picked up a piece from the framer today, $475 for one stretched canvas with a simple walnut frame. that alone hurt. then the guy behind the counter, who watched me sign the card, says "you know, you could probably make these yourself if you wanted to save a few bucks." i stared at him. sir. i am holding the thing i made. the painting on the canvas is mine. the canvas itself i stretched and primed in my kitchen. apparently none of that counts unless i'm also milling the wood and cutting the glass. i just said "yeah, i'll get right on learning carpentry" and walked out. but it's been nagging me all day. the way people assume the invisible labor isn't labor. the hours, the mess, the trial and error, none of it registers unless there's a saw involved. anyway the piece looks good. that's the thing. it's the best one i've done in months and now i keep thinking about the $475 instead of the work.
Spent three hours this morning stretching a canvas and the frame was out of square by maybe four millimetres. I knew it in my hands the minute I picked the thing up. Set it aside, stretched the canvas anyway, because I'd already mixed the ground and I didn't want to waste the afternoon. Now it's sitting in the studio leaning against the wall and I can't stop looking at the corner. Four millimetres. Nobody will ever see it. I will absolutely see it every day until I take the canvas off and do it again, which I will do tomorrow morning instead of just getting on with it, because I've never once in thirty years left a bad frame under a good painting. The thing is I knew. That's what galls me. I had the information, I made the choice, and now I get to pay for it twice. There's a whole philosophy in there about small dishonesties compounding, but right now it's mostly just a Tuesday and I'm out a morning.
I know you can buy perfectly good pre-stretched canvas. I know this. And sometimes I do, for studies or when I'm traveling. But for the real work I still go to the art supply shop on Rue des Trois-Marie, pick through the rolls of linen by touch, and spend an afternoon cutting and stretching and sizing. My husband thinks it's a ritual I won't let go of. Maybe it is. But there's something about the tension you can only get when you've done it yourself, pulling the pliers until the weave is exactly right, hearing the frame creak a little. And the rabbit skin glue, I know synthetic sizes work fine, but the smell of it cooking takes me straight back to my first year of training. That hideous little kitchen in the atelier where we learned to grind pigment and stretch linen before we were allowed to touch a brush. I had a student last year who asked why I bother. She'd only ever worked on pre-primed cotton. I told her to try it once, just to feel the difference in the surface when you've done it yourself. She never did, I think. But the ones who try it understand immediately. I'm not saying it makes better paintings. But it makes my paintings. That's enough for me.
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.
A 180 x 140, stretched it myself in early March, and then it just sat there on the easel like an accusation every time I crossed the studio. Not blocked, exactly. Not afraid, either. Just nothing rising. Some canvases wait for a feeling and I kept trying to force one in. Today I stopped trying. Mixed a cold wax ground with a little raw umber until it was the colour of wet pavement and just pushed it on with a drywall knife, no plan, no sketch, no idea what happens next. Took maybe twenty minutes and the whole weight of the month went out of the room. I don't know what will come after. That's the honest part. But the white is gone and I can work again. Sometimes the first layer is just permission. People overestimate inspiration and underestimate how much of painting is lowering your own bar far enough to start.
I stretched a canvas last week with the bars not quite square. Just a few millimetres off on one corner. Didn't notice until I'd already primed it. And then I thought, leave it. Let the whole damn thing be slightly off so the tension pulls uneven and the surface does something I didn't plan. It's working, actually. The cold wax sits heavier on one side, pools where I didn't ask it to. There's a kind of stubbornness in the canvas that wasn't there when I was controlling everything. My wife thinks I'm rationalising a mistake. Maybe I am. But I've been making the same rectangle for twenty-five years, and the one time the rectangle fought back, the painting got interesting. Probably not a method. Probably just Tuesday.
Got the go-ahead on a commission for a large landscape piece. It's a local scene, a rolling hill farm at sunset. I'm so excited but also a little nervous, it's bigger than anything I've done before. I've stretched a 30x40 canvas and now just have to actually put brush to it. Wish me luck! I'll need all the focus I can get with the kids home for the summer too. Maybe I'll hide out in the garage studio after bedtime.
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.
Funny thing happened last month. I was mid-stretch of a new canvas, fighting with a stubborn corner, and I photographed the back of the frame out of pure frustration to send to a painter friend. Bare wood, the wedges, my crappy handwritten label where I always date the work. Posted it by accident to my story before I caught myself. That image sold the painting before I ever showed the front. A collector I'd been going back and forth with for weeks wrote within the hour. Said he liked seeing the bones of it. I don't know what to do with that information. That the accidental, half-finished, unglamorous behind-the-scenes carries more weight than the months of careful work. I resent it a little. But I'm also not stupid. So now I'm trying to figure out how much of my process to show without turning the studio into a circus. There's a line between letting people in and performing the work instead of doing it. I keep showing the mess and it keeps working, and I'm not sure I like that it does.
There was a long stretch where every blank canvas felt like an exam. The pressure to make it the best thing I'd ever done, maybe the best thing anyone had ever done, ridiculous when I say it out loud, but that's what was there. And of course nothing survives that kind of weight. You kill it before you start. Today I blocked in a small interior, just our kitchen at a certain hour, the light falling across the table, a bowl of plums I didn't even arrange nicely, and I didn't once ask myself if it was going to be important. I just painted it. It's not going to change anything. It's a kitchen with plums. And it's the most alive I've felt in front of an easel in months. I don't know if this is age or exhaustion or something else, but I wish someone had told me twenty years ago that you don't have to win every time. You just have to show up and mean it.
The canvas has been sitting on the wall since 2021, primed, blank, staring at me. I stretched it myself, 140 by 110, lead white ground, and then I just... let it sit. Taught around it, painted small studies, told myself I was waiting for the right light. Today I mixed the raw umber and terre verte and blocked in the figure. Two hours, rough as anything, just finding where the mass wants to sit. My hand was shaking a little at the start, which is embarrassing to admit at 44, but there it is. By the end the fear had turned into work, which is where I wanted it. It looks like mud. I don't care. It's on the canvas now.
There's a spot under my easel where I've been dropping the dead ones. Little stubs, too small to hold anymore, maybe an inch of charcoal left. I've got a coffee tin full of them and I keep telling myself I'm going to crush them down and make ink or something. I never do. I just keep adding to the pile. Same thing with paint. I scrape the palette onto the same corner of the drop cloth every night and the canvas underneath has gone this muddy gray-brown that is honestly better than anything I've painted on purpose this month. I'm half tempted to cut it out and stretch it. Do you all keep the residue or am I just sentimental about garbage. Because I genuinely think the byproduct of making is more honest than the finished thing most days. Working on a big one right now, a full figure, and I've scraped her back twice already. Third layer is finally doing something. The floor remembers the first two.
had a canvas sitting against the wall since april. every time i walked past it i'd say "tomorrow" and then tomorrow was july. painted over the same corner like six times, hated all six. finally guilted myself into just sitting with it last night and it came together in like three hours. not even the hard part, it was the same green i'd been fighting the whole time. it was never the paint, it was me avoiding the thing it was asking for. anyway it's done now and i don't know if it's good but it's resolved and that's close enough. holding onto that feeling for the next inevitable stretch where everything looks like mud.
For four years I sold the same size piece, 18x24, mixed media on panel, for 240. Flat. Never changed it. Two people bought one every year like clockwork, one of them bought three over that stretch. In January I put it at 315. Not a big jump on paper. I sat on that number for two weeks before I even typed it into the listing. One of the regulars just... stopped. Didn't say anything, didn't ask, just gone. The other one bought anyway and said "worth it" which I have decided not to think about too hard. Thing is 240 was set in 2021 when I was buying cheap canvas and my rent was lower. I did the math in the fall and at 240 I was making around 9 an hour on the painting, and that's before the framing, before the prints, before any of the admin. So the raise wasn't even a raise, it was catching up to where I should have been. Still felt like asking for a kidney. I don't actually know if losing that buyer means I priced wrong or if it means the work got too expensive for that person specifically, which is a different thing. She used to say she bought one every year as a kind of anniversary thing with her sister. So maybe it was never about 240 at all. Anyway. 315 now. Nobody has blinked except the one who left.
bought two stretched canvases at the hardware store today, the cheap pre-primed ones. got them home and immediately flipped them over to look at the back, which is the only part I actually care about. staples, the little sag in the weave where it's been leaning against something. so now they go in the corner with the other ones. I have maybe eleven canvases in that corner and I've painted on the front of exactly none of them. the thing is I know why. my brother's denim jacket had the seam worn down to white on one shoulder, and I keep thinking the back of a canvas is the only surface that gets to hold a life without being asked to perform. the front is a stage. the back is just where something sat. so I keep buying them and putting them in the corner. my studio is 9x11 and the corner is becoming a problem. yesterday I moved the shop vac and there was mold on the wall behind the stack, which, fine, that's the wall's fault not mine. not asking for advice exactly. just. if you also keep a pile of blank things you can't use, I'd like to know I'm not alone in it
