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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.

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?

Started posting the shop floor last month. Chips on the ground, the jig I built to hold a 400-pound slab while I cut it, the hours of grinding nobody sees. Figured process content was the honest version of what everyone else does with their reels. Engagement dropped by about a third. The finished pieces still pull the likes. People want the clean picture of the thing, not the dirty work underneath it. The thing is, the people who did stick around are the ones asking real questions. About joints, about stone density, about how you keep a weld from cracking when the piece moves. That's worth more to me than the numbers I lost. But I won't pretend it didn't sting watching the count go down. I'm a grown man and I checked the likes on a Tuesday like it mattered. It doesn't. It still got me.

I spent the whole month on one painting of my daughter reading in the armchair by the window, and the calf of that figure refused to be right. Not the whole leg, just the one muscle. I repainted it maybe six times. Each time it looked fine in the first hour and then it was wrong again the next morning. Thursday I finally stopped trying to fix the drawing and instead I looked at where the light actually fell on her calf at that hour, not where I thought it should fall. I had been painting a calf in general. She has a specific one. The whole painting snapped together after that. Not because I finally made the muscle work. Because I stopped working from memory and started working from her. It is so humbling to need forty hours to remember the one thing I tell my students on day one. Anyway. She saw it this morning and said, "Now I look like me." That was the whole month, right there.

My gallery, after fifteen years, asked if I could start working on a smaller scale. The new collectors, they said, want something that fits above the sofa. I pointed out that I already have a small format, it's called a sketch. That didn't land. I know the market has gone that way, everything compressed into a domestic object, something you can rehang when you repaint the wall. But there is a size where a painting stops being a painting and becomes a furnishing. When I have to ask myself if the piece will clear the hallway of whoever buys it, I have stopped thinking about colour and started thinking about logistics. I didn't say no. I said let me think about it. And now I'm sitting with the fact that I said that, and what it costs me to keep the door open. Forty years ago I made work on paper you could fold and put in a drawer. Nobody asked me to then. Genau, times change.

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?

Took me years to admit I'm useless for the first hour in the studio. Coffee, walk around, stare at the piece, move a tool I don't need, leave again. Used to call it procrastination and push through it. Made worse work. Now I just accept it. First hour is for warming up the eyes, not the hands. The real work starts when I stop forcing it. What do you do in that dead time before anything happens?

okay this is such a ridiculous thing but i literally cannot start working if the room is above like 72 degrees. my watercolor dries too fast on the page and i get this panicky feeling like i'm racing the clock instead of actually painting. i have a little thermometer on my shelf that i glance at probably twenty times a day and if it's too warm i just sit there grumpy waiting for the air to shift. my partner thinks i'm insane because i'll open the window in december. like sorry i know it's 40 degrees out but my WASHES need this. it's funny because when i was in school i painted in this unventilated basement studio that was basically a sauna in spring and i convinced myself i just had to adapt. but now i'm like... no. i can just make the room the temperature i need. that's allowed. it's still a weird shock to realize i get to decide these things. anyway what's your weird non-negotiable studio condition that sounds insane when you say it out loud

I keep my palette clean maybe the first hour of a painting. After that it's just layers of dried paint I mix into, scrape off, add more on top. Someone told me last week I should clean it between sessions and I looked at them like they'd suggested I set my hair on fire. I know painters who treat their palette like an altar. Wipe it down, lay fresh piles, everything in its place. I've tried. I last about twenty minutes before I start working wet into wet and the whole thing turns into a crusty ruin again. There's something about the chaos that helps me find colour faster, I think. I don't have to decide, I just pull from whatever's there and adjust. Today I've got a smear of burnt sienna that's been there since Tuesday, a pool of medium I accidentally spilled, and what might be ultramarine or might be cobalt, I can't tell anymore because it's mixed with the grey from yesterday's shadows. It's fine. The painting is coming along. Maybe I'll scrape it clean when this one's done. Maybe not.

Ten years of photographing finished paintings under whatever light was convenient, and I only got it right this spring. The problem, as I now understand it, is that I had been lighting the work rather than letting it be lit. Two daylight bulbs on adjustable arms, a grey card, the whole apparatus. The photographs were bright and clear and wrong. Payne's grey kept going slightly blue, and the yellows in a foxglove study flattened into something closer to mustard. I told myself it was a monitor issue and did not look into it further, which is how one avoids learning things. What changed was a small job for a neighbour, a simple study of a hellebore, that I photographed on the north-facing porch at about eleven in the morning because I was late and could not be bothered to set up the lights. Overcast, no direct sun, pale wall behind. The photograph looked like the painting. Not better than the painting. Like it. I have since done every piece that way, and I now keep a note of the weather in the file name so I can reproduce it for a reprint. It is slower and it depends entirely on the sky cooperating, which offends the part of me that likes a controlled setup. But there is no arrangement of lamps I have found that does not lie about a green. The thing I keep turning over is how long I defended the equipment. I had spent real money on it and I think I needed it to have been the right purchase. Somebody in this channel said something similar about a daylight lamp recently and I found myself nodding at the screen before I had quite admitted it to myself.

I started signing the front of my pastels again. For years I only signed the back, because signing the front felt like announcing myself, like saying "this is good enough that I stake my name on it." And I wasn't sure it was. But I was going through old pieces this week and I found a portrait from two years ago that I'd forgotten, and it was... actually good? Not perfect, one eye sits a little high, but there was a life in it I don't think I could fake. And it's unsigned on the front, just a pencil note on the back, and it made me sad. Like I'd hidden the thing that made it mine. So now I sign the front of everything I manage to finish. Small, in the corner, soft pastel or pencil depending on the paper. My name, in my bad handwriting, which I've decided I'm allowed to have. It's a tiny thing but it feels like stepping out from behind something.

For years I shot everything the same way: tripod, two softboxes, neutral grey, fill in every corner so nothing was lost in shadow. Correct, and completely dead. Then in November I delivered a small interior to a client in Villeurbanne and she had already hung it before I got my coat off. Afternoon light coming sideways across the room, one half of the canvas frankly too dark to read. She was delighted. That is what the painting does in a real room, and I had spent a decade photographing it as if it were a passport photo. So now I photograph the new work where it lives. Same corner of my studio, north window, no lights, one shot at three in the afternoon when the light rakes across and the impasto shows, and I let the darks go dark. Enquiries went from almost nothing to about one a week, and the people who write are the ones who noticed the light, which tells me they will notice it on their wall too. The obvious objection: a client cannot judge the whole canvas. True. I send the full flat documentation to anyone who asks, privately, and nobody has ever been unhappy to receive it. The public image is not the record. It is the invitation. Bof, and the flat grey shots are still on my site, in the archive, where they belong.

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

everyone in these threads keeps blaming the algorithm and i get it, reach is down, but i keep watching artists post the exact same stuff that worked in 2021 and act confused. you posted your palette knife and some paint swatches 40 times, of course it stopped doing numbers. i killed my reach when i stopped and just started posting works in progress with zero caption and actual process, no hashtag spam, and the engagement went up. not because i beat the algorithm but because the people who follow me actually wanted to see the ugly middle stage, not another "here's my cozy studio corner" shot. the algorithm is not your enemy, your content being boring is. posted that with my full chest. come at me.

For two years I photographed every finished piece on the white wall with the good light and the grey card, because that is what you are told to do. Clean, neutral, correct. Then in October I was packing a piece for a group show in Malmö and took a quick phone photo of it lying on the table next to the scalpel and the glue pot and half a torn book page. Sent it to the gallery contact. She wrote back asking if she could use that one instead. Since then I have not shot on the wall once. Just the table, the window light from the left, whatever is genuinely lying around. Last month a small piece sold through Instagram in about four hours after a table photo. The wall version of the same piece had sat there for six weeks. I am not sure what the lesson is. Maybe that people are buying the studio, not the object. Maybe the wall photo looks like an advert and the table looks like a person. Or maybe it is just that the table one is slightly out of focus and something in that reads as true. I do not fully trust my own explanation. The annoying part is that it is less work. I used to spend an hour on the wall setup. Now it takes ninety seconds and does better.

Got a message yesterday from someone doing a small course on artist marketing. Friendly, well-meaning. They'd looked at my page and told me I was "leaving money on the table" because I post maybe twice a month and never with a call to action. They wanted me to batch content. Six weeks at a time, one afternoon, scheduled. I said I'd think about it and then sat with how much I didn't want to. My work is slow on purpose. I tear paper for hours before anything gets glued. Batching the talking about it feels like batching the wrong thing. Maybe I'm wrong. I sold three pieces last year and two of them came from someone who found me through a photo I nearly didn't take. But I keep thinking that if I had to produce a steady stream of it, the work would start to answer to the stream instead of the other way around. That's the part I'm not willing to trade. Curious whether anyone has actually tried the batching and had it be fine, or had it eat something.

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.

A gallery in Munich took a big 180 by 140 oil and cold wax piece in June. Sold it last week for €9,800, which is a good number for me, I'm not complaining. But I got curious last night and added up the actual studio hours. Not the staring at the wall hours, the hands-on hours, plus prep and varnishing and the two days I spent just getting the surface right. It came out to about €41 an hour. And that's not counting the years behind it, the materials, the studio rent, the gallery's cut which was already off the top. €41 an hour is what a plumber charges in this country and he doesn't have to paint over the work and start again. I don't know what the point is exactly. I think it's that nobody prices the thinking hours. You can't invoice for the Tuesday you just sat with it and didn't touch it, but that Tuesday is in the painting. The gallery would laugh at me if I tried to build that into the price. So we all quietly eat it and pretend the canvas took two weeks. Not going to raise the prices. The market here holds what it holds. Just wanted the number on the table once.

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

Working on a half-length figure, a woman seated by a window, left forearm resting on the table. Everything else is behaving. The forearm is not. Four times now. Each time I scrape it back, the drawing is fine, the value is fine, and then I go in with the half tones and it goes waxy. Like the skin of a mannequin. I know exactly what I'm doing wrong by the third pass and I do it anyway, because the correct version looks wrong to me at that moment, and so I chase the wrong thing until it dries enough to punish me. What is left on the palette is a grey I mixed at eleven this morning for the shadow side and it is perfect. I keep looking at it. Small mound of it, cool, a little violet in it, mixed with lead white and raw umber and something I've already forgotten. That grey is the only thing in the studio that has any idea what it's doing today. Anyway the light has gone. Not looking for advice, I know what the problem is. Just saying it out loud so I stop pretending it's the model's arm and not mine.