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For years I tried to push through that dead hour after lunch, you know, around two, three o'clock where the light is flat and your eyes are heavy and everything you touch looks wrong. I'd stand there squeezing paint, hating it, forcing myself to work on whatever big canvas was on the easel. Stupid. Now I just stop. I pull out a little panel, 20x20, 25x25, something I can finish in an afternoon, and I paint something completely unimportant. A lemon. The corner of the mantel. My daughter's shoe left by the door. No stakes, no ambition, just the physical pleasure of moving paint around. Half the time it's nothing, but sometimes these little studies end up being the best thing I did all week. The big work happens in the morning. The afternoon is for staying loose and not caring.

Small experiment the last three weeks. Along with the finished piece, I post a shot of the blank sheet, taped to my board, pencil grid barely visible, chai cup in the corner. No caption, no before/after, just the empty paper. Engagement is roughly double the finished paintings. Same people who scroll past a finished sketch of a Malleswaram house will stop and stare at a damp sheet of Arches. I have no idea what to do with this. On one hand it's lovely, people are curious about process. On the other, I spent eleven years learning to see and people want to look at the tape. My sister said it's because everyone can imagine themselves starting something, and nobody can imagine themselves finishing it. That stung a bit because I think she's right. So now I'm sitting here wondering whether I keep doing it, because it works, or stop, because it feels like I'm selling the idea of painting rather than the painting. Anyone else had a thing that performs well but sits oddly with them?

I am teaching Mithila painting to a small group in my village, mostly girls, on Sunday mornings in the room where my mother used to sit with her colours. One of them, Sunita, she is fourteen, she has been coming since two years. Very quiet girl, hardly speaking, but her line work is steady, better than some who have been doing longer. Today a lady from Patna who buys from our cooperative took one of her paintings. A small one, two fish and a lotus, on handmade paper, done with the black from lamp soot and the red from kusum flower. Two hundred and fifty rupees. Sunita's mother came to my house in the evening to tell me. She was holding the money folded in her blouse. She did not say much. I also did not say much. The thing is, when I was that age nobody gave us money for this. We painted on the mud walls before the wedding, we painted for the ritual, and that was all. The wall got whitewashed every year and the work went away with it. For long I thought that was the whole of it, that our painting was for the wall and for God and not for selling. I don't know what to feel sometimes. Half of me is happy that the girl has earned something of her own at fourteen. Other half is thinking, will she now paint only the small ones that sell fast, the fish and the peacock, and never learn the whole story of the Kohbar or the wedding of Shiva and Parvati which takes many days. It is a real worry for me. The market wants the easy ones. Anyway. I have told her next month we start the Kohbar, slowly, small portion everyday before she does any selling work. Let us see.

Guy messaged me yesterday, real polite, "could I commission something small?" and I was like sure! love that. Then he sent me a paragraph. A full paragraph. He wants a 60x80cm painting (small?? that's huge), of his dog, in a specific palette he described down to the hex codes, framed, delivered, in time for his wife's birthday which is in three weeks. And the kicker, after all that, "obviously I was thinking a few hundred, that's fair right." I did the math on the hours alone and I almost laughed out loud. That's about minimum wage before materials. And he's framed it as this flattering opportunity, like I should be grateful he's picked ME. I told him my rate for that size and timeline and he went quiet. Haven't heard back. Cool. Cool cool cool. I think the thing that gets me is people genuinely don't see the labor. They see watercolor, they think it's quick, it's just water, right? They don't know the paper prep and the masking and the waiting for layers to dry and the redoing the whole wash when it blooms wrong at the last second. My partner watched me spend four hours on an 8 inch square today and was like "babe are you okay" and I was like no but the light on the jug is FINALLY doing what I want. Anyway. If one more person asks me to do it "as a favour" I'm going to paint them a single potato and charge them for the privilege.

Okay so I've been trying to figure out why I'm exhausted at the end of the day but somehow only have like one small painting to show for it. So I started actually timing myself. Set a little timer on my phone every time I sat down, every time I walked away. The result is honestly embarrassing. Over a four hour stretch today I painted for maybe 90 minutes. The rest was: staring at the reference photo, rearranging my brushes, looking at the same wash dry, texting my mom twice, going to get water and then just standing in the kitchen for a while. The actual sitting and committing part is way shorter than I thought it was. The weird thing is the paint time is so much better quality. When I actually clock in, I make decisions so much faster. But the gap between "okay I'm starting" and actually putting paint down is where all the energy goes. My new thing this week is a 25 minute timer, no phone in the room, and I don't get up until it dings. Even if I just sit there. Tried it today and got a whole sketch done in the first two rounds. Anyone else have no idea how much of their studio time is actually fear management? Because I think I'm maybe 40% painter and 60% pacing around thinking about painting.

People ask me where I get my green and I tell them, from the neem tree behind my house, and they think I am joking. But it is true. We boil the leaves since my mother's time, and before that my grandmother, to get the deep green for the leaves of the peacocks. The tree is older than me. Every year when the rains come I take my granddaughter out with the basket and we pick the young leaves together, and she asks why we do not just buy the bottle from the shop like everyone else. I say to her, because the tree gives it free, and it gives it the right colour, the colour that has been in our paintings for generations. The shop green is flat. This green moves. Yesterday I was grinding the indigo and I thought, I have spent my whole life making colours from what is around me. Mud, turmeric, the lamp black from the clay diya. Nothing is bought. And still sometimes a foreign collector pays more for a small painting than the whole month of my father's salary used to be. Strange world. The neem is flowering now. After the flowers the fruit comes, and then the young leaves again. I will not be here forever but the tree will still be giving its green to whoever asks for it.

I have a theory that half of gallery outreach is just picking the wrong door the first time, and then you're marked. My first real gallery relationship started because I walked in off the street with three small paintings under my arm, no appointment, asking if anyone would look. The owner laughed, said people don't do that anymore, then spent an hour with me. Turned into five years together. But I've also sent hundreds of emails that went nowhere, and I know plenty of people who swear the polite letter is the only way in. So which is it for you, the walk-in or the email? And has anyone had a gallery flat out say they preferred one over the other?

The canvas has been sitting on the wall since 2021, primed, blank, staring at me. I stretched it myself, 140 by 110, lead white ground, and then I just... let it sit. Taught around it, painted small studies, told myself I was waiting for the right light. Today I mixed the raw umber and terre verte and blocked in the figure. Two hours, rough as anything, just finding where the mass wants to sit. My hand was shaking a little at the start, which is embarrassing to admit at 44, but there it is. By the end the fear had turned into work, which is where I wanted it. It looks like mud. I don't care. It's on the canvas now.

I landed my second gallery by just walking in with a small painting under my arm. The owner was standing at the counter, we talked for twenty minutes about a Durer print she had framed on the wall, and she asked to see the canvas before I even offered. I think door-to-door still works, at least here. But I've also had a gallery that would never have taken a meeting by email. Two of them. So I'm curious, when you approach a new gallery, do you knock or do you write? And has the method ever surprised you, worked when you thought it wouldn't?

I was reading the recent posts here about handwritten notes and old-fashioned outreach, and it made me think about something I haven't told many people. Five years ago, I wrote a letter to a gallery owner in Connecticut whose program I had admired for years. Not an email. A letter. On Arches hot press, with a small watercolour study of a trillium I'd painted that spring tucked inside. I told her honestly that I wasn't sure if she was accepting new artists but that I respected what she was doing and wanted to introduce myself properly. She wrote back. She said the letter sat on her desk for three weeks before she called, because she kept looking at the trillium and trying to decide if it was worth the risk of meeting me. She took me on. That gallery remains the steadiest source of my serious sales. Not Instagram. Not my website. A letter. I don't think the lesson is that we should all be sending letters. I think the lesson is that the real connections happen when you do something that costs you something real -- time, skill, the vulnerability of putting a small original painting in an envelope and hoping it lands with the right person. It is harder to ignore than a form submission. I still send a letter occasionally when a connection matters to me. I have never once regretted it. I have regretted the polished emails I overthought and never sent.

For seven years I billed other people's buildings. Architects send invoices for work that's already done, measured, approved, nothing emotional about it. Today I sent an invoice for my own painting. A small one, a balcony sketch of a house on Sampige Road that's going to be rubble by next monsoon, but someone wanted it enough to pay for it. The whole morning I kept going back and forth on the number. Undercharged myself twice, then sat there embarrassed and corrected it. My husband found me staring at the PDF and just said "send it na." So I did. It's funny because the actual hard part wasn't the painting. It was deciding that my work had a price at all. Architects know exactly what an hour of their time costs. Painters apparently have to relearn it every single time. Anyway. The money barely covers the paints. Doesn't matter. First one's out. Here's to the next few. And to Sampige Road houses getting a little something before they're gone.

I spent three weeks fighting a harbor scene and finally gave up on it one night, shoved it in the back of my closet. Pulled it out two months later mostly to see if the canvas was worth reusing, and you know what, it was actually fine. A few glazes later I really liked it. Ended up hanging it at a little craft fair in November. Not expecting anything from it, it was the piece I kept apologizing for when people stopped at my table. A woman came back twice to look at it and ended up asking if I could do something similar for her lake house. Smaller, different colors, but same idea. She just sent me the deposit. I keep thinking about how close that painting came to being gessoed over. Also the timing is funny because I'm exactly the kind of person who would've talked myself out of even putting it on the table. Glad I didn't.

A small thing I want to ask you all, since it has been sitting in my mind. Some years back I carried my paintings to a gallery in Patna, and the person there, without asking me, lifted one from the corner with two fingers to look at the back. Natural colour on handmade paper, it can smudge, and he did not ask. I said nothing, I am sorry to say. I was younger and I needed the sale. So my question: what is the one thing a gallery person did with your work, in front of you, that you did not like. Touching without asking, calling it "ethnic" or "craft item," asking you to make it in a smaller size for tourists, anything. Myself I will say the "craft item" word hurts more than the finger. Tell me yours ji.

Portrait commission, a girl of about nine, and the mother sat with me through the whole sitting. That should have told me. After the third session she looked at the block-in and asked if I could make the nose "less present." I asked what she meant. She meant smaller. Then the chin. Then the eyes, God help me, because the daughter's eyes are slightly asymmetrical and that, apparently, is a flaw and not the whole point of a face. I did the painting my way. She paid, she hung it, she has not called since and I am fine with that. But here is what stays with me. I have painted about sixty commissioned portraits in my life and the requests get stranger every year. Not more difficult, stranger. People are so used to filters on their phones that a face as it is has become an insult. They are not commissioning a portrait anymore, they are commissioning a correction. The thing nobody warns you about is that the correction is the easy part. I can make a nose smaller. That takes twenty minutes and no skill. Making a smaller nose still look like her, still sit in the light the way a real nose sits in the light, that is the work. And if I do it well, the client is happy and the painting is a small lie that will hang on a wall for forty years. So I paint them true and I lose the referral. C'est ça. For anyone here who sells something made by hand: do you give them the thing they asked for, or the thing that is actually good? I have stopped pretending those are the same request.

For two days my son has been photographing my paintings for the website. He has made a white cloth, two lamps borrowed from the neighbour, and he is very particular about the angle. Forty paintings he has done. It is good work and I am grateful, because before this we were only selling through the cooperative in Darbhanga and whatever the buyers who came to the house would take. But here is my difficulty. On the screen, my Kohbar and my Durga all look the same size. The line which I pulled for three days with a squirrel-hair brush looks thin like a hair, and the fish which I made the size of my palm looks small like nothing. A painting is not made to be looked at in a small box on a phone. It is made to be sat in front of. He is telling me this is how people buy now, they will not come to Madhubani to see. Maybe he is right. Still I am thinking we should put one photo where he has kept a matchbox beside the painting, just so the person knows. My mother never measured anything in her life and now I am measuring for a machine. If any of you are selling your work this way, kindly tell me one thing. Do you send the actual size, or the person will understand by themselves?

Our library does a little community show every spring, nothing juried, you just sign up for a 4 foot panel and hang whatever. I'd been planning to put in the marsh piece I did in October, the one that actually came out the way I wanted. I hung two others instead. Both were ones I nearly painted over. A small still life of the kids' cereal bowls from last summer that I hated for months because the light is flat and the left bowl is honestly a little lopsided, and a scrappy plein air thing from the parking lot behind the rink in February where I got the cold sky right and the tree wrong. I don't fully know why. I think I'm tired of only showing the ones that behave. The cereal bowls especially, my 11 year old walked past the table while I was varnishing it and said oh that's the actual morning. Anyway it's up until the 22nd. I keep catching myself wondering if anyone will say anything about them, which is a stupid way to feel about two paintings I almost threw out. The marsh one can go to the fall fair.

Started three canvases this week and killed all three by Thursday. Overworked, muddy, the cold wax turning to glue because I wouldn't stop pushing. You know that feeling when you can feel yourself making it worse and you keep going anyway. This morning I scraped one of them down to the linen with a palette knife. Just a ghost of yellow ochre left in the weave. I thought, good, now it's a fresh surface and I've got nothing. Sat with it for an hour. Then I took a tube of Prussian blue and a rag and just wiped it across, thin, no plan, no composition. Let it dry forty minutes. Came back and put one mark on it, a single stroke, cadmium orange, right through the middle. Stood there. That was it. That was the whole painting. It's small. 60 x 80. But it has something the other three didn't have. It knows when to stop. I don't learn that lesson, I relearn it every time.

ok so I need to say this out loud to people who'll get it. back in like February a friend of a friend asked me to paint her parents' house, small thing, gouache, maybe 9x12, and I said 180 euros because she was nice and I panicked and it felt rude to go higher for something that "small." eleven hours. eleven. and honestly probably more if I count the two evenings I just sat and stared at the roof line because the perspective was fighting me. so that's what, 16 euros an hour, and that's before the paper and the paint I burned through redoing the sky three times. my partner did the math out loud in the kitchen and I genuinely wanted to leave the room. the worst part is it's a lovely painting now and I'm proud of it and she cried a little when I dropped it off, and I still can't figure out how to feel about that. like the crying was worth something but it doesn't pay my rent and I can't take it to the shop. I think the actual thing I'm working on is that I price by how bad I feel asking, not by the work. which is a terrible system. my old teacher used to say price the thing you'd be happy to do it again for and I keep not doing that. anyway I've got two more of these little house commissions sitting in my inbox and I'm seriously considering going back and saying I quoted wrong, which feels mortifying. has anyone actually done that and survived it

I have a small interior study I've been fighting for weeks. A corner of my studio, the chair by the window, nothing grand. It never sat right. Every time I looked at it I knew the light was wrong but I couldn't say why. This morning I woke before the alarm, went down in the half-dark, and there was that particular grey Lyonnais light, the flat diffuse one that comes off the river. And I saw it. The painting had been lit like an afternoon in my head, warm and golden, but the room itself only ever looks like this. Grey. Honest. I mixed a little ivory black into everything, cooled the whole thing down, and it just... clicked. Two hours, gone. Funny that the answer was to make it less pretty. I think I'd been painting what I wanted the room to be instead of what it is. The chair looks more like the chair now than it ever did with all that fake sun on it. It's still not the painting I thought I was making. It's better.

Something happened last night that I did not expect at 44. I stopped early. Voluntarily. On a painting. It is a small interior, a corner of the kitchen with the morning light coming across the zinc, and I had been fighting one passage near the copper pot for three sessions. I knew exactly what I wanted to do to it. I could feel my wrist already making the stroke. And then I put the brush in the turpentine and walked away. Ten years ago I would have stayed there until two in the morning and ruined it. I have done that many times. The painting looks wonderful at 1am and dead in daylight, and you cannot save it because you have closed everything underneath. My teacher at the atelier used to say the hardest thing to learn is not the drawing. It is knowing the moment your eye stops seeing and starts inventing. Took me twenty years to actually hear that. So, voilà. The pot is not finished. It is also not ruined. I am calling that a win this week, which feels strange to type, but there it is.