Search

I spent yesterday and most of today on one horse chestnut leaf. Just the leaf, not the tree or any kind of composition, a specimen study. Eleven hours, which is absurd for a single leaf that will go into a reference folder and may never be seen by anyone but me. But I finally got the transition from the main vein to the secondary veins to look the way it should. That subtle flattening of the green as it moves out toward the edge, where the light catches the pubescence. I have been trying and failing to render that particular softness for about two years. It is not a win that will make sense to most people. But I have been struggling with a certain stiffness in my work lately, and this felt like a crack in the wall. One leaf, properly done. I will take it.

I spent three weeks on a 30cm still life of a split melon last month. Three weeks. I was chasing a particular green in the rind, that pale celadon just under the skin, and I couldn't land it. Every session I'd scrape it back and try again. My husband started giving me that look like maybe I needed a walk. Yesterday I walked past it in the studio and realized I don't hate it anymore. It's not perfect. The green still isn't what I was after. But there's something about the light on the cut face that I actually got right, and the seeds have this little accidental life to them that I couldn't plan if I tried. I don't know why I'm telling you this except that painting is mostly failure and I think we should say that out loud more. The three weeks of frustration are invisible in the finished thing but they're what it's made of. And that's fine. That's the work.

It's a single nodding flower on a stem I cut from the garden last Monday. By Tuesday it had started to droop. By Thursday the petals were translucent and the stamens had begun to shed. Today it's practically a study in decay, the sepals are papery and brown at the edges, the stem is soft. I keep painting it anyway. There's a peculiar honesty to painting a specimen as it actually changes, rather than freezing it at its best moment. The color shifts, the structure fails, and you have to decide whether you're documenting the plant or your own attachment to how it looked three days ago. I think I'm doing both. I set up a new page each morning and work from life, not from the previous day's study. It's unsentimental work, or it's meant to be. The flower doesn't know it's declining. It just is what it is.

I was reading the recent posts here about handwritten notes and old-fashioned outreach, and it made me think about something I haven't told many people. Five years ago, I wrote a letter to a gallery owner in Connecticut whose program I had admired for years. Not an email. A letter. On Arches hot press, with a small watercolour study of a trillium I'd painted that spring tucked inside. I told her honestly that I wasn't sure if she was accepting new artists but that I respected what she was doing and wanted to introduce myself properly. She wrote back. She said the letter sat on her desk for three weeks before she called, because she kept looking at the trillium and trying to decide if it was worth the risk of meeting me. She took me on. That gallery remains the steadiest source of my serious sales. Not Instagram. Not my website. A letter. I don't think the lesson is that we should all be sending letters. I think the lesson is that the real connections happen when you do something that costs you something real -- time, skill, the vulnerability of putting a small original painting in an envelope and hoping it lands with the right person. It is harder to ignore than a form submission. I still send a letter occasionally when a connection matters to me. I have never once regretted it. I have regretted the polished emails I overthought and never sent.

This American couple at a café in Vieux Lyon yesterday. The man sees me mixing a small study at my table, just a pear, a bottle, a cloth, nothing ambitious, and he sits down uninvited. Starts telling me about "the real Lyon" you have to find off the main streets. The traboules, the bouchons, the silk history. I've lived here forty-four years. My grandfather worked in the Canuts. But I let him finish because there's a certain comedy to it, and because my painting was going badly and I needed a break from looking at it. Then his wife notices I'm French and asks if I've ever been to Paris. Like it's the natural next stop on the tour.

I brought in a small oil study yesterday, just a lemon on a blue cloth, to get it framed for a show. The woman behind the counter looked at it and said, very helpfully, "You know you could just take a photo and have the colors matched digitally, it's much more accurate than the human eye." "More accurate." To a painting. Of a lemon. I stood there with paint under my nails from a morning glazing session, holding a canvas where I'd spent two hours getting that particular blue right, the one that sits behind the lemon and makes it feel like you could reach out and take it. And she's telling me a printer would do it better. I said something polite in the end because I'm trying to be less of a bitch in public. But I wanted to say: the whole point is that it's my eye. My eye that spent twenty years learning to see. My eye that decides the lemon is a little more yellow-green on this side, that the cloth has a fold that catches the light a different way. That's not an error to be corrected. That's the entire painting. Anyway the frame is fine. But I'm still annoyed.

There's this late Byzantine panel from the Church of the Holy Apostles in Thessaloniki, Christ Pantokrator, standard stuff, and I copied it by hand for a conservation module back in 2004. Six weeks on my knees, matching every tessera, and I got it so close my professor kept it as a teaching example. The joke is that piece ruined me. I can't look at a face in mosaic anymore without measuring the eye spacing against that Pantokrator. Last week I finished a portrait commission, contemporary, abstracted, not even trying to be realistic, and I spent an hour staring at it thinking the left eye is two millimeters too far out. Client won't see it. Nobody will see it. But I know it's there because of a dead Byzantine emperor's face I memorized twenty years ago. Anyone else carry a reference piece in their head like a splinter? Something you studied so hard it rewired your eye permanently.

A gallery I was in conversation with last year asked for exclusive representation of every single piece I produce, including work they would never exhibit or sell, studies, private commissions, teaching demonstration pieces. I told them no, and the conversation ended rather quickly. Has anyone else run into this kind of exclusivity clause? Where do you draw the line? I understand a gallery wanting commitment on what they show, but ownership of everything that leaves your brush seems a step too far to me.

Not as a study, not trying to match anything specific. Just mixing it, scraping it off, mixing again. Different combinations of ivory black and white, a little ultramarine, a touch of raw umber, sometimes a speck of yellow ochre. Seeing how far I could push the temperature before it stopped being grey and became something else entirely. My husband came in to ask about dinner and I think he was a little alarmed. But this is the thing nobody tells you when you start painting, you will spend whole days doing something that looks like nothing, and it's not wasted time. The hand learns things the eye can't explain. What's your useless practice? The thing you do that produces nothing visible but you know matters.

For years I tried to push through that dead hour after lunch, you know, around two, three o'clock where the light is flat and your eyes are heavy and everything you touch looks wrong. I'd stand there squeezing paint, hating it, forcing myself to work on whatever big canvas was on the easel. Stupid. Now I just stop. I pull out a little panel, 20x20, 25x25, something I can finish in an afternoon, and I paint something completely unimportant. A lemon. The corner of the mantel. My daughter's shoe left by the door. No stakes, no ambition, just the physical pleasure of moving paint around. Half the time it's nothing, but sometimes these little studies end up being the best thing I did all week. The big work happens in the morning. The afternoon is for staying loose and not caring.

I spent this morning wrestling with a blank sheet of Arches 300lb cold press. It’s for a series of Helleborus orientalis studies, and honestly, the paper itself feels like an accusation. It’s so… expectant. You can’t just splash about; every mark has to be considered, deliberate. I find myself sketching out the composition in pencil at least three times before I even think about touching a brush. It’s a discipline, of course, and one I value, but some mornings it feels less like a discipline and more like a quiet form of self-sabotage.

okay so there's this window in my apartment that gets this specific soft afternoon light around 3pm and I've been trying to catch it for like... months now. This month alone I've done 14 studies of it. 14. Same window, same view of the neighbor's slightly sad little balcony, different light every time. My partner thinks I've lost it. Maybe I have. But here's the thing – every single time I think I've figured out how to paint that quality of light, the next day it's different and I realize I was wrong. The color temperature shifts, or there's a haze, or the whole thing goes golden for like twenty minutes before it's gone. Watercolor is SO unforgiving about this because you can't just paint over it, you have to get it right while it's wet or you lose it forever. And I keep losing it. My mom called yesterday and asked if I'd sold any of them yet and I was like Mom I can't sell them they're all failures. She didn't get it. But I think there's something in the repetition, you know? Like each one teaches me something the last one couldn't. I'm not chasing a perfect painting, I'm chasing understanding how light actually works. Anyway I laid them all out on the floor last night to compare and honestly it's kind of beautiful seeing them together even if none of them are The One. Might keep going until I run out of paper or winter comes and the light changes completely. Then I guess I'll start over.

I've been struggling with achieving a true, permanent deep red for a series of studies on Papaver somniferum. Cadmium reds, while vibrant, tend to shift towards orange over time, and alizarin crimson isn't entirely lightfast for this kind of archival work. My current approach involves layering a small amount of quinacridone red with a touch of ultramarine blue, glazed over a base of burnt sienna. It’s a painstaking process, but the resulting depth and stability are, I think, worth the effort. Does anyone else have a preferred method for this particular hue?

I had this little study going, just a corner of my desk with the morning light hitting a ceramic bowl, nothing ambitious, and it was genuinely working. The washes were doing exactly what I wanted, the edges were soft where they should be soft, I was so pleased with myself. And then I started "fixing" things. Just tiny little adjustments. A little more shadow here, a little more definition there. Twenty minutes later I had a muddy overworked mess and I just sat there staring at it like why do I do this to myself every single time. Watercolor is so unforgiving about that specific impulse. Oil you can scrape back, acrylic you can paint over, gouache you can reactivate if you're careful. But watercolor just sits there and lets you ruin it and you watch yourself do it in real time. I know the solution is to just stop. Walk away. Start something else. But man, the compulsion to keep noodling is so strong when something is almost there. Almost there feels worse than not even close, somehow. Anyway I started fresh and the second one is fine but not as good as the first one was before I killed it. Just needed to yell into the void about this specific flavor of artist self-sabotage. Does anyone else have a version of this or is it just me and my inability to leave well enough alone

i have a perfectly good easel. i have a drafting table i found on facebook marketplace for $40. and yet for the last three months i've been doing all my small studies on a clipboard i grabbed from the checkout aisle at stop & shop while buying trash bags. it's just... the right amount of friction. i can prop it on my lap, lean it against a stack of books, take it outside, set it down anywhere. there's something about the lack of ceremony that makes starting easier. no adjusting, no standing up, no "ok now i am in the studio doing Art." just grab the clipboard and go. i think i've made more paintings this quarter than the last two combined and i hate admitting it's because of a $6 piece of bent metal and a spring clip. but here we are. what's the dumbest thing in your setup that you're secretly loyal to

It's not even a good corner. There's a radiator, an old chair my daughter doesn't want anymore, a window that faces a wall of the building next door so the light is always indirect and grey. I've done maybe thirty small studies of it, different seasons, different times of day. Nobody would ever hang them. They're not for anything. I think I just need a subject I don't have to perform for. Something that asks nothing of me. When you spend all day trying to make something worthy of being looked at, you start to crave the opposite, a corner of the world you can paint badly and it doesn't matter. My husband thinks I'm avoiding the commission I'm supposed to start. Maybe. But I also think there's something real in these little failures. A kind of intimacy.

I spent years emailing galleries the way you're supposed to, brief, professional, a link to my work, a polite request to be considered. Got nowhere. Then I tried something different: I sent one gallery director a handwritten letter on good paper, with a small original study tucked inside, a lily I'd painted from their city's botanical garden. She called me the same week. I'm not sure I'd recommend that approach to everyone, and it probably only worked because my work is small and botanical and the gesture fit. But it made me wonder what actually cuts through. What's the one email, or approach, that actually got you a reply?

Been wrestling with this same piece since Monday. Big charcoal study of a seated figure, hip tilted, weight on one hand. Could not get the left shoulder to sit right. Kept pushing the value darker thinking that would fix it. Made it worse and worse and worse. Finally stepped back this morning and realized I'd drawn the whole arm wrong at the structural level. The angle was off by maybe ten degrees from the start and everything I did after that was just trying to prop up a mistake instead of undoing it. Erased the whole arm down to the paper. Redid it in like twenty minutes. Now it works. Hate that I spent three days being stubborn when the answer was just admit I was wrong and start over. Love that the drawing is finally saying what I wanted it to say. Both feelings true at once. Anyone else ever fight a piece for days only to realize the fix was way simpler than you were letting it be? Or is that just me and my brilliant stubborn brain 😭

I had a canvas sitting on the easel for six months. A figure study, woman reading by a window, good bones but I'd stalled somewhere in the middle and couldn't look at it anymore. Last week I decided to scrape it and start something else. Mixed up some thinner and started wiping into the still-wet layers. And then I stopped because there was something in what I was destroying. A passage of light on the arm of the chair, a bit of edge I'd actually gotten right without noticing. So I cleaned what I could, let it dry, and now I'm back in it. Sometimes you have to be ready to kill a painting to see what it actually is. Anyone else done this, nearly wrecked something before you finally saw it?

I teach a beginner botanical watercolour class at the local art centre twice a year, and I start every session the same way: I hand everyone a sheet of cheap cellulose paper and tell them to paint a leaf on it. The groaning is predictable. But I want them to feel what bad paper does before they ever touch the good stuff. I want them to experience the buckling, the pilling, the muddy washes that happen when the sizing fails. Because until you've fought a losing battle against a sheet of Canson student-grade, you don't really understand why you're paying for Arches. It's the same reason I still keep a block of that wretched paper in my own studio. Every few months I pull it out and paint a study on it, just to remind myself. It keeps me honest about technique. You can't fudge your way through a wash on paper that won't hold it. You have to be deliberate.