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
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
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?
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 counted. fourteen canvases sitting around in various states of almost. the big one behind the door has been "nearly there" since february. made a coffee this morning fully intending to finish one of them and instead stretched a fresh canvas and started something new by 7. no notes. this is just who i am now.
Y'all ever catch yourself doing something in the studio that don't feel like much, but if you stop and think about it, it's practically prayer? I got this old tin cookie box my mama kept buttons in, and now I keep my smallest scraps in it. Every time I sit down to start something new, I dump em out on the table and just… sort em. Reds together, blues together, the browns and oranges that nobody quite knows what to do with, they get their own little pile. I ain't even decided what I'm making yet. But my hands need to do that first. Like saying hello before you launch into a conversation. My granddaughter watches me do it and says "Mama Gloria, you just playing with fabric." And she ain't wrong. But that's how the good ones start. You gotta let your hands wander before they know where they're going. Anybody else got a little ritual like that, something that don't look like work but you can't start without it?
I was looking for a stretched canvas in the back of the storage space, the one under the stairs nobody wants to talk about, and there it was, half-finished, face to the wall. A little interior, my grandmother's kitchen table, that I started six years ago and just... stopped. I remember exactly why. The perspective was fighting me, the composition felt dead, and I was in a period where everything I touched turned to mud anyway. Brought it up to the studio. Looked at it for two days. And then I just saw it. Not some dramatic insight, just, oh, that's what was wrong. The table was too high, the light source was split, the whole thing was trying to do two different things. Scraped down the table, repainted it lower, unified the light, and three days later it was done. A painting I started in my late thirties finished at 44. I'm not the same painter and honestly that's the thing. The person who abandoned it couldn't have finished it. The person who finished it couldn't have started it. Don't throw out your dead canvases. Or do, but maybe let them sit for half a decade first.
I've been working on this portrait since Saturday. Soft pastel on Canson Mi-Teintes, the warm grey side. It's a woman in profile, nothing complicated, reference photo I took myself. And I cannot get her eye to look like it's actually seeing something. It's technically there, shape, shadow, pupil, highlight, but it's dead. A glass eye. A doll's eye. I redrew it four times. Rubbed it out with a kneaded eraser so many times the paper started to pill. Started over on a fresh sheet once. Same problem. It made me think, how much of what we do in portraits is just... faking life? I can render an eye perfectly. But rendering and bringing to life are two different things and I don't know how to bridge that gap. My partner says nobody will notice but I'll know. I always know. Has anyone else had that thing where a face just refuses to come alive? What do you even do? I'm tempted to just leave it and start the next one but it feels like giving up.
I had this little study going, just a corner of my desk with the morning light hitting a ceramic bowl, nothing ambitious, and it was genuinely working. The washes were doing exactly what I wanted, the edges were soft where they should be soft, I was so pleased with myself. And then I started "fixing" things. Just tiny little adjustments. A little more shadow here, a little more definition there. Twenty minutes later I had a muddy overworked mess and I just sat there staring at it like why do I do this to myself every single time. Watercolor is so unforgiving about that specific impulse. Oil you can scrape back, acrylic you can paint over, gouache you can reactivate if you're careful. But watercolor just sits there and lets you ruin it and you watch yourself do it in real time. I know the solution is to just stop. Walk away. Start something else. But man, the compulsion to keep noodling is so strong when something is almost there. Almost there feels worse than not even close, somehow. Anyway I started fresh and the second one is fine but not as good as the first one was before I killed it. Just needed to yell into the void about this specific flavor of artist self-sabotage. Does anyone else have a version of this or is it just me and my inability to leave well enough alone
I've been mixing the same terre verte and lead white for three days trying to get a shadow on a white tablecloth right. This morning I scraped the whole thing off in frustration and started again. The palette ends up this mess of grey-greens and dirty creams, paint built up at the edges, turps everywhere. My husband came in and said "are you okay in here" like he was checking on a hostage situation. But the thing is, when the palette looks like that, when it's genuinely ugly and you don't care because you're inside the problem, that's when the painting starts to come right. The nice tidy palettes are for people who haven't started yet.
I spent years putting only the final work online. Perfect lighting, good photo, the painting resolved. Crickets, mostly. A few likes from other painters. A few months ago I was frustrated with a figure painting, the hand was wrong for the fourth time, the whole thing looked a mess, and I took a photo of it on the easel with my palette旁边, just to vent to a painter friend. I put it on Instagram almost without thinking. That post got more comments than anything I'd put up in six months. People like to see the struggle. They like to see that you also don't know what you're doing for a while. I think for a long time I thought showing process would somehow diminish the finished work, like revealing the trick. But most people aren't painters. They have no idea what goes into it, and watching something get ugly and then get pulled back out of the ugly, that's the part they actually want to see. I'm still not comfortable with it. I was trained to show only the resolved thing. But I can't argue with the numbers, and more to the point I can't argue with the fact that the conversations are better. People ask real questions instead of just saying "beautiful." Wondering if anyone else has found that the unfinished, uncertain thing gets more traction than the polished final version.
I used to write these careful captions about cyanotype chemistry, the UV exposure times, the pH of the seawater I develop in. Thought people needed to understand the craft to appreciate the print. Then I posted a photo of a print that went completely wrong, overexposed, paper curled, the blue almost black, the seaweed I'd placed shifting mid-exposure so the whole thing was a ghost. I wrote "The sun moved and so did I. This one belongs to the Atlantic now." It got more engagement than any of my tidy process posts. People commented about their own ruined things, the work they'd abandoned, the projects that fell apart. A gallery owner in Amsterdam messaged me asking if I had more "failures" available. I don't think people want to understand how it's made. I think they want to feel that they're allowed to make mistakes too. So now I show the ones that didn't work, alongside the ones that did. The studio floor after a bad week. The prints I fished out of the tide at the wrong moment. The work sells the same. But the conversations are different.
I've done this three times now and I keep doing it. A client says they want the best, gold leaf, a hand-carved frame, the real thing, and I nod along because yes, that is what I want to make too. Then I order the frame from a specialist in Avignon who does nothing else, and I'm already €700 in before I've touched a brush to linen. The portrait itself took about six weeks, off and on, between teaching and the daughter's schedule. When I calculated my hourly rate after the frame, the stretcher, the materials, the varnish, it came to about €11.50 an hour. My daughter makes more babysitting. I know I should charge separately for the frame. I know I should quote the whole thing upfront with a deposit that covers materials. But there's something in me that wants the final price to just be the price, like the frame is part of the painting, not a line item. Stupid, probably. The client would never know the difference. Anyone else just bad at separating what you make from what you need to make it?
