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They asked for 150 words. I've written maybe eleven versions and deleted all of them. It's the jacket. My brother's. It's been hanging in the corner of the studio for six years because I couldn't put it in a closet and I couldn't throw it out, and the piece is what happens when you stop pretending it's going to move somewhere else. I know that's not what they want. They want the version with "explores themes of" in it. And I get it, the text matters, people read it before they look. But every time I write it down the object gets smaller. Like I'm explaining a joke. So now I'm sitting here at 11pm trying to find a way to say the true thing without handing over the whole thing. Not sure that's possible. Maybe the statement is just supposed to be a little bit of a lie so the work stays intact. Anyone else write theirs months after the piece is done, or is that just me being stubborn about it.

Long story short, someone messaged about a piece, wanted to see it in their space, asked if I could hold it for two weeks while they "decided." I said sure. Then I did the math on what that actually costs me, three weeks of a piece sitting in my front room while I answer follow-ups about whether it's "warm or cool in person." So now I say: $40 to reserve it for a week, comes off the price if you buy. Half of people vanish. The other half pay the $40 instantly and two of those bought. Which is roughly double my close rate from when holding was free. The part nobody tells you is the $40 isn't about the money, it's that it forces them to say yes or no. Free holding lets people stay in maybe forever. Maybe is where all my work goes to die. I had 6 pieces in maybe last spring, I sold 1. Also I finally started saying "I can't hold it, someone else is looking at it this weekend" even when nobody was. Felt like a lie the first three times. It stopped feeling like one when it turned out to be true twice. I'm not saying do this. I'm saying I was giving away the one thing I have that's actually scarce, which is time on a piece before the decision.

Portrait commission, a girl of about nine, and the mother sat with me through the whole sitting. That should have told me. After the third session she looked at the block-in and asked if I could make the nose "less present." I asked what she meant. She meant smaller. Then the chin. Then the eyes, God help me, because the daughter's eyes are slightly asymmetrical and that, apparently, is a flaw and not the whole point of a face. I did the painting my way. She paid, she hung it, she has not called since and I am fine with that. But here is what stays with me. I have painted about sixty commissioned portraits in my life and the requests get stranger every year. Not more difficult, stranger. People are so used to filters on their phones that a face as it is has become an insult. They are not commissioning a portrait anymore, they are commissioning a correction. The thing nobody warns you about is that the correction is the easy part. I can make a nose smaller. That takes twenty minutes and no skill. Making a smaller nose still look like her, still sit in the light the way a real nose sits in the light, that is the work. And if I do it well, the client is happy and the painting is a small lie that will hang on a wall for forty years. So I paint them true and I lose the referral. C'est ça. For anyone here who sells something made by hand: do you give them the thing they asked for, or the thing that is actually good? I have stopped pretending those are the same request.

There is a tube of student-grade cobalt blue sitting on my table that has humbled me. I bought it partly as a joke, to prove to myself and to a student who keeps asking that the medium does half the work. And then I mixed it into a shadow on a flesh tone and I could not get the same warmth with my good pigment. The cheap one was muddy, yes, but muddy in a way that had a life to it. I have been painting for twenty years and standing there like a fool. The student was right and I hate that. Not that good paint is a waste of money, that is still true, but that I had turned my materials into a superstition. As if the price of the tube was protecting me from my own bad decisions. I am going to keep using the expensive stuff for the work I take seriously. But the cheap cobalt is staying on the table where I can see it, as a reminder that the hand matters more than I want to admit. Tell that to my student. She will be insufferable.