an apartment block, I'm sure of it. I've been putting off painting it for months. Too close, too much pressure, too many feelings. But yesterday I just sat on the floor of my old room with my sketchbook and did it. Watercolour and ink, the way it looked in the late afternoon when the light slants through the neem tree outside. Cried a little while painting. Then laughed at myself for crying. My husband found me like that and just handed me a cup of chai and walked away, the man knows when not to say anything. It's not my best work technically. But it's the most honest thing I've done in a while. I don't know if I'll frame it or stash it away. Just needed to put it down somewhere before it's gone.

Now listen, I want to hear this one. When I first went to a gallery about my quilts, I didn't bring a portfolio, I didn't have a website, none of that. I carried two quilts folded in a clean sheet and a old photograph of my grandmother standing by her frame. That photograph did more talking than I did. The woman at the desk looked at it a long time before she ever looked at the cloth. So I'm asking: what did you actually bring through that door? A stack of prints, a laptop, one big piece, a sketchbook, your phone? And what did the trick, or what did you wish you'd left in the car? I'll tell you what I wish I'd left home. A whole folder of every quilt I ever made, most of them mediocre. Man looked through it patient as Job but I could tell it was too much. Tell me yours 🙏

I showed my sketchbook to a gallery contact last month, mostly old Bangalore houses and the morning light ones. He flipped through the whole thing very slowly and then said "very nice" and handed it back. Not one question about the work itself. I have never felt so politely dismissed in my life. Tell me I'm reading too much into it. What's the most useful thing a gallery person has actually said to your face? The one line that stayed with you, good or bad. Mine so far is a friend's wife telling me the ink line on one of the roofs was "confident" and I have been dining out on that for weeks.

The first gallery that ever showed my work, I got because I was sitting outside sketching a chai stall on the same road, and the owner came out to ask what I was doing. Three weeks later I had four watercolours on their back wall. No email, no portfolio, no plan. Just me being nosy with a sketchbook. Since then I have emailed plenty of galleries and heard nothing back, so I genuinely don't know which way works. Tell me how you got your first one. Email with a proper PDF, walking in with originals under your arm, an open call, a friend of a friend, or some random thing like mine. And say whether it actually led anywhere, or was a one-time thing that never repeated.

Found a block of lino the other day that I'd carved in 2019 and never got round to printing, just sat in a drawer under some old rollers. A heron, half-finished, barely past the first rough cuts. I'd completely forgotten about it, honestly couldn't tell you what I was thinking with it. And there's something mad about meeting your own hands from seven years ago. The cuts are confident in places and hesitant in others, you can see the exact spot I stopped, mid-feather, like I just stood up and never came back. Probably went out for a smoke and got distracted by a whole other life. I inked it up and pulled a proof just to see. It's rough, sure, but there's a looseness to it I don't have anymore. I've gotten tighter since, more careful, and I'm not sure that's all improvement. Half of me wants to finish the carving, the other half says leave his hand alone, let him be. Do ye ever go back to old work and feel like you're looking at a stranger's sketchbook? One you'd maybe buy at a market but not one that's yours.

Ok so I did this thing where I drew my own hand every night for thirty days. Same hand, same angle basically. Just to see if it would stay boring. Day 1 I wanted to throw the sketchbook across the room. My hands are ugly and I hated every line. Day 11 something shifted and I stopped trying to make it look like a hand and started trying to make it FEEL like the hand that's been doing every single thing for me. Day 30 I cried a little and I'm not even embarrassed about it. It stopped being a hand. It became all the damage and all the work and all the love I've ever done with it. Nobody tells you that drawing the same boring thing over and over turns into drawing your whole life. I'm not saying everyone should do this but I'm also not not saying it. If you try it tell me what day you break

two months ago i got in my head about "the algorithm" and paid someone $500 for a 90-minute zoom where she told me to: film myself painting (i hate this) use trending audio (i'm 33) post 3x a day (i will simply die) do a "bts" of my sketchbook (it's just bad drawings, that's the whole point) i tried it for a week and felt like i was performing having a personality instead of having one. my engagement went down. i wanted to quit painting. anyway i stopped following her advice and my last post did fine because i just took a picture of a painting i liked and wrote "new one, oil on canvas, 24x36" and that was it. 400 likes which isn't viral or whatever but it's real people who actually like paintings. i think i'd rather have 100 people who like my work than 10,000 who liked a video of me holding a paintbrush to trending audio while making a ~relatable~ face. the math might not math on that but my brain feels better.

i realized today that my "studio organization system" is just. piles. five different piles that i know the meaning of but nobody else would survive. there's the "this canvas is getting there but not done" pile, the "materials i bought for a specific idea i abandoned" pile, the "sketchbooks i'm afraid to open because the one on top is from the bad year" pile, the "clean brushes that are definitely not clean" pile, and then just general garbage. it works until it doesn't. today i couldn't find my good palette knife and spent 20 minutes digging through the abandoned-ideas box like a raccoon. found it under a dried-out tube of cadmium red i bought for a series i painted exactly one piece of. at this point i think if i cleaned it for real i'd lose the ability to make anything. the entropy is part of the process. or that's what i tell myself lol

not a sketchbook, not a journal. it's a cardboard box under my worktable. failed experiments, pieces i started and hated halfway through, collages that just wouldn't lay right. things i cut up and tried to save and made worse. i told myself i was keeping them to learn from. but honestly i think i just can't throw them away. they're like artifacts of a version of me that was trying something and missed. feels wrong to trash that. pulled one out today. a painting i abandoned last february. thick muddy acrylics, wrong composition, everything fighting everything. i scraped at it with a palette knife for a while and something actually started to happen. might not save it but it's not dead yet either. anyone else keep the ugly ones around?