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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.

I've had a student since October, a woman in her fifties who spent her whole life in accounting and paints like someone who has never been told a thing is good enough. She had the hardest time with the first lay-in. Everything she did, she wanted to finish immediately, blend it smooth, make it look like a photograph of a thing. I kept telling her: ugly now, beautiful later. She did not believe me, which is healthy, honestly. Tuesday she brought in a cast study, a plaster foot, and the grisaille was correct. Not pretty. Correct. Values sitting in the right place, the halftone where it belongs, the edges soft only where the light actually turns. She was almost apologetic about it, said it looked "unfinished and dirty." I told her that is what an underpainting is supposed to look like, and she went very quiet, and then she said, "oh. So I've been painting the wrong part of the process for forty years." That's the win. Not the foot. The forty years. I'm going to let her glaze it next week and I'm a little nervous, because glazing over a good grisaille is like putting a coat on a child and sending them out the door. If she overworks it I'll be sick. But she earned it.

Small thing but it sat with me all day. One of my students, a girl of nineteen with a good hand and terrible confidence, had spent three weeks fighting a drapery study. Every version was the same version. So this morning I put my No. 4 Isabey in her hand, the one I've had since the atelier, the one I'd probably run back into a burning building for. Told her to draw the folds with paint instead of pencil and stop apologizing to the canvas. She went quiet for about forty minutes. I nearly took it back twice. Then she did the thing, the highlight on the crest of the fold, one stroke, and it worked. Twenty years ago I'd never have let it out of the studio. Ten years ago I was so sure I'd stopped painting for good that I would have sold it. I don't know what changed exactly. Maybe just that watching someone find it is worth more now than the brush is. Anyway. She's using it again Thursday.

Had a student this week, third year with me, technically very good. Clean edges, correct values, the drawing underneath all correct. And the paintings are dead. Nothing wrong with them. That is the problem. So I made her do an exercise: take a canvas already dry, a study she liked, and scumble dirt over it. Grey, ochre, a scraped-down mess. Then find the painting again in the wreck. She looked at me like I had insulted her mother. Honestly I might have. But by the end of the session she had a shoulder and a bit of wall that were more alive than anything she has painted in a year, because she could not control it anymore, so she had to look. I did the same thing to myself at her age and I hated it. What I think now: technique is what lets you get away with the accident, not what prevents it. You cannot smear your way out of not being able to draw, the drawing has to be there underneath or it is just a mess with a mood, but the drawing alone is a recipe for marble. Anyway she is furious with me and she will come back Thursday. Both things are correct.

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 the girls who comes to my house on Sundays to learn, Sunita, she is maybe seventeen. She has been coming since two years, very quiet, never asking anything, only watching my hand when I draw the line for the fish scales. Her lines were shaky for long, I will not lie. Last month there was a small exhibition at the block office in Madhubani, arranged by the cooperative. She sent two paintings without telling me. I came to know only when the secretary phoned me. Both were sold. One to a teacher from Darbhanga, one to a man who works in the bank there. She came on Sunday and put the money in her mother's hand, and her mother did not say anything for some time. I have seen many paintings go from my own house to the walls of people who will never know whose hands made them. But this is different. It is her own money from her own line work. I told her, now you must be regular in practice, this is only starting. But inside I was thinking of my mother, who taught me in the same way, sitting on the floor with the bamboo stick for the brush. Nothing has changed in that room since long. Only the names are new. She is asking me now whether she can learn to do the kohbar on cloth, not only paper. I said yes but cloth is costly and one mistake cannot be removed. Any of you have experience teaching a young student on cloth? I do not want to discourage her by being too careful also.

A former student's mother asked me to paint her Helleborus niger in flower for a birthday gift. She is a lovely woman, she has been generous with my classes, and I said two hundred and eighty pounds before I had thought about it at all. That is the whole trouble, of course. I said a number to be kind rather than a number to be paid. It arrived in October. I made three drawings before I was satisfied with the arrangement, painted it twice and discarded the first attempt because the greens had gone muddy at the edges, and then spent the better part of nine hours glazing the white petals so they would read as white on white rather than as flat paper. Twenty two hours in total by the time it was mounted and wrapped. I worked it out afterwards, as one does, and it came to less than thirteen pounds an hour, before paper, before paint, before the frame she asked me to recommend. The painting is good. That is the difficult part. She will hang it and it will be correct and quiet and it will not occur to her that it was ever anything other than a favour, because I priced it as one. I have told myself the lesson is simply not to quote in the moment. What I actually think is that I have never once worked out a friends and family price and had it come out fair, and I keep doing it anyway, which suggests the problem is not arithmetic.

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.

Forty minutes into the morning class, a woman who has been painting for eleven months puts down a grey that made me stop mid-sentence. Not a grey from a tube. She mixed it herself, three pigments she had no business combining yet, and it was exactly the colour of the north wall of my studio in November at five in the afternoon. I have been chasing that grey for something like twenty years and mostly failing. The thing that annoyed me, and I mean this sincerely, is that she did not notice. I said something, she shrugged, she said it looked muddy and went back to her shadow side. I spent the rest of the session working on a hand in a portrait commission and thinking about that grey. A good grey is genuinely one of the most difficult things in this whole business. You can teach value, you can teach the drawing, you can teach edges until you are hoarse. You cannot teach someone to arrive at a particular grey on the right day. It happens when it happens. Then she wiped it off the palette at the end of the class with a rag like it was dirty water.

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.