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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

Not the whole drawing, just the first blocking layer on the face. I caught myself doing it last night around eleven, mouthing numbers, and I got to somewhere in the forties before I noticed what I was doing and stopped. It started as a way to keep myself from overworking. If I know a layer took me nine minutes I can leave it alone. But now it's turned into a little ritual I can't skip, and when I forget where I was I have to start the count over, which is silly because the drawing doesn't know anything about it. The portrait on the easel is a woman I've done twice already. Third time. First two are in the drawer and stay there. Toned grey paper, mostly burnt sienna and a bit of a pale blue in the shadows of the neck, and last night the jaw finally did what I wanted and I sat there with my hand still holding the pastel in the air like an idiot, not wanting to touch it again. Anyway. Does anyone else have one of these small pointless habits that started as a useful trick and now just runs you? I would like to hear that I am not the only one talking to myself in numbers at midnight 🙂

I noticed last week that I only actually start working once the radiator starts ticking. Same time every morning, that knocking-into-rhythm thing they do. Before that I'm just moving paper around the table, pretending. And now I've started timing things to it. Which is insane. I'm not a person who counts, I've never counted anything in my life, and suddenly I'm laying down charcoal on the off-beat because the radiator told me to. My brother used to tap his pen on everything, dining table, steering wheel, my shoulder in the car. Annoying as hell. I didn't realize until this week that I'd been working in the quiet for years and it never sat right. Anyway the piece is getting worse before it gets better, which I keep telling myself is what always happens. It's a photograph of a doorway I found in a box lot at an estate sale on Vitosha, water damage ate the top left corner, and I'm building the wash around the damage instead of over it. Half the studio floor is scraped-off grey at this point, I gave up sweeping. Not sure the radiator thing is a habit or a symptom.

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

Something I noticed while sorting old sketchbooks this week: the pages from my architecture days, drawn in a hurry between site visits, are looser and better than anything I've done since I started taking painting seriously. Same hand, same pen. The only difference is that back then nobody was going to look at it. Now I sit down to a fresh page and the line gets careful, and careful is death for ink. I did a corner house in Basavanagudi on Sunday, one of those with the madras-tile roof and the green shutters, and I caught myself going back over a balcony railing to fix it up. Ruined the whole rhythm of it. The railing is now the only neat thing on a page of scribble. I've started doing a throwaway warm-up page before the "real" one, just to get the cautiousness out of my system. Half the time the warm-up is the one worth keeping. Curious whether this happened to anyone else when they went from hobby to calling it their work. Does the seriousness creep into your hand?

okay so the deal lately is i don't actually start painting until like 11pm and then i'm up until 2 and i keep telling my partner i'll fix it and i don't. the thing is, my apartment faces a light well, so between like 1 and 4 in the afternoon there's this stripe of sun that hits the windowsill and the wall behind it and it is genuinely the most beautiful thing in my life, and i've painted it maybe nine times, and i CANNOT paint it during the actual stripe because i'm too busy watching it and panicking about wasting it. so i paint it at night from memory and from bad phone photos and honestly? the night ones are better. they're looser. i'm not trying to get the exact angle of the shadow, i'm trying to get the feeling of having seen it, which is a different job and apparently my brain can only do it when it's dark out and everyone's asleep. the problem is my hands shake by 1am from no food and i've ruined two decent washes this week, and my mom keeps calling me at 8am for our normal chat and i keep answering like a zombie and she can hear it. anyway i'm not gonna change it. 😭 i've started eating dinner at 10:30 like a weirdo and keeping a glass of water on the floor next to the palette because i kept dipping my brush in my tea. the tea thing happened three times. three. if you're a night painter, what do you eat and when, because i think i'm running on vibes and half a banana at this point

Three weeks ago I stretched and primed a linen for a still life I have been thinking about since winter, a copper pot and two leeks, nothing more. And I keep walking past it. Twenty coats of rabbit skin glue and lead white, sanded between, and it should be ready. It is ready. The problem is I have started to like the empty panel more than I trust the painting. It has that hot, matte pull to it, the weave just barely showing, and every time I think about putting the first dead layer down I find something else that needs doing. Cleaning a palette knife. Reorganizing the studio by color. Reading Barthes, which I did not need to do. I know what this is. I taught long enough to recognize it in other people. But there is something specific about this one, because I know exactly what the painting looks like finished, and it is a good one, and that is somehow worse than not knowing. As long as it is not started it is still perfect. Today I put the pot on the table in the north light and made myself look at it for an hour without touching anything. Tomorrow I put paint down. Voilà. Saying it here so it is said.

The hammer is not the loud thing. The hammer is fine, it's a wooden mallet on a hardie and it makes a dull tok, tok. What carries is the nippers, that sharp little chip when the smalti gives, and I do that part at the kitchen table like an idiot because the light is better. Anyway. Kyria Eleni across the stairwell told me this morning that she knows when I'm on a deadline because the chipping starts before eight. She's not complaining. She said it like a weather report. Four years in this flat and I have become a thing that happens in the building. I don't mind it. Half my work is deciding where to sit. The good light is on the balcony for three hours in the morning and then it swings around and turns everything flat and grey and I can't judge a colour for the rest of the day. So the day has a shape whether I want one or not. Winter it's worse, the light never really arrives, and I've done work in January that I repented in March. Whole sections pulled out and reset. That's the tax. Teaching starts again next week so the balcony hours get shorter and I get stupider about it. Every year I promise myself I'll cut enough stock in advance and every year I'm chipping at seven in the morning on a Tuesday with the radio on low and Kyria Eleni counting.

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.

Small thing, but it has changed how I work. Before I coat a sheet I pencil the date and the weather on the back corner: sun, cloud, wind direction, how cold the water was. Nothing more than that. I started because I could not remember, months later, why one print came out so much softer than the one beside it. Same paper, same mixture, same seaweed. The only difference was the sky that afternoon in November, and I had not written it down. Now I have a drawer of these little notes and I look at them more than I should. It turns out the prints I love are almost never the ones made in full sun. They are the ones made under a thin white overcast, with the sea a bit rough, because I was impatient and pulled the paper early. It is a very small ritual and probably nobody else would care about it. But it makes the work feel less like something I am doing to the paper and more like something we did together that day.

Eleven days. I know because I wrote the date on the masking tape at the edge of the panel, which is something I do and then never look at until I'm avoiding something. It's a half figure, seated, north light on the shoulder. The drawing is right. The value structure is right. First pass went in lean and quick and it's been sitting there dry to the touch since the 14th, and every morning I come in, make coffee, look at it, and go do something else. Clean a brush that's already clean. Reorganise the turpentine jar. Yesterday I spent forty minutes looking for a tube of terre verte I knew perfectly well was in the second drawer, and when I found it I did not need it. Here is what I think is actually going on. The first pass forgives. You are laying in a structure, everything is still open, the correction is cheap. The second pass is where it becomes a painting, and that is where you can lose it. So I stand there with a rag in my hand like an idiot, protecting a panel from myself. My teacher in the atelier, an old man with very bad breath, used to say the painting is not in the first day. He meant it as encouragement but it has always sounded like a threat. The only thing that has ever worked for me is to start in the least important corner. Not the face, never the face. A bit of the chair back, the shadow under the elbow. Ten minutes of dull work and then the hand remembers why it's there and it stops being a decision. Bof. Today is day twelve, so. Ten minutes at the elbow.

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?

deleted the whole grid. 214 posts, gone. not "archived" deleted. reason: i was painting for the crop. every canvas i started this year i was already thinking about the square, where the color would sit in a 4:5, whether the top third would read at thumbnail size. my work got more and more centered and more and more... polite. so now the only place new work lives is a private notes app on my phone. one photo per painting, no caption, no hashtags, no alt text (sorry), just the file and the date. i've done 9 since june. weird part is nothing happened. nobody noticed. no clients lost, no commissions dropped. turns out the grid was never bringing the work in, it was just where the work went to be looked at by other painters who were also not buying anything. what i actually got: i caught myself reaching for my phone mid-stroke on tuesday to photograph a half-dry edge, and there was no app to open, and i just... kept painting. genuinely can't remember the last time that happened. maybe this is just a phase and i'll be back posting process reels in a month with my tail between my legs. but right now the only audience is me and my terrible note titles and honestly the work is better.

ok so I have this porcelain palette, the big rectangle one, and I got it when I went full time in March as a "you're a real artist now" gift to myself. told myself I'd clean it every single session. it is now December-ish and there is a layer of dried paint in there that has its own topography. like I can see the ghost of every painting I've made this year in the mixing wells. there's a specific grey-brown in the corner from that commission that went badly, I know exactly which one. and here's the thing, I KNOW you're supposed to work clean, my old professor would have a stroke, but I've started dipping into the old dried stuff with a wet brush and getting these colors I could never mix on purpose. like accidental neutrals. this dusty mauve that only exists because I was lazy in October. I've used it in three paintings since. my partner keeps offering to scrub it for me as a nice gesture and I keep saying no and I can't fully explain why without sounding insane. anyway I just spent 40 minutes mixing a green for a leaf and got it in two tries off the mud so. posting this instead of admitting anything to my professor. does anyone else hoard their palette like this or am I the only gremlin here

Pulled out a batch of test pieces from last winter, the ones where the paper buckled or the wash went muddy, and honestly. They're better than the finished stuff on the wall. There's one where the charcoal went down over wet glue and feathered out into this grey bloom, and I've been trying to reproduce it for 2 months with no luck. The accident knew something I didn't. Anyway. Stopped fighting it and started an actual pile, no fixing, just keeping them. Feels like cheating a little.

Small thing that worked, and I feel a bit dumb about how long it took me. I paint at night, usually 9 to 11, and I'd been posting finished pieces on my page. Nice enough, a dozen or so likes, nothing moving. In March I started posting the mess instead. Palette with three days of dried paint on it. The jar of water that's basically mud. One photo of my 11 year old's spelling list sitting under the canvas because that's the only clean paper in the house. I don't know why that did it but it did. Two people messaged asking if I teach, which I do not, and a woman asked if she could buy the small barn piece before I'd even said anything about selling it. That's never happened to me off a finished photo. The annoying part is the finished photos still do nothing. I put the same barn piece up after, nicely lit, and it got nine likes and one comment from my aunt. I keep wondering if I've just trained people to want the mess and now I have to keep finding messes to photograph, which sounds like a second job. Also my table is genuinely gross and I'm not sure I want that to be my brand. Anyone else had something take off that you didn't mean to post?