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i don't know why but i literally cannot start throwing or handbuilding unless i've spent like 10 minutes just... touching the clay. like i have to sit there and wedge it a bit, poke it, flatten it, roll it around. my hands have to remember it first. it's not preparation really, it's like a weird ritual. if i skip it and try to go straight to making something, the piece comes out stiff and wrong every time. my grandmother (who is the wisest person i know) once watched me do this and said "clay remembers your hands even when you forget them" and i think about that constantly. today i had a whole plan for a series of little cups with faces pressed into the sides. spent 15 minutes just kneading a lump of terracotta like it owed me money. finally started and now i have five little heads staring at me from the shelf. vale, worth it. anyone else have a stupid little thing you have to do before the work actually starts? or am i just a weirdo with clay dependency issues

Chased a weld on a 3/4" base plate last week. Pulled the whole thing out of square by about a quarter inch over three feet. My first thought was to cut it and start fresh, which is what most people would do now. Instead I did it the way my old mentor would have. Laid it flat, worked the high side with a torch and a hammer, checked it against a straightedge about fifty times over two days. Slow, boring, unphotogenic work. It's square now. I keep telling younger guys that knowing when to stop is the whole game. Turns out knowing when not to start over is the other half. The plate has a story on it now, and it'll hold. Some things are worth the boring fix.

I've been working on this canvas for about six weeks now. 190 x 160. Oil and cold wax. And for the first three or four weeks I was still pushing it, you know, making decisions, applying pressure. Then at some point last week, I don't remember exactly when, the thing started pushing back. It started having its own requirements. I'm not talking about the paint itself leading you, that's something else. I mean the painting developing a kind of internal logic that you either follow or you ruin it. I had a patch of cadmium red deep in the lower left quadrant, maybe the size of my hand, and I kept wanting to extend it, pull it further into the composition. But every time I tried, the whole thing went wrong. The painting didn't want it. Two days ago I finally stopped and just left it where it was, isolated, and the whole canvas breathed again. My gallerist would hate me saying this because it sounds like mysticism. But I've been doing this long enough to trust it. The painting knows what it is before I do. My job is mostly to get out of its way in time. Anyone else have this? The moment where you stop being the author and become more of an editor?

I've been selling small edition screenprints through Instagram and my site for about a year now. Nothing huge, maybe 15-20 pieces a month. A few weeks ago I started slipping in a free risograph print with each order, just something I'd already made, an extra, no mention of it in the listing. I thought it would be a nice gesture. What I didn't expect is that people started posting the risograph more than the thing they paid for. Like, photographing it on their wall, tagging me, asking if it's for sale separately. The free thing became the thing they wanted. It's making me rethink how I present the work. People love feeling like they discovered something, even if you deliberately put it there. There's something about the "bonus" object that reads as more authentic than the main one, probably because it feels less like a transaction. I don't know, maybe this is just a thing everyone in product already knows. But coming from a fine art background where you never give anything away because it devalues the work, it's messing with my head a little.

ngl i think i'm addicted to the first 20% of a painting. that part where everything's possible and you haven't ruined it yet. i'll block in a composition, get the color rough in, feel like a genius for about an hour, and then my brain goes "cool, that one's done" and i start a new one. now i have 14 canvases staring at me from various corners of the studio like disappointed landlords. all of them have like. one good square foot of actually finished work and then the rest is just. potential. rotting. i know the answer is "just push through the ugly middle" but the ugly middle is SO ugly and starting something new makes the brain go brrr. anyone else collect half-babies or is this just my adhd running the show

started a piece back in march that was so bad i actually quit painting for two weeks. full stop. told myself i was done, started looking at used bikes online like that was my new thing now. came back to it out of spite. it sat half dead on the easel for months and every time i walked past i'd mutter at it. then last night the answer was just... a wrong color. the ugliest orange i own, one of those cadmiums that could start a fire. slapped it in as a background wash and suddenly everything else clicked into place. it's done. it's not even good. but it's DONE and it's been yelling at me for six months and now it can't. gonna sell it for cheap just to get it out of my apartment. someone else can have the bad energy. i feel like i finally won a fight i started with myself. 💀

Three years. Three years this thing sat under my workbench wrapped in old sheets, half-cut, wrong, not working. It's a portrait of my yiayia's hands, she was a seamstress, those hands knew things, and I could not get the light right in the smalti. The gold kept coming out flat, like a coin, not like afternoon sun on old skin. Took it back out two months ago and finally saw what was wrong. Wrong andamento, wrong direction of the cuts. I'd been setting the tesserae like fabric folds instead of like hands. Had to pull half of it out and start again. Sent photos to the client this afternoon. She cried. So did I, a bit, alone in the studio with the cats looking at me like I'd lost it. Anyway. Sometimes the work needs to wait until you're ready for it. That's the thing nobody tells you.

Seven years I did the Christmas markets circuit around Galway, and sure I loved the craic of it, the whole gang of us makers propping each other up over cold tea at half nine. But I started doing the sums on it last year and the amount of hours I was standing on my feet to shift maybe thirty prints at a tenner margin each... you'd get more per hour stacking shelves in Tesco. So I pulled out of the big one this winter. No table, no fairy lights, no man trying to haggle me down to a fiver for something that took me two days to carve. What I did instead was dead boring. I printed a plain little catalogue, four pages, black and white, every piece photographed flat on the kitchen table with the kids' homework shoved out of frame, and I posted the damn thing to about forty people who've bought off me before or who run the small galleries I've dealt with. Old school. Envelopes and stamps, like a man posting letters to his granny. And it worked. Sold twenty-three prints before December even got going. People wrote back, some of them just to say they liked the look of the hare on page two, no purchase, and that's grand too. The gallery in Westport took twelve on the strength of a paper catalogue and a phone call. I'm not saying markets are dead. I'm saying I was so busy performing the selling I forgot the actual selling. Nobody wants to scroll you at a draughty hall in November when they can sit in their own kitchen and pick what they genuinely like off a table of your work. Turns out the thing that worked was the most old-fashioned thing I could have done, and my phone never once told me how many people saw it.

Twenty-four prints in an edition and not one of them with a bald spot or a jagged edge. I've done this long enough to know that's not luck, that's the block finally behaving itself after I stopped fighting it. Carved that heron for the third time, third go at the same bird, and this is the one where I just let the lino tell me where it wanted to give. Sounds feckin' mystical writing it out but that's genuinely what it is. First forty prints all had this one spot on the wing where the ink was shy. Re-carved it once, twice, then I just left it and the thing started printing like a dream. Signed and numbered the whole run this morning with the kids at the table, little fella trying to press his palm into the corner of every one. Had to tell him no about forty times and he still got one. So there's a print out there with a tiny handprint in the margin that I'll sell to nobody and keep for himself. Grand. Anyway. Twenty-four clean pulls, my back is wrecked, and I'm dead proud of the lot of them. The bird finally earned his keep.

Somewhere along the way I stopped showing finished pieces and started showing the torn paper pile on my studio floor. Rough edges, the ugly rejects, the stack of book pages I was deciding not to use. Not deliberate. I just got tired of curating. The emails I get now are from people who ask about the process, not the pieces. A collector in Oslo bought three things because she said she wanted to own the part I hadn't thrown away. Still small numbers, but the conversations are better. I think showing the finished thing invites people to judge it. Showing the mess invites them in. Two weeks ago I posted a photo of my hands covered in paste and got more genuine replies than anything I've put up in a year. No idea if this scales. But I'd rather have forty people who care than four hundred who scroll past.

pulled an old canvas out of the closet today that i started in like... 2021. deep in the bad year. it was just blocked in with this muddy grey-green i was mixing over and over back then like it meant something. couldn't finish it. couldn't throw it out either. finally figured out what it wanted today. scraped half of it off, repainted the whole bottom third, kept maybe two square inches of the original. it's done now. feels weirdly like i got to go back and tell that version of myself "hey it's fine, you're not stuck forever, you just need to wait three years and paint over most of it lol" anyway. it's leaning against the wall drying and i keep walking past it and going "huh. okay. it's good." feels like i earned that one.

There's maybe ten or fifteen minutes every morning where I just sit in the studio with the coffee and look at whatever's on the wall from yesterday. I don't touch anything. I don't think about what to do next, not deliberately. I just let the painting sit there and let myself sit there. It took me years to understand this isn't procrastination. It's the actual work starting, the part where you let the thing tell you what it needs before you go at it again. My wife thinks I'm just staring into space. Maybe I am. But I've ruined more paintings by walking in and going straight at them than any other way. Anyone else have a ritual that looks like doing nothing but isn't?

I'm weirdly superstitious about this but I started writing a short note to every person who buys something from me. Nothing long, like three sentences on a scrap of the same paper I use in collage work. Thank you, something about why I kept that piece around longer than others, hope it finds its wall. It's been maybe four months now. The thing that's getting me is the replies. People write back. Not always, but often enough that it's shifted something. One woman sent me a photo of the piece hung above her dead mother's armchair. Another guy said he'd been having a shit year and the note made him cry which is intense and also definitely not what I was going for but okay. Here's the part I don't know how to think about: it's not scalable. Obviously. So is this just a thing I do while I'm small and then it dies when I can't keep up? Or is the fact that it can't scale actually the whole point, like the size I'm at right now is the size where this works and maybe I should just stay here? I don't have an answer. Just feels like every time I try to "grow" I make something worse, and every time I do something that feels natural and small it actually works.

I had this piece on the wall for two weeks. Looked at it every morning with my coffee. Knew something was off but couldn't name it. Yesterday I took it down and started gessoing over the bottom third. The composition was fine. The papers were good. But the whole lower section had this weight to it that the rest didn't earn. I kept trying to fix it by adding more and it just got worse. Now there's a grey rectangle where the bottom used to be and I already like it better. Feels like clearing my throat. Anyone else sit on something for weeks only to realise the fix was to remove half of it?

finally put the last stroke on a piece i've started over maybe six times since last spring. every attempt i was trying to make it look like the reference and that's why it kept dying. last week i gave up on the reference, painted the whole thing from memory in three sittings, and it's the only version of it that ever worked. it's the biggest thing i've done since the bad year and honestly i'm a little scared to show anyone because it's actually good and i don't know what to do with that. anyway if you want to see the reference and the final side by side it's genuinely funny how different they are lol point being if a piece keeps fighting you, fight back and stop listening to it

I bought a box of late 50s Swedish family photos and letters at a flea market in Mölndal maybe four years ago. Never used most of them, they're too specific, too intact, too much like someone's actual life. But I keep the box under my cutting table anyway. Now it's started to smell like damp cellar and old paper, the good kind. Today I finally opened it and sorted through. Two faces I recognised from the ones I did use, a little girl on a tricycle, a man in a suit standing by a Volvo. The rest are strangers. I don't know why I'm keeping them. Maybe I'm waiting for them to become anonymous enough to cut into. Anyway the box is open now and my whole studio smells like 1959. Not unpleasant but distracting. Might just put it all back and close the lid for another year.

I delivered a small piece last week, 20x25cm, torn pages from a 1930s French anatomy book, just three elements on a pale ground. Charged €250. The gallery sells my work at €480 and takes 50%, so I got €240. It took me 14 hours because I kept scrapping it and starting again. That's about €17 an hour before materials. I know the math is bad. Objectively I know. But I also know I wouldn't have made it faster if I'd rushed. The quiet part is I'm not sure I want to work faster. I want to sit with a piece until it's right. That's the whole point of doing this. I don't know what to do with that. Raise the price and risk the gallery dropping me? Accept that collage is a loss leader for a life I'd be living anyway?

ok so i KNOW this is gonna sound ridiculous but i cannot start painting unless i've done the exact same stupid ritual first, i have to make a cup of tea, i have to light this one specific candle my partner got me, and i have to put on the same playlist i've been using for like three years now. it's not even a good playlist, it's just a shuffled mess of stuff i added when i was 19. there's some owl city on there still. owl city!!! and if i skip any of these steps i will literally just sit there staring at my paper for 20 minutes like a malfunctioning robot. i keep trying to break out of it because it feels so silly and precious but honestly??? every time i've tried to just "go for it" without the ritual i've messed up the first wash within minutes and gotten frustrated and quit. so maybe the ritual is actually functional and i should stop being embarrassed about it? or maybe i need to finally delete owl city from the playlist. one of those. does anyone else have a weird little thing you HAVE to do before you can work or am i uniquely insane here

tell me the real reason you started. not the tidy bio answer, the actual one. mine: i was eight, home sick from school, and my nan shoved a tin of dried-up watercolours at me just to keep me quiet. something happened in my chest that i have been chasing for thirty years since. what's yours

I've got this big lino on the bench, maybe two foot across, a heron standing in water that's meant to be the inlet at Barna at dusk. And I carved the sky in these long horizontal strokes, close together, the way you do for a dark evening. Only problem is, the girl who helps me at the market on a Saturday looked at the proof and said "oh that's lovely, is it a wave?" And now I can't unsee it. The sky reads as water. The water reads as water. So it's just water on water, and the poor heron standing in the middle of it all like a fella who's lost his bearings. The grain on the lino was doing what it does and I leaned into it, but I think I've over-carved the sky trying to make it interesting when a plain flat sky would've done the job. Half of me wants to cut a fresh block and start the sky again, the other half keeps looking at it thinking well sure, a heron in the middle of the Atlantic would be a grand picture too. It's the second time this month I've let texture run away with me and turned a thing into a different thing entirely. Anyone else had a piece that kept telling you it was something else, and did you fight it or just let it be what it wanted?