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I work part-time at a paper conservation studio, and last week one of the conservators asked if she could keep one of my collages on the reference shelf. Not to display. To study how the layers sit together, how the adhesives hold up over time. It's the kindest thing anyone's said about my work in a while, because she meant it as a materials question, not a compliment. It was a small piece, mostly a torn map fragment and a bit of old ledger paper. The sort of thing that takes me three weeks and looks almost accidental. She's seen a hundred years of paper fail, so her keeping it around says something about how it's made that I actually trust more than a gallery wall. I walked home in the drizzle feeling steadier than I have in months. Small win, but it's mine.

Okay so this is the thing I've been circling for a while and I finally did it. I spent yesterday filming this whole thing on how to get a charcoal drawing not to lift when you're doing layers and washes. Setup, voiceover, the little tips, all of it. Edited down to like 40 seconds. It was fine. It was GOOD actually. Clean. And I sat there looking at it and hated it, because it made me look like I know what I'm doing, and I mostly do not. So I threw it out and filmed one take of me ruining the same drawing twice, saying hi to someone at the door, coming back to a corner that had smeared everywhere, and just saying "yeah I don't know why it does that either." No music. No cutaways. Put it up. It did 40k views overnight, which for me is like 10x anything I've posted. 300 comments. And the wild part is people were DMing me asking about the ACTUAL layers question, the one I couldn't answer. Everyone keeps telling you to teach teach teach, position yourself as the expert. I don't know. I think we're so sick of being sold a method by someone standing in front of a shelf of books. The thing that travels is the mess, because it's the only part nobody's faking. I'm not going to turn this into a whole strategy. I just know what I filmed first and what I filmed second and which one people watched. Anyway. Small win. Back to the drawing that's currently annoying me.

Small win but it's been sitting with me. A friend of a friend who saw my sketches at a coffee shop asked me to paint her grandmother's house before it gets demolished. She's from the same area I grew up in, so I knew exactly what those houses look like from inside even with the paint peeling and wires everywhere. I quoted her a price, I always underquote, working on that, and she transferred the full amount the same evening without me even asking for an advance. Half the time I chase people for months after they say they'll buy. This lady just paid and said take your time, no rush. I delivered it yesterday and she cried. Like actually held the painting and cried because I'd gotten the jasmine creeper on the compound wall right, and the little verandah step where she used to sit with her grandmother. She said I should charge more. I'm not going to, but I'm framing that in my head for the next time I'm scared to name a price. Painting houses that are about to fall down, and people still want them kept alive somewhere. That's the whole thing na. Made my week.

I keep almost not posting this because it feels small, but my mom pointed out it's the whole point so here I am. Someone found my work on instagram (which still feels fake to say, like who is out there FINDING my work) and commissioned a little painting of their dog. Not a friend, not a friend of a friend, a total stranger. And the money from it covered my groceries this week, which I know sounds like nothing but it's the first time I've paid for food with art money and I cried in the checkout line at Aldi. Like actually cried. Over frozen vegetables. The dog was a corgi named Mabel and she had this ridiculous grumpy face that I fell in love with. I spent three days on a 8x10 and I keep thinking about how her person is going to hang it in their house somewhere and think of her. Meanwhile my landlord just emailed about rent. Life is so funny like that. One door opening while another one is standing there with its hand out. Eight months into this full-time thing and I'm still mostly terrified but days like today I think it might actually work? Anyway if you've ever wondered whether the small wins count, they do, they're the only ones that have kept me going some weeks.

There's a piece of glass I collected from Praia do Carneiro maybe two years ago. Frosted, worn soft at the edges, the kind the Atlantic takes decades to sand down. I have kept it on the shelf with the other shore things and never once put it on paper. Too much of it, I think. The whole summer my father was ill, that glass was in my pocket. Took it out on the sand in August and thought, no, not yet. This morning I coated a sheet of Fabriano, laid the glass down, weighted the corners with two pebbles, and put it in the sun at 9:40. Nine minutes. Nine. Two years of not-doing it, and the whole thing took nine minutes of ordinary winter light. It came out like a thing that had been underwater a long time. The frosted part went a pale milky blue where the paper stayed damp. Around the edge, where the seawater dripped, that dark Prussian rim I can never quite plan for. I don't know why the waiting was so long. Maybe it needed to be a different person holding the paper down. Anyway it is on the line now, drying, and I keep going out to look at it and coming back in. Small win. But it's the one that has been following me around the house for two years, so it counts double.

omg you guys i actually did it i sent the invoice for that big commission i finished last week. i was so nervous about it honestly, like what if they think it's too much or they ghost me or something?? but my partner was like 'just send it Dani you did the work!' and they were so right haha. it feels SO good to have it out of my hands and just like, trust that it'll get paid. fingers crossed it all goes smoothly! this is such a huge step for me going full-time, it feels so real and terrifying and amazing all at once. anyway, just wanted to share a small win!! 🙏

Okay so I've painted the same window in my apartment, I don't know, forty-something times now? People keep asking why and honestly I don't have a good answer except that the light is never the same twice and I keep chasing it. But here's the thing. I framed one today. Actually framed it, matted it, hung it on the wall above my desk where I can see it while I paint the next one. I've never done that before. Forty-something windows and I just let them pile up in a portfolio folder. This one had this weird grey-yellow morning light through the glass that made the whole room feel like a memory, and I almost scraped the wash and started over, and then I didn't, and now it's on my wall. It's not a sale. It's not a commission. Nobody's going to buy it. But I walked past my desk like six times today just to look at it and feel like, yeah, I made that, and that's allowed to be enough for once. I spend so much time trying to make work other people want that I forget I'm allowed to just keep one for me. Anyway that's my win today. Small and dumb and mine 🙂 Did anyone else keep something for themselves recently? Because I think we should all be doing that more.

A woman came to the market on Sunday, picked up the tall vessel with the crooked neck, the one that slumped in the second firing and I spent a whole week deciding whether to break it or pretend it was on purpose. She held it up to the light and said "this one looks like it's listening." I sold it. Full price. I didn't even have to do my speech about how the leaning is intentional. Here's the thing though, I've been making for two years now and I still can't predict which piece people will go for. The ones I sand for an hour and finish in three glazes sit there all day. The one I pulled out of the kiln and said "joder, no" goes home with someone who sees something I didn't. So my win is small and confusing: the piece I nearly destroyed is now in somebody's living room in Godella. I keep thinking about that woman's face. She wasn't being polite, she actually looked at it. Anyway I'm not going to start making everything crooked on purpose. Or maybe I am. Kiln doesn't care either way.

lets do a thread. drop one win from this week, doesnt matter how small, there is no win too tiny for this. ill go first and set the bar nice and low: i cleaned my brushes the SAME DAY i used them instead of leaving them to fossilise in a jar for a fortnight. revolutionary stuff. your turn ShareProject contentpersonasCreated by youAdd PDFs, documents, or other text to reference in this project.Content

Small thing compared to some of the wins here, but a man came up to me while I was sketching the old house on Sajjan Rao Circle last Sunday, watched for maybe twenty minutes, and asked if the sheet was for sale. Not "do you teach" or "my cousin also draws" or the usual. For sale. I quoted a number that I made up on the spot and immediately regretted, too low. He paid it in cash and walked off with it under his arm, and I sat there with an empty plastic folder and a pen and felt completely strange about it. Because now somewhere in Basavanagudi there's a stranger's wall with my wobbly verandah railing on it. That house is going to be gone by next year, the compound wall is already marked. I've given away plenty of sketches. This is the first one that went out into the world without me knowing where it landed. Still deciding whether that's nice or unsettling. Anyway. I am going to start quoting higher numbers, that much I've learned.

I been putting off a repair on a quilt for a lady from over in Tuscaloosa for a good three weeks, just dreading it. The cloth was her mama's apron from the seventies, thin as onion skin in places, and I was scared I'd cut wrong and ruin what she trusted me with. Well. I pulled out my grandmother's old Singer this morning, the treadle one she learned on, and it hummed for me like it was alive. That machine has outlived three houses and more grief than I care to name, and it still sews a straighter seam than I can manage by hand on my best day. The apron's whole and the lady's gonna cry when she sees it, and I sat back and told the Lord thank you for giving me hands that still know what to do. Mighty small thing, but it felt big today. That's the win. That's always been the win.

A woman came by the studio this afternoon to look at a small panel I did in March. Copper pot, two pears, the corner of a linen cloth. Nothing ambitious, I painted it in two sittings and mostly to work out a problem with the shadow side of the pot. She stood in front of it a long time. Then she said it was her grandmother's kitchen and her eyes went. I did not know what to do with my hands, so I made tea badly and we sat on the two good chairs with the painting between us on the easel. She bought it. That is not really the win. The win is that for about ten minutes I stopped calculating: whether the price was right, whether the gallery would have wanted it, whether a small panel even counts as a serious painting. She was looking at the thing itself. That is what I have been chasing for twenty-five years and I forget it constantly, sometimes for months at a time. Anyway the wall where it hung is empty now and I keep glancing at the nail.

Started pulling the boxes down in March. Four of them, mostly paper: a pay stub from 2009, a parking ticket, a birthday card I wrote him in shitty handwriting, two photos of a kitchen nobody lives in anymore. They've been in my studio since he died, moving from shelf to shelf every time I needed the space. Today I drove them to a framer. Just for one piece, not the whole archive. A photograph with a water stain spreading up the left side. I asked him to float it, no mat, so the stain and the torn corner sit there in the open. He said most people want that cropped out. I said that's the part I want. On the drive home I had the radio off and I felt something I did not expect. Not the sad thing. Relief. Like I'd finally let one small object out of my custody. I don't know yet if that's a win or if it's me giving something away that I'll want back later.

Not deep, barely a scratch. But it's on the pad of my left thumb, exactly where I press to feel the cut edge when I'm checking a tessera. So two days now I'm sitting here doing nothing, or worse, sorting by colour like an intern. The infuriating part is I did it being lazy. I have a small wooden jig for holding the small stuff when I score it. It was right there. I turned my head to answer the phone and pushed the wheel through with my thumb in the wrong place, like I've never held a hammer before. So now I have one panel that's 80 percent done and a thumb wrapped in tape like a cartoon character, and my neighbour Katerina keeps asking if I went to the doctor. For a cut. In Greece. My grandmother would laugh at me. Does anyone else have a body part that decides when they can work? Because mine is the thumb and I am not going to win this argument.

Okay so the tape. Not a fresh roll, the same four strips I've been reusing since like March, stuck to the edge of my glass palette so they don't lose their tack. My partner watched me peel one off this morning, press it back down, and just said "we have a whole drawer of that." We do. I know we do. The thing is these four strips have the exact right amount of stick left. New tape rips the paper when I lift it, old tape gives up halfway through a big wet wash and the whole sheet buckles and I have to sit there watching it curl like it's personally disappointed in me. So I keep them. They've got paint on them now, a reddish smear from that cadmium I use way too much of, and one corner is folded over from the day I was rushing to get the light on the window before it moved. I don't think this is a cute habit, I think it's probably a small problem and I'm telling on myself. But every time I go to grab a fresh strip I do the little satisfaction check first, tap the paper, and the used ones always win. Anyone else hoarding a supply that's technically garbage because the replacement behaves wrong? I need to know I'm not the only one with a tape problem, or honestly, I need someone to tell me to just use the new roll.

Something I want to share with you all. For many years I am sending my paintings to the cooperative in Patna, and from there sometimes they go to Delhi, once to Kolkata. That much only. My son keeps saying Baba, put on internet, people are buying from all countries. I was doubtful, honestly, because the work is small and made on paper by hand, not any big thing to see. But last month a lady from Hamburg wrote to me. She had seen one of my paintings of the marriage of Gauri and Shiva, kachni style, only line work, no colour filling, three weeks of work with a brush of one or two hair. She wrote that she wanted one for her mother, and she said please do only in that old line style, not with the bright filling which is now common. I sat quiet for some time after reading that. Because this is what my mother used to do. The colour work sells faster, buyers like it, and I also have to make it, no shame in that. But the pure kachni line, that is the mother's hand, so to say. Nobody was asking for it since long. I had nearly stopped doing it except for puja time. So I did one. Small, on handmade paper, line only, fish at the border, and I sent it after eleven days. She wrote back only two lines, that her mother had put it on the wall next to the door. I do not know if this is a big win. The money was not much, and I spent more on the courier than I wanted. But somebody in another country, who never met my mother, asked for her style by name. That felt like something. I am thinking now to keep one corner of the work always for the old line style, even if no buyer comes for months.

Small thing, but it sat on my desk for eleven days. A private client brought in a set of loose watercolour plates from the 1890s, foxed, edges ragged, the kind of thing that needs a lot of slow work and no drama. I put the hours down honestly. Then I rewrote the covering letter twice, because my first version had a paragraph in it explaining why the number was the number. I deleted it. Sent the invoice with a date and a payment term and nothing else. I have done this job for years and I still do the flinch thing where I try to make the price smaller by talking around it. The interesting part is that she replied in about ten minutes and just said when can I bring them in. Anyway. That is my win this week. A letter with a number in it and no apology.

I did that last year. Small room in a collective space downtown, knew the people running it had zero budget and the foot traffic was basically the other artists. The work didn't sell. I don't regret it though, the hang was respectful and they treated the work properly. I keep going back and forth on whether that was naive or just... fine. Part of me thinks a quiet room with the right person handling the work is worth more than a bad gallery that moves pieces. Anyone else take shows knowing they'll be a financial wash? Do you ever consider that a win?

There was a long stretch where every blank canvas felt like an exam. The pressure to make it the best thing I'd ever done, maybe the best thing anyone had ever done, ridiculous when I say it out loud, but that's what was there. And of course nothing survives that kind of weight. You kill it before you start. Today I blocked in a small interior, just our kitchen at a certain hour, the light falling across the table, a bowl of plums I didn't even arrange nicely, and I didn't once ask myself if it was going to be important. I just painted it. It's not going to change anything. It's a kitchen with plums. And it's the most alive I've felt in front of an easel in months. I don't know if this is age or exhaustion or something else, but I wish someone had told me twenty years ago that you don't have to win every time. You just have to show up and mean it.

Small thing but it's thrown me. The little Roberts radio in the studio, the one with the aerial held on with a strip of gaffer, finally gave up after about fifteen years. Took it apart, cleaned the dial, nothing. So it's just me and the noise of the house now. And I've discovered the washing machine has a rhythm to it. Not a nice one either. It's a sort of thunk-thunk-thunk-whirr that sets up a tempo I did not ask for, and I've caught myself carving to it. Small controlled cuts, then a long pause at the whirr. Took me two days to cop that my hand was following a spin cycle. The hare's ear I'm working on is now in 4/4 whether it wants to be or not. I'm not one for the headphones thing either, tried it, the earphones kept pulling the block sideways when I leaned over. So I'm left with options. Talk radio in the morning, which is a mistake because I end up arguing with it and losing my line. Or one of the kids' story tapes on the little speaker, which honestly is winning at the moment, there's a version of the Children of Lir on it that's grand to work to. Pointless question I know, but I'm genuinely curious what's on in other people's rooms when the work is happening. Music, silence, the telly through the wall, the dog snoring. I've a feeling the answer says a lot about the person. Mine currently says: I am carving a hare to the beat of a load of whites.