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Got asked to do a live demo at a gallery opening in Athens next month. They said "the guests would love to watch you work." I said do you know what mosaic looks like in real time? Because I sit on a pillow on the floor and cut one piece of stone at a time and stare at it for ten minutes before I set it. That's a Tuesday. It's not performance, it's just slow. They said it's fine, people find it meditative. We'll see. Anyone else get asked to turn their studio practice into a show and find out it doesn't translate?

I got this old adjustable lamp my son found at a yard sale, must be from the 70s, green enamel shade all chipped up. I keep it aimed just so at my cutting table where the afternoon sun comes through the window and I swear there's this ten minute window around six o'clock where the light hits the fabric just right and I can see every thread and every stitch clear as day. Built the whole corner around that little stretch of time. I know it's silly but I'll sit there with my scissors and my strips and wait on it. That's my favorite time to work. Everything slows down. Y'all got a time of day that just works for what you do?

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.

Lord have mercy. I'm still chewing on this one. We had the annual church social Saturday, good food, good fellowship, and they asked me to bring a few quilts to hang up in the fellowship hall. So I brought three. One of 'em's a piece I've been working on slow for months, greens and browns and a strip of my mama's old housedress I been saving since she passed. Improvisational piecing, the way my grandmother taught me. Nothing in it is supposed to line up like a grid. That's the whole point. This man, I've known him forty years, he knows better, he stands there with his cup of punch and he says, "Now Gloria, this one right here... you know if you just squared those blocks up, it'd really be something." Just like that. Like I'd been trying my best and come up short. I said, "It already is something, Leonard. It's a Gloria Mae original. That's worth more than a perfect seam and you know it." He laughed it off but I was hot about it the rest of the evening. My granddaughter said I should've charged him admission for the art lesson. She's not wrong. Y'all. The squares aren't supposed to line up. That's the music in it. That's the breath. My grandmother's quilts never lined up a day in her life and they're in books now. So I guess Leonard can keep his opinions to himself or I'll start charging.

The radiator in my studio gave up yesterday. Temperature this morning was just above freezing. I put on a second sweater and stayed because I realised the cold was doing something I'd never deliberately tried, the cold wax was setting up almost immediately, the oil was stiff, the marks were staying exactly where they landed instead of bleeding or shifting. Normally I fight that, want the slow drag, the uncertainty. Today I worked with it and it was like a different vocabulary. I don't know if there's anything useful in that, or if I was just too stubborn to pack up and go home. Probably both. But I'll fix the heater tomorrow.

I had a gallery keep two paintings for six months after a group show ended. Not sold, just... sitting there. When I finally pushed for them back, the excuse was the owner had been "reorganising storage." Sure. Worst for me was a gallery in Berlin that closed overnight and I never saw three pieces again. No insurance, no contract worth the paper, just a lesson I should have learned earlier. What's the worst a gallery has ever done with your actual work? Not the rudeness or the slow emails, I mean physically, with the pieces.

It was at my brother-in-law's place in the 6th. Some woman I'd never met, nice enough, works in tech. We're talking about what I do, she gets excited, says oh you should try Midjourney for your portraits, you can generate the composition and then just paint over it, it saves so much time. I said that's not really how I work. She said no but it's the same thing in the end, the image is what matters. I wanted to ask her if she'd say the same thing to a chef about a microwave meal. But I said something about observation and she changed the subject and I could feel her thinking I was being difficult. The thing is, I spent four years learning to see. Not to copy photographs. To see the actual fall of light across a real face in a real room. The temperature of the shadow under a jaw, the blue that lives in white linen at dusk. If I let a machine decide my compositions, what exactly did I learn? I know we all use reference. I know photography changed painting forever. I'm not a purist. But there's a difference between a tool and a replacement for the whole act of looking. Maybe I'm just old. Maybe in ten years every painter works this way and nobody cares. But I care. I like the slowness. I like being wrong for two hours and then something clicks.

Took me forty-five years and a divorce to say it out loud but here we are: if someone hands me a theme and a deadline, my brain turns off like a switch. I stare at the wall. I cut and reset the same piece of stone six times. I produce something technically fine that I don't care about. Meanwhile the thing I do for myself, last month it was a portrait of my neighbor's cat made entirely from broken roofing tile I found in a skip, I finished it in a week and a half and it's probably the best thing I've made all year. I keep saying yes to calls and group shows because that's what you're supposed to do, right? Get your work out there. Network. But I think I'm done pretending I function that way. I'll take the solo slow route even if nobody sees it for a while.

I've been thinking about how my prints sell. It's not through aggressive social media campaigns or paid ads. It's mostly word-of-mouth, people seeing them in small galleries or cafes here in Porto, and then finding me online later. I sell maybe five pieces a month this way. The key is that the work itself has to resonate, to carry its own quiet story. I don't chase trends. I just make what feels true to the ocean, to the light. It’s a slow burn, not a sprint, and honestly, I’m fine with that. It feels more honest, somehow.

I had this whole thing planned out for today, I was gonna paint this corner of my studio where the afternoon light hits this dumb little ceramic donkey my mom got me at a flea market, and I mixed this perfect warm gray for the shadow side, really felt good about it, and then I walked away to let it settle for literally two minutes and came back and it was already cracking. Gouache is such a brat sometimes. Like alright fine I guess we're starting over?? And I KNOW it's because I didn't work the pigment back enough before I put it down, I was too excited, I rushed it. I do this every time I'm really into a piece. My partner says I need to slow down but like, the thing is when I'm excited about something I just wanna GET IT DOWN you know?? And then the materials are like nope sorry try again. Anyway I'm re-mixing and I'm gonna be real patient about it this time lol. The light's still good for another hour or so. We'll see if I learned my lesson.

weird thing i noticed about myself. i can paint alone in my flat for six hours and feel like im wasting my life. but the second someone walks past the window and slows down to look, suddenly im an Artist with a capital A, posture fixed, very serious about the brush. is it just me or is the whole thing a bit of a performance and we just don't admit it