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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.

I teach two botanical illustration classes a year, capped at twelve students, and I have never once advertised them. Word of mouth has carried that for over a decade and I assumed it always would. Then this past term three students told me they found the class through an Instagram post I made about pigment lightfastness testing. I had completely forgotten writing it. It was a photo of my test swatches in harsh sun, nothing more. That unsettled me more than it pleased me, honestly. I have spent years treating my social media as a ledger, a record of finished work, and the one post that actually brought people in was a half-finished experiment I nearly did not share. There is a lesson in there somewhere about showing process over polish and I keep resisting it because it feels like capitulating to trends I do not fully respect. I am still not sure what to do with that information. The finished pieces get the likes, but the mess gets the students.

I teach a watercolor workshop twice a year and I've noticed something I keep turning over. My students, most of them a decade or two younger, post every sketch, every failed wash, every reel of paint mixing. Their follower counts are triple mine. Meanwhile my studio sits on an Instagram account with about 1,100 followers, most of whom have been there since 2016 and probably don't even look at it anymore. The commissions still come, but they come through word of mouth, through the gallery, through someone who saw my work in a botanical garden exhibit two years ago. Not once through social media. I've tried the process videos. I've tried the timelapses. I find them slightly embarrassing to make, and the engagement was never more than a polite ripple. I'm not drawing a lesson from this. I say it because at forty-seven, I've stopped being able to tell whether I'm bad at social media or whether social media simply rewards a kind of performance I'm not interested in giving. My students deserve their audiences; they work for them. But I wonder how many of them will still be painting in twenty years, and whether the audience will still be there when the algorithm moves on to something else. I keep painting either way. The paper doesn't care about engagement.

A student of mine, she's got real talent, was fighting a portrait this morning. Every fifteen minutes she wanted to scrape it down and start over. I made her sit with it. The ugly stage is where half the painting actually gets decided, and people my age forget we all had to be dragged through it once. It's the same panic every time. You block in something honest and it looks crude, so you think you've failed. But crude is not failure, it's just early. The painting that looks decent at every step is usually the boring one. I told her: if it's ugly because it's wrong, fix it. If it's ugly because it's not finished, shut up and keep going. She kept going. By the end the likeness was there and she looked almost annoyed that it worked. That annoyed look is the best sign I get all week.

There's a pattern in my classes I've never found a way to explain. A student hits a wall around the six month mark, gets frustrated, stops coming. No goodbye, just gone. And then a month or two later they walk back in half apologising, and their work is suddenly, inexplicably, better. Not in a small way. A leap. I used to take it personally. Thought they'd found another teacher, or given up and gone to something easier. Now I think the wall was the point. They had to stop trying so hard, stop gripping the brush like it owed them something, and just live for a while without the painting. The eye keeps working in the background. Anyway, one of them came back today. Didn't say a word about where she'd been, just handed me a drawing. I nearly told her I was proud, which would have embarrassed us both. So I said "good" and walked away. She knows what that means. We have a code. 🙂

A student brought in a phone photo of her grandmother's kitchen and asked if she could paint from it. I said of course, but that's not the real question. The real question is why she wanted to. She said because the light in that room doesn't exist anymore, the afternoon sun through the window where her grandmother used to stand. So I told her to go find a room with the same kind of light, sit in it, and paint the memory anyway. The photo gives you the facts. It can't give you the hour you were there. We don't paint what we see. We paint what it was like to see it. That's the whole job and nobody teaches it anymore because you can't put it in a curriculum.

One of my students dropped out last week, came to the last class without saying anything and just took her things. But she left her best drawing taped to the easel. A hand, resting on a table. Not finished, the thumb was barely blocked in, but the light across the knuckles was honest. Really good. The kind of drawing that makes you understand why you teach at all. I kept it. Couldn't throw it away. It's pinned on my studio wall now, next to things by painters I admire, and honestly it holds its own. I keep thinking about what makes someone with that eye walk away. She was twenty-one. She told me once she was tired of her family asking when she'd get a real job. I didn't have the words then. I still don't. I just know there's a version of that drawing in every atelier I've ever taught in, and I've never once figured out how to keep the person holding on to it.

Had a new student yesterday, first day, and she walks in and says "how do you breathe in here?" I told her open a window, and anyway we're only in oils two days a week, the rest is drawing. She looked at the rack of drying canvases like they were going to get her. I remember being that age and convinced the fumes would rot my brain. Now I've painted in studios that smelled of turpentine for thirty years and honestly the only thing that's happened is I can't stand the smell of fresh linen. Priorities shift. But it made me think about how we guard the young ones. My atelier master smoked a pipe while he ground his own lead white. We've come a long way from that and I'm glad. Still, there's something in me that misses the old seriousness about materials, the ritual of it. These days everyone wants water-soluble oils and quick-dry mediums and I get it, I really do, but paint takes the time it takes. You can't fix patience with a product.

I took on a private student a few years back, right after the worst of the crisis here. She was young, maybe 24, no money at all but she wanted to learn mosaic so badly. She showed up at my studio with a five-liter tin of her family's olive oil and asked if we could trade. I said yes because I remembered what it was like to be young and broke and hungry for a skill. She came once a week for six months. She was terrible with the hammer and hardie at first, kept shattering the glass instead of cutting it. But she learned. She ended up getting a commission for a hotel lobby last year. When she sent me photos I actually teared up a little. Meanwhile I get DMs every week from people who want to "collaborate", meaning they want my work for exposure, or they want me to teach them for free because "it would be good for my brand." I don't answer those anymore. The olive oil was good, by the way. Her family makes it near Kalamata. I used it for six months and every time I cooked with it I thought, this is what paying attention to someone actually looks like.

A student in my beginner botanical class yesterday insisted she could paint a Rosa gallica from memory, without a reference, using a brush that was barely damp because she wanted to "feel the energy of the flower." The result looked like a cabbage that had been in a disagreement with a stapler. I try very hard not to be prescriptive. I believe there is room for many approaches. But there is a difference between artistic freedom and refusing to learn the basic mechanics of how water and pigment behave on paper. You cannot will a wash into existence through sheer self-expression. The water has to be there. The pigment has to be mixed. These are not negotiable. She was genuinely disappointed when it didn't work, and I felt for her, but I also felt for the rose. They are not symbolic abstractions. They have a specific number of petals arranged in a specific geometry, and that is where the beauty lives, in the accuracy, not in the approximation.

One of my students, fourteen years old, was painting the fish motif from our Mithila tradition. She does very fine work for her age. Then she stopped and put down the brush and asked me, very politely, "Guru ji, why must the fish always look like fish? Why not make it my own way?" I did not have a quick answer for her. That itself troubled me. I have been doing this since I was a small child sitting beside my mother. Nobody ever asked me that. The fish is the fish because it always has been. It carries meaning. It is auspicious. But she is not wrong to ask. When I was learning, we drew from the memory of our mothers and grandmothers, not from any book. Every hand was a little different. My mother's fish were rounder than my grandmother's. So where does the tradition end and her own hand begin? I told her to finish one fish the traditional way first. Then she may make another one her own way, and we will look at both together and see what remains that is still Mithila. I do not know yet what I will tell her if the second fish is unrecognisable. Some of the old ones would say the tradition is lost then. I myself am not so sure. She is the one who will carry it after I am gone.

I teach a private student one afternoon a week, glazing and edge handling mostly. €95 for two hours. She said, without any malice, "that's so cheap." And she was right and also completely wrong and I've been chewing on it since. The thing is I don't price like a business. I price like a colleague. I remember what it cost me to learn this stuff and I want it accessible. But she's the one sitting there telling me it's undervalued, not the other way around. When did I get so shy about the years of practice that went into being able to say "no, the light catches there, soften that edge" and actually be right? I raised it to €125. She didn't blink. Now I'm annoyed at myself for not doing it two years ago. But also slightly proud that I finally said the number out loud. The hardest word in this métier is just asking for what the skill is actually worth. C'est ça.

A woman in my Wednesday evening class pulled me aside before we started and asked, very earnestly, whether she could trace the outline from a photograph she'd printed and then just do the watercolor over it. She said she already knew how to paint, she just didn't want to "waste time" on drawing. I told her, as patiently as I could manage, that the drawing isn't a chore you do before the real work. It is the real work. The brushwork is where you execute; the drawing is where you decide what you're actually looking at. Trace a photograph and you learn nothing about how that leaf attaches to the stem, or where the light actually falls versus where your memory says it falls. She seemed genuinely puzzled, not defensive. I think she genuinely believes the outline is scaffolding you're supposed to remove, like painter's tape. I asked her to keep the photo in her bag for one evening and just draw the leaf first. She did. Three hours later she told me she'd never noticed how the veins curve. She was a bit annoyed about it, actually, which I took as a good sign. The frustrating part is how widespread this attitude has become. Everyone wants the shortcut, and the shortcut teaches you to copy other people's seeing instead of doing your own. There is no shortcut. There never was.

I have been trying for months to make nice reels about Mithila painting. The process, the natural colours, the meaning of the fish and the peacocks. Good lighting, proper background, all arranged. My son helps me with the editing. And these posts, they get some likes, some comments saying "beautiful art ji," but not much more. Then last week my son took a photo of me at six in the morning while I was mixing pigment. I had not even bathed. Old kurta, hands stained with lampblack. The photo is not good, blurry, bad angle. I told him delete it. He said no, let me post. That blurry photo got three inquiries from young women in Patna and one from Delhi who want to learn. They said it looked "real." One said she could see I was actually doing the work, not performing. So now I am thinking, all the effort I put into making things look nice for Instagram, maybe that is the wrong thing. Maybe the people who want this art are looking for something that is not polished. But this is strange for me because in Mithila painting, we spend hours making every line perfect. The whole point is precision. But online, they want the opposite. I am not sure what to do with this information. Keep posting the blurry morning photos or go back to the proper videos? Both feel wrong in different ways.

Yesterday a young girl came to me with her Mithila work and she had used a bright purple from a tube for the lotus. She was so proud, and the drawing was good, her lines were clean. But I had to tell her no, this is not our colour. She looked at me like I had scolded her for nothing. I tried to explain. In our tradition, we do not have purple. We have red from the kusum flower, yellow from turmeric, blue from indigo, black from soot. The lotus is red or pink or sometimes white, but not this purple. She said but it looks nice, and she was right, it did look nice. But it is not Mithila. This is the thing that troubles me these days. I am not against new things. When I was young I also wanted to try new colours. But the old way, it has a reason. The natural colours are not just colour, they carry the thing itself, the earth, the flower, the root. When you use a purple from a tube, you lose that connection. The painting becomes decoration only, not ritual. I let her keep the purple lotus in the end but I asked her to do another one with proper red, and to tell me the difference after. She is young, maybe twelve. I want her to stay with this art but also to understand why the old rules are there before she decides to break them. Sometimes I feel like a strict grandfather when I say these things. But this is our heritage, not just any painting.

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.🙏

Found a stack of them last night while reorganizing the studio. Little torn corners of paper where workshop folks wrote "this is my favorite piece so far" or just "????" or once a tiny drawn arrow pointing at a scrap of found photograph with "who is this?" in pencil. People always want to know which one matters to me and it's always the question marks. "????" means they actually stopped. The compliments slide off, but a real question stays in you for weeks. I keep them in a shoebox on the shelf next to the charcoal dust. Not sure why. It's not sentimental exactly, or maybe it is. They're the closest thing I have to a studio journal that isn't about me.

a girl in my studio's open session last night asked me to take a look at her piece. big abstract thing, mostly palette knife, lots of texture. i actually liked the bones of it. told her the composition was fighting itself in the lower left quadrant, too much heavy color pulling the eye down and nothing anchoring the top right to balance it. suggested she either pull some of that weight up or knock the bottom back with a glaze. she goes "i disagree, i think the tension is the point." okay. sure. then why'd you ask? i don't mind someone having a vision. i mind someone asking for help and then treating it like a debate. like i'm not trying to boss you around, i'm just telling you what my eye does when it lands on your canvas. you can take it or leave it, but don't make me defend my own visual cortex lol. i told her "fair enough, it's your painting" and walked off. felt rude but also i'm not gonna stand there and argue about why i see what i see. anyway this happens more than i'd expect and i'm curious how other people handle it. i used to dig in and try to explain myself but lately i just shrug and let them figure it out. saves my energy.

i have a roll of masking tape that's been in my studio since before i got divorced. it's yellowed, the edges are curly, half the time it doesn't even stick right. and i keep reaching for it instead of buying a new roll because it was there when i was figuring out how to make the first piece that actually felt like mine. i know this is stupid. i know tape is like three dollars. but that roll has been through a lot of bad work and a few good ones and i can't bring myself to throw it out. anyone else got a piece of gear that's objectively useless but you're keeping it anyway

I keep a small notebook where I log every pigment I've ever bought: the manufacturer, the series number, the lightfastness rating, the date I first mixed it, and a brush swipe of the color once it's dried. Forty-seven pages now, and this afternoon I counted. I have eleven different blues. That's not a confession of extravagance. Eleven blues each do a genuinely different thing, and I can defend every single one of them. But then I flipped to the greens and realized I own six viridian-adjacent tubes that are, if I'm being honest with myself, within a hair of each other on the page. One of them I bought because the shop had it in a display tray and the label was printed in a serif typeface I liked. I teach a class every spring, and I tell my students the first week that you need exactly three yellows, two reds, and two blues, and everything else is laziness or vanity. I believe that, too. It's just that I am apparently a very good student and a very poor practitioner of my own advice. The serif typeface got me.