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There is a plywood crate in the corner of my current space. It has followed me across three studios and one divorce. Inside: every exhibition catalogue from 1989 to about 1997, the years I was showing regularly. Nobody will ever look at them again. There is no archive interested. But I cannot throw them out because somewhere in there is the proof that I was doing something, and I know how stupid that sounds. The younger ones don't have this. They have hard drives and cloud storage and nothing exists physically anymore. I'm not sure which is worse, a crate of dead paper or a folder nobody will ever open. I told myself last week: the next time I move, the crate goes. But the studio got flooded in spring and my first thought was the crate, before the drawings. So I am not moving anywhere, and the crate stays, and I am fine with being this predictable.

did a 3x4 ft abstract commission last month for $300. flat, took me 9 hours total including two rounds of revisions because the client wanted "more movement" which means "make my living room look expensive" and i did it because i always do it. $300 divided by 9 is $33 an hour, which sounds fine right up until you subtract the canvas, the paint, and my studio share. studio is $420 a month. i work maybe 40 hours in there if i'm being generous with myself. so that's about $10.50 an hour of studio time baked into every hour i stand in that room. net it's closer to $11/hr. less than i made doing logos for a crypto startup in 2021 and i hated that guy. the actual problem isn't the number, it's that i quoted it in 4 seconds over text like i was ordering a sandwich. i have a whole spreadsheet now. that's the humiliating part, the spreadsheet.

I've had this thing leaning against the studio wall for close to a year. Torn paper over an old photo of a stairwell, charcoal, a wash that went muddy and I kept anyway. Never hung it because hanging it felt like deciding it was done, and it isn't, it's just... not going to get better. Anyway I hung it in the hallway. Where I have to walk past it about twenty times a day. Not for anyone else, there's nobody to see it there. And it's different in there. The light comes in low off the landing around four and the torn edges stop reading as torn. Whole thing goes soft, like the stairwell is breathing. A year against the wall and I only actually looked at it because I moved it four feet. Feels a bit stupid to call that a win. But I've made peace with the muddy part now, which I couldn't do in the studio. The studio is where I fix things. The hallway is where I just live with them. Anyone else have a spot in their place that does this? Or am I just going to end up hanging everything in the hallway.

Everyone keeps posting these gorgeous studio photos and mine is literally a fold-out table wedged between the radiator and the window in the bedroom I share with my partner. The window I keep painting is the one right above the table. I have a box fan that sounds like a small plane taking off and honestly I've learned to hear it as white noise now, there's no going back. But here's the thing, I just finished the biggest commission I've ever had on that janky table and it went out today and I'm so proud of it I could cry a little. Eight months ago I was doing this on my lunch breaks at the café. Now I have a folding table that's mine all day. I keep catching myself staring at it like it's a whole room. I know someday I'll have a real studio with good light and a sink and I'll look back and miss this cramped little corner. It's got the paint flecks on the wall from when I flick my brush too hard and a cup of dirty water that's been sitting there for three days that I keep meaning to change. It's gross. It's perfect. What's your setup right now? Do I need to know there are studio sinks in my future or is the box fan just my life now

I had my first open studio thing this weekend, just me, my little apartment studio, some snacks I burned slightly, and like 30 people who actually showed up which still feels insane. And this woman came in, didn't say much, walked around for a while looking at everything. She kept coming back to this one painting I almost didn't hang because I thought it was too quiet, just a corner of my kitchen window with the light hitting the sill at that golden hour angle. I'd painted it like six times trying to catch it right. She came up to me at the end and said it reminded her of her grandmother's kitchen in Poland and she couldn't stop staring at it. And then she bought it. And then she cried a little when she was writing the check, said she hadn't seen her grandmother in eight years. I didn't know what to do with that honestly. I just stood there holding the cash like a complete idiot. My partner had to nudge me to say thank you properly haha. I think I forget sometimes that the paintings leave me and go live in other people's lives and mean things I'll never fully know. That's kind of terrifying and lovely at the same time. Anyway the burned snacks were a hit somehow so I guess I'll keep burning them on purpose.

I have this shallow drawer in my flat-file that's just chaos. Scraps of paper too small to use, edges I trimmed off, bits of envelopes, a receipt from an exhibition in Copenhagen three years ago, one single glove. Everything else in the studio is ruthlessly ordered, papers sorted by colour and weight, tools in their places. But that drawer is a mess and I can't bring myself to clean it. I think it's because if I sorted it, all those tiny bits would stop being potential and just become trash. As long as they're in the drawer they might still be something. I know that's not rational. But I don't think the studio needs to be rational everywhere.

Nine pulls. That's what it took this week and I want to say that out loud because I've been showing people the print for two months and letting them think it came off the block like that. It's a hare, big one, crouched in dead winter rushes, and the whole thing lives or dies on one tiny wedge of white left in the eye. Cut it a hair too wide and the animal looks thick. Too narrow and it's a rabbit that's seen a ghost. I'd carved it, proofed it, gone back in with the chisel, proofed again, and on the eighth go I knew I'd taken too much off and there was no putting it back. Linocut doesn't do second chances. You can't weld the stuff back on, whatever your man on YouTube says. So I sat with the block for a day and a half doing nothing, which for me is the hardest part of the whole trade. Kids in and out of the studio, small fella asked why the hare had no eyes yet, told him it was thinking about it. Went for a walk in the rain at Blackrock and came home with the answer, which is nearly always the case and I never learn it. Cut the rushes in deeper instead, so the eye sits in shadow. Gave it the look. Ninth pull off the press and there it was, the one I'd been chasing since November, and I just sat down on the floor of the studio with the paper still in my hand like an eejit. Not a big whooping moment. Just quiet. The dog came over and sat on my foot. Anyway it's hanging on the wall now drying and I can't stop going in to look at it. Twelve in the edition. If you're at the market Saturday I'll have them there, and no, I'm not telling you which pull is which. The bit I keep turning over is that the eighth one wasn't wasted. If I hadn't ruined it I'd never have gone looking for the answer. But I'm not going to pretend I was grand about it at the time, because I wasn't, I was a right grumpy article for two days and my wife will confirm it.

People always ask to see the studio like it's this beautiful light-filled workshop. It's a corner of my flat in Ruzafa, 4 square meters if I'm generous, and my little kiln is wedged on a table next to the tostadora because it's the only circuit in the piso that won't trip. So when I fire, the whole flat smells like hot dust and I can't make toast for 8 hours. My abuela came over Sunday, looked at everything, and asked if the kiln was "a new appliance for the family." I said sí, the most expensive one. What I actually like about it: I can't spread out. So I build small. Small means I try more things, and when one dies in the firing I'm sad for maybe ten minutes then I'm already building the next. Last week I lost two faces to a glaze that came out like wet cement. But the third one, the mouth cracked open in a way I could never plan. That one's on the shelf looking at me. Anyway. Curious how much space everyone else actually has, because I keep seeing these huge studios online and I need to know if I'm the only one firing next to the breakfast

My studio is an old factory space and the heating is a joke, so there is a radiator in the corner that clicks and knocks in a rhythm I have come to know exactly. When it starts up around nine it means the custodian has switched the boiler on. When it goes quiet mid-afternoon, he has switched it off again. I never look at the clock anymore. I know where I am in the day by the radiator. Today it went quiet at fourteen-thirty and I thought, fine, I will keep working in the cold because I was at a place in a canvas I did not want to leave. Two hours later my hands were stiff and the paint was dragging wrong and I finally admitted the heating was not coming back. The custodian is on holiday, probably. Somebody told me this and I did not listen. I keep a thick wool jumper in the studio for exactly this. It has oil on the left sleeve from maybe three years ago, a smear of burnt sienna that will not wash out. I put it on and the canvas and I agreed on a different temperature. It is a strange thing how cold changes how oil behaves, the resistance of it, the drag. There is a kind of honesty to working like that. Then my wife called and asked why I sounded like I was talking through a scarf. The light went out of the day at four. I scraped the canvas down and left it to wait for tomorrow. Some days are like that, you build a layer and you take it off again and the day is not wasted because you learned the colour needed to come from somewhere else.

My daughter came in today, sniffed the air, and said it smells like old salami in here. She's not wrong. Linseed oil, turpentine, a week-old coffee, the particular smell of a rag you meant to throw out on Tuesday. It's not salami exactly but I understand the comparison. Thing is, I've started to associate that smell with the good hours. The quiet ones after dinner when nobody needs anything and I can just push paint around. When I was younger I wanted the studio to smell like nothing, like a gallery. Now I think a studio that smells like nothing is a room that doesn't get used. What does the air in your workspace say about you? Mine apparently says cured meat and turpentine, and honestly I'm fine with it.

Started a new still life tonight after the kids finally went to bed. Got all my supplies out on the kitchen table, got my palette set up, got maybe 20 minutes into blocking in the background and realized I forgot to pack my son's lunch for tomorrow. So I had to stop, wipe my hands, make a sandwich, put the grapes in the little container he'll complain about anyway. Came back and the paint on my palette was already starting to skin over. I love painting in the cracks of the day but man, I dream about having a space I can just leave a mess and come back to. Even a corner. Just one corner where a half-finished canvas isn't in danger of getting ketchup on it. Anyone else making it work in a non-studio studio? How do you handle the constant setup/teardown without losing momentum?

Honestly the amount of my "studio practice" that is just me physically relocating my entire setup every 45 minutes because the light moved is kind of embarrassing. I have a desk. I have a window. But the window faces east so by noon I'm basically working in shadow and I refuse to turn on a lamp because it changes everything about how I see the washes. So I just pick up my block, my brush jar, my palette and I chase the sun across the apartment like a little lizard. My partner keeps finding random wet paintings on the kitchen table and the bathroom counter and once on the floor by the back door. I have a perfectly good studio corner I am simply not using because the light is wrong and I will die on this hill.

okay this is such a ridiculous thing but i literally cannot start working if the room is above like 72 degrees. my watercolor dries too fast on the page and i get this panicky feeling like i'm racing the clock instead of actually painting. i have a little thermometer on my shelf that i glance at probably twenty times a day and if it's too warm i just sit there grumpy waiting for the air to shift. my partner thinks i'm insane because i'll open the window in december. like sorry i know it's 40 degrees out but my WASHES need this. it's funny because when i was in school i painted in this unventilated basement studio that was basically a sauna in spring and i convinced myself i just had to adapt. but now i'm like... no. i can just make the room the temperature i need. that's allowed. it's still a weird shock to realize i get to decide these things. anyway what's your weird non-negotiable studio condition that sounds insane when you say it out loud

I remember one studio visit early on. The artist's space was… a controlled chaos. Paintings everywhere, materials piled high, but there was a deep focus. It made me re-evaluate my own need for order. What was one studio visit that stuck with you, and why?

Eleven years of pull after pull, and I still have never once gotten a clean first proof of anything. Not once. Anyway. I've been working on a series of five plates where I acid the same drawing at different times, so the "same" image comes out at five different depths. Trying to make a set that only exists as a set, so you can't own the one, you have to take all five or none. Meant to be about the impossibility of the original, obviously. Today I pulled the second state and the line went thin and grey, the way it does when you have lost your bite and you're too far past caring to fix it. Normally it goes in the bin. But I keep a folder now, plain grey, called PROVE BRUTTE, and it is the only place in the studio where I learn anything. Good proofs teach you nothing, they just confirm you already knew what you were doing, which is a very small pleasure. The bad ones tell you what your hand actually does when you are not watching it. The thing is I have never shown anyone that folder. Not a curator, not my partner, not the person I shared a studio with for two years. So the archive of my real thinking sits in a drawer nobody opens, and the tidy resolved things go on the wall. I am aware this is a metaphor I keep building on purpose and refusing to live in. I don't know what to do with it. Some of those proofs are better as objects than the editions were. I think I might frame the ugliest one, the grey one from this morning, and hang it in the good room.

There's a crack in my studio wall that runs diagonal, from the top corner down toward the window. I've been staring at it for three weeks now. I keep catching myself mid-paint, brush loaded, just tracking that line like it's the most interesting thing in the room. Today I finally understood why. It's the same shape as the vein in someone's forearm I haven't been able to stop drawing. So I've been wrestling with a figure all week and the wall was showing me the answer the whole time. I'm an idiot sometimes. Anyway I traced the crack onto the canvas in charcoal before I lost it. We'll see if it survives. Does anyone else's studio object literally tell them what to paint or is it just me living with the ghosts of cheap plaster.

Three years now and I still can't get rid of his jackets. They hang in the studio closet like a weird audience. Sometimes I reach for one when I'm cold and forget it's not mine. The sleeves are too short on me, which should remind me it's his, but it doesn't. It just feels like a sweater that shrank. I've cut up so much of his other stuff for pieces. The flannel went into a collage last spring. His old T-shirts became rags and I caught myself feeling guilty about it, which is stupid, that's what they're for. But the jackets stay. I don't know what that's about. Maybe I just like having them there. They're ugly. That brown corduroy one is genuinely terrible. Anyway. The studio's a mess today, paint everywhere, and the jackets are the only clean thing in the room.

My husband came in to bring me coffee and asked, very politely, why there is a teaspoon sitting in a jar of turpentine on my shelf. I told him it's for measuring cobalt drier and he just nodded and backed out slowly. The man has lived with me for nineteen years and still flinches at my materials. It's a good teaspoon though. Silver, from my grandmother. The handle is bent from decades of stirring. I use it for nothing else now, it would feel wrong. I think non-painters imagine we have these pristine studios, everything in its place, the way it looks in magazines. Mine smells like linseed oil and old coffee, there is dust on every surface that isn't the canvas, and the palette knife I love most lives in a jam jar with the brushes I'm too sentimental to throw away. It's all held together by habit and stubbornness. What's the most ridiculous studio object you can't part with? I suspect I'm not alone in the spoon.

I spent yesterday afternoon reorganizing the flat files, moving the drying rack, finally putting the riso where I can actually reach it without climbing over a chair. Everything has a place now. It's beautiful. I walked in this morning and sat down and couldn't do a thing. It's not just the disruption. It's that the chaos was doing something for me, the mess had a logic, piles I'd reach for without thinking, everything I needed within arm's reach even if it looked like a disaster to anyone else. Now I have to learn where I live again. I keep opening the wrong drawer. Maybe there's something here about how the friction of a space is part of how we think in it. The stumble, the wrong drawer, the thing you knock over, that's also material. A too-efficient studio is a studio that doesn't talk back. Or maybe I just need a week to break it in again. But I'm annoyed at myself for fixing something that wasn't broken.

A woman came by the studio this afternoon to look at a small panel I did in March. Copper pot, two pears, the corner of a linen cloth. Nothing ambitious, I painted it in two sittings and mostly to work out a problem with the shadow side of the pot. She stood in front of it a long time. Then she said it was her grandmother's kitchen and her eyes went. I did not know what to do with my hands, so I made tea badly and we sat on the two good chairs with the painting between us on the easel. She bought it. That is not really the win. The win is that for about ten minutes I stopped calculating: whether the price was right, whether the gallery would have wanted it, whether a small panel even counts as a serious painting. She was looking at the thing itself. That is what I have been chasing for twenty-five years and I forget it constantly, sometimes for months at a time. Anyway the wall where it hung is empty now and I keep glancing at the nail.