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Nine states of the same copper plate, same scratched line, and I pulled the last one at two in the morning with the acid bath still faintly in my nose. I have them drying on the rack now, 1 through 9, each one a bit more eaten away than the one before. The first is almost nothing, a hairline. The ninth is a wound. The thing that gets me: there is no original. Not really. The plate is gone by the state 9, bitten past recognition. And I keep catching myself thinking of state 1 as the "true" one, which is nonsense, because state 1 only exists because I knew I was going to destroy it. Whistler used to show his states in sequence like that, painting and prints, and I always found it a bit precious. Now I'm the one with nine of them on a rack at 2am. Someone asked me last week which is the work. I said all of them, then immediately felt like a fraud, because all of them means I can never sell a single one without lying about what it is. Anyway. The ninth is the best. I think. Ask me in a week.

One of my girls, she has been learning from me since she was eleven, she is now nineteen. This year I told her, apply for the state handicraft exhibition, what is the harm. She was so nervous she almost did not send the form. Yesterday the list came and her name is on it. When I saw it I felt more happy than the day my own work was first selected, I cannot explain it. She comes from a family where they were telling her, why you are wasting time painting, learn tailoring, make some money. Now her mother called me and she was crying a little, saying thank you ji. I told her, no thanks needed, your daughter did the work. Her fish border is very fine, the line work is steady like someone much older. She will go far. I am thinking also it is important for the other girls in the village to see this. When one of them goes, the path opens for all.🙏

two open ink tins, one of them definitely crusting over. a proof I pulled yesterday that's fine except the one bit I can't stop staring at. the cat asleep on the only clean bit of newsprint. a coffee mug from three days ago that I'm pretending I'll wash later. and the tune I've been trying to remember for a week is finally in my head now that I'm not trying at all. I spent the whole morning just sharpening tools. that's the whole story. didn't cut a single line. just sat there with the oilstone and the slipstrop and got everything singing. there's something in that, though, the day you spend getting ready is still a day in the work. sure the kids'll be home in two hours and I'll have a hare's head and nothing else to show for it but half a dozen razor-sharp gouges. grand. tomorrow they'll earn their keep.

I spent eleven years painting before I had a gallery willing to represent me. Not for lack of trying, mind you. I sent portfolios, made appointments, attended openings, did all the proper things. Nothing. What finally worked was a letter. Not an email, a proper letter on good paper, after a small show of mine got a modest review in a regional paper. I wrote to the director of a small natural-history gallery two states away, enclosed photographs of my actual work, and said I thought we might suit each other. She wrote back within the week. We worked together for thirteen years. I still wonder whether it was the letter, the timing, or simply that I stopped trying to impress and started stating plainly what I could offer. How did you land your first gallery? Was it persistence, a lucky introduction, or something you'd never repeat?

I spent the whole morning scraping back a glaze I was proud of last week. It was doing everything right - the light sat in it exactly the way I wanted, the undertone was singing. But it was too pretty. That's the thing nobody tells you about painting. Pretty is a trap. It stops you from going further because you're afraid to wreck it. So I wrecked it. Scraped it back to the dry underlayer with a palette knife and now the whole panel is this raw, honest state I have to rebuild from. And I'm not sorry. The first version would have been a nice painting. This one might be a real one. The panel is propped on the easel in this ugly in-between state right now and I keep glancing at it like it's a dare. It is, I suppose. Anyone else ever deliberately kill a passage that was working? Or am I the only one who does this to themselves.

Got the email from the gallery in Berlin at nine this morning. Their press person needs titles, dimensions and a short statement for the November show by Friday. The show is in November. Four of the seven canvases are still leaning against the wall in the state I would call "arguing with me." I know how this sounds. Naja. But I cannot name a painting before it has stopped moving, and one of them has been moving since March. The last time I named something early I ended up calling a big grey thing "Zwischenräume" and then spent six weeks painting towards a word instead of towards the picture. That is the wrong direction of travel entirely. So now I have a list of provisional titles in a notebook, all of them bad, and a deadline that exists because a printer in Kreuzberg needs it, not because the work does. I will send them something. I always do. But it will be a lie in a small, administrative way.

There is a small head study hanging next to the door in my studio, and it is not good. Dead flesh tones, the jaw runs away from me on the left side, the whole thing looks like it was painted by someone who had read about painting. I did it in February in a bad mood and I would not sign it. I keep it there on purpose. My students ask about it constantly, thinking it is a lesson, and I tell them the truth: it is there so I stop expecting every session to arrive somewhere. I spent my thirties waiting for the good mood to come back before I would touch the brush, and the good mood never comes looking for you. Now I have a bad painting on the wall to remind me that the work happens anyway. Also it is honest. Everything else in here is either finished or in that flattering state where you still believe in it.

The woman was very polite on the phone. She said they are doing a show of folk artists from different states in November, and they liked my work, and could I send twenty pieces. I said I will send six. She was quiet for a moment. Then she said twenty is better for the wall, the space is big. So I told her the truth. A painting of the size she is asking, with the fine line work, takes me eighteen to twenty days if the monsoon is not troubling the drying. Twenty pieces means five or six other hands. And whose hands will those be? My neighbours' daughters, who I teach. Fine. They are good. But then it is not my work on her wall, it is my name on their work, and that is a different thing which I am not comfortable with. She said other artists manage it. Yes, I said. That is true. They also manage a signature. Now I am wondering if I have done a foolish thing. November is a good month for selling. The money would have been useful, the roof of the back room is leaking since last year. But I have seen what happens when one name becomes a small factory. The buyers never know, and after some years the young ones who did the actual painting are not even known in their own district. Six pieces I can do with my own hand. I told her she can hang them with more space between, and if the wall looks empty she can put a small write-up about the tradition. She is thinking.

The dry air from the heating has my hands in this state where I keep catching on the surface of thin Japanese paper. Tiny little tears where I just want a clean edge. I've tried lotion, I've tried washing less, nothing fixes it except waiting for the humidity to come back. So today I'm just handling cheap scrap paper instead and letting the good stuff sit. A whole day of making do because of dry hands. Smallest thing in the world but it's the kind of thing that decides how a day goes.

Had a collector ask me last month for a portrait of her two dogs, "but maybe a little less" than my usual figure rate, since dogs aren't people. I said no, politely, and she came back two days later at full price. She just wanted to know I wouldn't fold. It made me think about every commission I've taken in my life where I was vague about cost at the start because I was afraid of scaring someone off. Every one of those ended badly. The ones where I stated the number clearly, even when it made me wince, they respected it. You don't get clients by being cheaper, you get them by being clear. I paint. I'm not a negotiator. But after twenty years I've learned the only protection I have is a number said out loud early. The moment I start hedging, the client smells it, and then everything becomes a negotiation.

I used to do this thing where I'd tell people "pay what you can afford" because I genuinely believed in making art accessible and also I hate conflict LOL. But here's what kept happening: Someone who clearly had money would pay me $20 for a charcoal portrait that took me 6 hours. And I'd smile and say thank you because I SAID they could name the price and I didn't want to be a hypocrite. Meanwhile I had a single mom pay me $150 for a small drawing because she said "I know what labor costs and I want you to keep making work." The sliding scale only works if people are honest. And I realized I was letting the people who COULD pay more off the hook because I was scared to just... state my price like a real businessperson. Now I just say what it costs. If someone genuinely can't afford it I'll trade or work something out one on one. But I stopped making my pricing a charity auction where the rich get the discount. Anyone else do the "honor system" thing and regret it?

A gallery in Berlin that I won't name wants three of my etchings for a small group show in spring, and asked for the price list. I sent it. Three plates, aquatint, edition of 18, 780 euros unframed. The reply came back the same afternoon. Could I do 390, because "prints are multiples, so the price should reflect that." I have been chewing on this for two days and not because I'm insulted. Because the logic is wrong in a way that's interesting. The multiple is exactly the reason the price is what it is. Eighteen people can own this thing, which means each one of them is not paying for the whole of the work. The plate, the proofing, the four days of biting and scraping and failing, the two states I threw away, the paper I ruined on the third run: all of that is divided across eighteen. If I'd made a single unique drawing on that same paper I would be asking four times more and nobody at that gallery would blink. So the argument isn't that the multiple makes it cheap. It's that the multiple makes it copyable, and somewhere in the gallery's head a copy is worth less than an original. Which is the oldest idea in the medium and also the one I've built my whole practice against. Walter Benjamin would have a field day. Actually he'd probably be very polite about it and then say something devastating. What I want to know is whether I'm being naive. I could say no to 390 and lose the show, or say yes and quietly agree that eighteen is a discount rather than a structure. I said I'd think about it. I don't want to think about it, I want to know what the rest of you do when the person across the table is using the medium against you. Meanwhile I've got a stack of proofs on the drying rack that I can't look at without doing sums in my head.

Working on a half-length figure, a woman at a window, morning light from the left. Third glaze over a dry underpainting, just ultramarine and a touch of raw umber thinned down to almost nothing. Maybe forty minutes of work in the whole layer. My daughter called about something at school. I had the brush in my hand, so of course I kept going while I talked. Ten minutes later I looked and the whole passage had gone chalky and dead. I had overworked it with the phone against my ear instead of my attention on the surface. Not the paint's fault. Not even really mine. But this is the thing nobody tells you early: glazing is not a technique, it's a state of concentration. You cannot glaze and do anything else. The layer knows when you were somewhere else. Scraped it back with the palette knife, which is its own small grief when a passage was almost there. Tomorrow the underpainting is still underneath, waiting, which is the only mercy of the method. Nothing is ever truly lost until you build it up too thick to see through. I've started leaving my phone in the other room during the wet stages. Not out of principle. Just because the layer can tell.

I was reorganizing my supplies this week and counted eleven jars of water sitting around the studio in various states of use. Eleven. My husband walked in, looked at the collection, and asked if I was conducting an experiment. I told him I was, and had been for thirty years. People economize on paint, on paper, on brushes, and I understand all of it. But water is the variable I will not cut corners on. A tired wash full of lifted pigment is the difference between a leaf that looks alive and one that looks painted. When I teach, I make students change their water after every third wash and they always think I'm being precious. Then they see the two paintings side by side and they stop arguing. Distilled water for mixing, tap for cleaning, and never the two shall meet. I know it sounds like superstition. Maybe it is, at this point. But there's a particular blue-gray that only appears in water that's been sitting overnight, and I've learned to recognize it the way you'd recognize a bad mood in a friend. Some days I paint with it anyway, just to see what happens.

asked to see more work, sent it, and then nothing for three months. i followed up twice, polite and normal about it, and crickets. then they reposted one of my pieces on their story like we were old friends?? didn't mention it, didn't reply, just vibes. i honestly don't know if that's a soft no, a mix-up, or if they just live in a state of permanent chaos. my gut says let it go but the petty part of me wants to email them every full moon just to see what happens. is this a normal part of gallery life or did i just catch a weird one? what do you do when a gallery goes quiet after showing interest?

had a collage almost where I wanted it this morning. not finished but close, that fragile state where one wrong move sends the whole thing sideways. i knew this. i looked at it and thought "you know what this needs" and i put a single torn strip of something right through the middle. instant dead. killed the air out of it completely. now it's sitting on the floor leaning against the wall and i keep glancing at it hoping it somehow fixed itself while i wasn't looking. i know the move is to scrape it down and start that layer over but i'm mad about it so i'm just going to sit with being mad for the rest of the day and start fresh tomorrow. anyone else got a piece on punishment rotation right now

I carved a granite bench a few years back for a public garden. Had to source the stone from a quarry two states away, rented a flatbed to haul it, worked it on and off for two months because there were other jobs in between. Sold it for $1,200. That's maybe a dollar an hour if you count research, travel, the rental, the chisels I dulled, and the sanding pads. I knew it at the time and I still said yes. I told myself it was a "public installation" and that was worth something. But the garden closed three years later and I heard the bench got hauled away with the trash. I don't know what the right number was. Double maybe. But what I do know is I priced the materials and my time separately and left out everything else. The knowledge, the years of figuring out how to carve granite without splitting it, the fact that I knew which quarry to call. That all went for free. I still do it. Not as bad, but I still leave money on the table somewhere. Hard habit to break when you started out thinking you should be grateful anyone paid you at all.

The edition is 12 and I have been at the same zinc plate since Thursday. The image is fine. The problem is that I keep pulling proofs to check the bite and then keeping the ones that are "nice", and now I have eleven nice prints and no idea which one is the print. My printer friend says this is the whole point of an edition, that the multiplicity is the work, the small differences are the variable. I know the theory. I have read the theory. I have even written about the theory. But at 1am in the studio with a fan going and my hands black to the wrist, the theory feels like something I say to other people. In practice I am standing there choosing between eleven nearly identical sheets like a woman picking tomatoes, and every one of them is a little bit wrong in a different place. The third one has a softer edge on the left where the felt slipped. The eleventh has a cleaner line and less atmosphere. I like the third. I should not like the third, because liking the third is liking a mistake, and then what do I do, print eleven more mistakes on purpose? I am also aware, and this is the part that actually bothers me, that if I frame the third one and call it the definitive state, it becomes the original, and the other ten become copies of it, and I have spent eleven years arguing that this is a lie.

It's a Swedish almanac from 1953, the paper is thin and slightly grey and it takes paste without cockling. I've been cutting from the same four sheets for a year and a half. Now I have four sheets left and I keep changing my mind about whether the last piece should use it at all. The sensible answer is not to. Use something else, keep the paper. But then it sits in the flat file forever being saved, which is its own kind of waste. I have a whole folder like that. Things too good to use. Currently the four sheets are under a board with a jar of paste on top so they don't curl. That has been their state for eleven days.

The Vandercook in the corner of the studio makes this heavy click-clack rhythm when I run a proof, and I've stopped noticing it until someone visits and says, what is that noise. And then I notice it and I realize I like it. Like a metronome that doesn't care about tempo. There's something about a machine that just does its one thing, over and over, that calms me down more than any playlist. Repetition is literally my medium and I still get surprised that I find it soothing instead of boring. Today I pulled thirty-one proofs of a copper plate I've been fighting for two weeks. The inking is finally even. The plate is ruined in the sense that I will probably never edition it because I changed the composition three times, so it's just a unique state nobody will ever see. There's a word for that in Italian, stato unico, and I like that a language has a term for the thing that's only ever happened once and will never happen again. Printmaking is supposed to be about multiples. Sometimes the one-off is the honest version. Anyway. The click sound is still going. I think I'd actually miss it on the days I don't print.