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swept the studio today for the first time in weeks and honestly it's a documentary. there's a dried puddle of matte medium where I tried to decoupage something at 11pm and gave up. a pile of charcoal dust that only goes in one spot because I keep sharpening over the same corner like an animal. and one single screw that I have no memory of ever dropping but it's been there so long it's rusted into the wood. the floor is basically archaeology. you could date my bad moods by the paint splatters. thick and muddy = tuesday. thin and watery = I was crying or hungover, hard to tell. anyway the screw is still there. I put a pencil next to it. maybe I'll deal with it eventually. probably not.

the palette is one of those cheap grey plastic ones from the art store, the big rectangle with the thumb hole. i've been using it so long that the actual mixing surface is a mound now, old ultramarine and burnt sienna and this orange i've been chasing for two years sitting under everything like sediment. i know a clean palette is "correct." i know the colors get muddy. i've been told. but every time i go to soak it or scrape it down i just... don't. part of it is laziness, obviously. part of it is that the dried layer is basically a color swatch of every decision i've made in that studio, and scraping it off feels like throwing out notes. anyway it's 11pm and i'm sitting here telling myself i'll clean it sunday. i won't.

People keep posting clean studio shots and I'm over here with a self-healing mat that stopped healing somewhere around 2019. The cuts are so deep now the blade catches in the old grooves and drags. I know it's time to replace it. I've known for a year. Instead I just rotate the paper 90 degrees and cut around the damage, which is ridiculous because the whole point of the mat was that I didn't have to think about it. There's something almost archaeological about it though. I can trace the exact week I was fighting with a series, the parallel scoring marks where I kept re-cutting the same line because I couldn't get it straight, the angry single gouge from the one time I pushed too hard on a wet day. My practice is supposed to be slow and careful and the mat says otherwise. I'll buy a new one next week. I won't throw this one out though. I'll keep it behind the bench and use it for the messy jobs, the ones where precision doesn't matter. Which means in six months the new mat will be pristine and this one will have absorbed every mistake. Honestly that feels like a fair division of labour.

Moved my desk out to the front verandah last week because the bedroom studio was hitting me with four walls and no air. Best decision in months. The auntie next door has now asked three times if my AC is broken, and the dog from two houses down comes and sits at the gate watching me paint like he's critiquing my composition. The light out here is genuinely different. I keep catching myself sketching the same old house across the street that I've painted maybe six times already, but at this hour the shadow falls completely differently and I can't help it. Downside is every passerby thinks you're available for conversation. Today the plumber who was fixing the neighbour's tap spent ten minutes giving me unsolicited advice on mixing skin tones. He wasn't wrong though. That's the embarrassing part. 🙂

The little flat chisel I apprenticed under old man Kowalski with finally cracked this morning. Thirty-eight years I've had that thing. Ground it down so many times the handle was about two inches long and wrapped in electrical tape I'd replaced maybe a dozen times. First tool I ever bought with my own money. Fifty cents at a flea market in 1982, and I remember thinking I was being robbed. I stood there for a while not knowing what to do with myself. That sounds soft. But it was the only thing in the studio I didn't have to think about. Pick it up, it does what you need. No decisions. I know it's just a tool. I've got a drawer full of better ones. But I spent the morning looking at the break instead of starting the piece I'd planned, and that's not like me. Boxed up the two pieces. Going to bury it out back with the other ones I've worn past saving. Give it a little ceremony nobody's going to see. Then I'll pull a new one off the shelf and get on with it. Don't know why I'm writing this on here. Maybe so somebody else who's got a tool with too much history in it knows it's normal to feel stupid about it when it goes.

The gallery in Düsseldorf wants a short process video for the newsletter. Fifteen seconds, vertical, something "authentic." I said yes before I thought about what fifteen seconds of my actual working day looks like. It is standing in front of a canvas the size of a door, doing nothing, for about an hour. Then a small adjustment with a palette knife. Then more nothing. The interesting part of my work is the part where I decide not to touch it, and you cannot film a decision not to act. So now I am supposed to stage a version of my own studio for a phone camera. Squeeze out paint I am not going to use yet. Look thoughtfully at something. It feels like being asked to perform a caricature of myself, and the fee for the show is good enough that I will probably do it. That is the part that sits badly with me. Not them asking. Me agreeing. My wife says just film your hands and let them loop it. She is usually right about these things, which is annoying.

ok so this was not a design decision. my tabla de amasar, the board I've wedged on since the course, finally split down the middle last month. it was pine, my uncle made it, I'd oiled it maybe twice in three years like an idiot. so it's gone. and I have not replaced it. I've been sitting on the floor of the studio with the clay between my feet and honestly? better. I feel the whole piece through my legs now, I catch a wobble in the wall before it becomes a problem. my back hates me by hour three but the vessels are coming out straighter in the foot and weirder in the belly, which is exactly the trade I wanted. everyone who comes in tells me to go buy a new table. my madre has offered me money for one twice. I keep saying vale, vale. tell me I'm not the only one who's given up furniture for a reason this dumb.

I've had them sitting on the studio floor since I moved in here. Actually I had them five years before that, in a box, then on a shelf, then on the floor because putting them on a shelf felt like making a decision about them. The sole on the right one is split almost the whole way through. He wore them like that for two years, wouldn't replace them, kept saying he'd get to it. So the piece is mostly about that split. I stitched it. That's it, that's the whole thing, I stitched the sole back together with linen thread and mounted the pair on a panel with some of the paper from the box of his stuff I still can't get through. What got me is I kept trying to make it more than it was. For about a year I kept adding. Charcoal, wash, layering paper over the toes, I don't know what I thought I was doing. Somewhere around month eleven I scraped all of it off and just left the boots and the thread and the one sheet of paper behind them. It looks almost empty now. Empty enough that I wasn't sure it was a piece at all until I saw it from across the room this morning with the light coming in the wrong way. Anyway. It's done and it's hanging in the hallway because I don't have wall space and I didn't want to put it in the closet with the rest. Fourteen months. I'm not sure if that's slow or if that's just what this one cost.

Not a metaphor. I mean actually glued. Cyanoacrylate, which is of course the one that sets before you can blink. Thumb, index finger, and a good solid square of tabletop bonded together like we were meant to be. I sat there for maybe forty seconds just looking at it. Not panicking. Just thinking, alright, this is where I am now. This is the situation. I have committed to this table in a way I hadn't planned. The acetone was three meters away in the other room. I could have rocked and reached. Instead I just sat. Sometimes you make a decision and the decision is: wait. Eventually I peeled myself off. Left a good bit of skin behind. The table doesn't seem to mind. I mention this only because so much of the talk about studio practice is about discipline and flow states and intention. And sometimes it's just, you glue yourself to your own table and you sit there like an idiot for a minute because that's what the moment requires.

I've been going back and forth for years on this and it's ridiculous. For the figure work I do, the flesh tones especially, I want paint that stays where I put it and doesn't go dead when it dries. Michael Harding makes the most beautiful Naples yellow I've ever used, the texture is like butter straight from the tube. But I keep ordering Gamblin for the studio because it's half the price and honestly the consistency is more reliable batch to batch. Today I had both open on the table. Squinting at two identical piles of titanium white like a lunatic. My husband came in and said "just pick one, Camille." He doesn't understand this is not a practical decision, it's a spiritual one. What do you use and why. But don't tell me Williamsburg unless you want me to argue with you.

Not because I forgot. Because I know what it looks like and I don't want to see it yet. A bite that runs too long goes under the wax and comes out with that soft grey rot around the lines, and you can't undo it, you can only pretend it was intentional or start again. So the plate sits in the tray, and I keep working on the screenprint edition instead, which is going fine, which is the problem. I keep choosing the thing that is going fine. I do this every time the work turns. I get to the part where the idea has to become a specific decision and I suddenly have a very urgent need to re-stretch a screen or clean the ink off the glass. My studio is spotless right now. That is never a good sign. The annoying part is I know the answer. It's a 40 second job, gloves, tongs, rinse, look. And I know the plate is probably fine, probably better than fine, because the last three I was scared of turned out to be the ones that held. Fear and judgement are not the same instrument and I keep using one for the other. Anyway. Tray is still there. Writing this instead of looking, which is a third thing I am doing instead of looking.

There's a canvas that sat face to the wall in my studio for six months. I'd scraped too much back on the right side, the mass went wrong, and I decided the whole thing was dead weight. Left it leaning there as a reminder of a bad decision or something. Punishment, maybe. Then my wife hung it on a bare wall in the hallway just to see it in daylight, and I saw it properly for the first time. The scrape that looked like a failure when I made it was the best part. It had a quietness the other work doesn't have, because I wasn't trying to please anyone while I made it. I was just angry and letting the palette knife do the thinking. Retouched the edge, signed it, sent photos to the gallery. Collector in Berlin bought it four days later for more than my careful, successful pieces move for. The ones you fight with, the ones you nearly destroy. That's where the honest work lives. I keep having to learn it again.

The flat file has a drawer I don't open when people visit. Sixty, maybe seventy proofs from the last three years, every one of them a state I decided was wrong. Wrong pressure on the roller, wrong registration, paper too wet, ink too thin, the plate bitten unevenly because I left it too long in the ferric. In Berlin I had a studio mate who binned everything immediately. Said it was hygiene. I understand the logic and I can't do it. A bad proof is still a document of a decision. It tells me exactly where the plate was on that day, which is information I lose the moment I clean up and start again properly. Also I have noticed that almost everything I now like started as something I called a failure. The blurred edges in the last series, the ones people ask about, were registration mistakes I stopped correcting out of laziness one afternoon. Then they became the whole point of the work. Which is a slightly embarrassing way to arrive at a method. The problem is I can't make an argument for keeping them that isn't also an argument for never finishing anything. At some point the drawer is just a place where I avoid the decision. Anyone else keeping the bad ones, or am I the only one with a drawer of evidence against myself.

I did it this morning. Third time I've repainted this interior, same corner of my studio, same grey November light through the window, and it just would not settle. The drawing was off, the values were muddy, I kept overmixing and killing the colour. So I took the palette knife and scraped the whole thing back to a thin brown smear on the canvas. There's this moment after you scrape. The painting's gone, but the canvas has a history now, ghosts of all the wrong decisions. The surface is smoother, there's a stain to work into instead of a white void. And suddenly I can see what was wrong the whole time. The floor plane was tilted. Of course. I don't know if other painters feel this, but scraping down is almost better than a good day of painting. It's a reset without being a blank slate. You keep the mistakes as a foundation. Very few things in life work like that.

Okay so I've been trying to figure out why I'm exhausted at the end of the day but somehow only have like one small painting to show for it. So I started actually timing myself. Set a little timer on my phone every time I sat down, every time I walked away. The result is honestly embarrassing. Over a four hour stretch today I painted for maybe 90 minutes. The rest was: staring at the reference photo, rearranging my brushes, looking at the same wash dry, texting my mom twice, going to get water and then just standing in the kitchen for a while. The actual sitting and committing part is way shorter than I thought it was. The weird thing is the paint time is so much better quality. When I actually clock in, I make decisions so much faster. But the gap between "okay I'm starting" and actually putting paint down is where all the energy goes. My new thing this week is a 25 minute timer, no phone in the room, and I don't get up until it dings. Even if I just sit there. Tried it today and got a whole sketch done in the first two rounds. Anyone else have no idea how much of their studio time is actually fear management? Because I think I'm maybe 40% painter and 60% pacing around thinking about painting.

Twelve volumes, 40 kronor at a secondhand place in Majorna. The paper is perfect, slightly foxed, good weight, exactly what I use. That was the whole point of buying it. It's been on the studio floor for nine days. I've opened maybe four pages. There's a plate in volume seven of Nordic birds, hand colored, someone has written a name in the margin in pencil, I think a child. I keep not cutting it. The thing is I know how this ends. Either it sits there until it's furniture, or I cut it and it turns into three good pieces and a lot of scraps. Both are fine. I just don't like that I've made it into a decision. Usually the paper is just paper. Might start with volume one, the A's. Nobody's sentimental about the A's.

Six years ago I did a course at the Fondation where we had to do a copy of a Dutch still life using period grounds. I used zinc white in the underpainting because the leader swore by it, and I remember thinking the surface looked beautiful, milky, soft. I've kept that painting hanging in my studio ever since. I looked at it this morning and the whole thing has gone chalky. Collagen-like cracks running through the greys, the whites turned to plaster. The craquelure is everywhere, and the softness I admired was the zinc pulling the paint film apart slowly, year after year. It's not drying, it's delaminating. The thing that gets me is I knew better. I teach this. I tell students never to use zinc in anything but the final touches, if at all, because it stays plastic forever and never forms a decent film. And I kept a bad decision alive for six years on my own wall because it had looked convincing at the start. I'm going to scrape it down and do it again on a good lead white ground. Actually I feel lighter about it. It was a good lesson to have hanging in front of me all this time, failing in slow motion.

Pulled it out of a demolition on Průmyslová two weeks ago. The site foreman let me take it for free, which should tell you something about rebar's market value. Four meters short of forty, actually, if I'm honest, I measured this morning with the tape I keep hooked on the coffee grinder. The problem is I've walked past it nine times a day for two weeks now and it has stopped being material. It's just the thing that's there. I catch myself resting a hand on it when I'm thinking. Yesterday I hung my jacket on it. That's the moment it starts to become architecture instead of raw stock, and I'm not sure that's a decision I made or one the wall made for me. I know the move is to cut it. The second you cut it, it's yours again, it's stock, it's a decision. But the cutting is also the end of the possibility. Once it's bent into the shape it's going to be bent into, it's an object and I've lost the version where it was the whole room. Anyway. Coffee number three. The rebar stays. For now.

A collector bought one of my prints at the studio open day, then emailed asking if I'd sign it "individually" because "an edition of 50 feels a bit mass produced." I had to explain that the edition IS the work. The number is not a compromise, it is the point. Fifty prints that are one image, one decision, repeated until they stop being copies and become something else. He wrote back, "Oh, so it's like a limited edition." Yes. That is exactly what it is. That was always the whole thing. I spent ten minutes afterward staring at my own screenprint like I had to defend it from its own buyer. Maybe I should start answering the question with "would you say that to a writer about their print run?" I don't know why the edition makes people so uncomfortable. As if the multiple is somehow less honest than a unique object. As if there is a true original hiding somewhere and the rest of us are just photocopying. Anyway. He bought it. I think he still believes he got a discount version of a real artwork. Let him.

Someone at an open studio yesterday looked at a big interior I've been working on for two months and said, with real admiration, "wow, it looks just like a photograph." I smiled and thanked her because what else do you do. But inside I was thinking, I spent two months fighting the light in that room, scraping back a passage three times because the edge was too hard, because a photograph would never have that softness in the shadow side. I am not trying to make a photograph. If I wanted a photograph I would take one in three seconds. The funny thing is people think it's the highest praise. It tells me they don't see anything I'm actually doing. The paint, the color temperature shifting across a form, the decisions. It reduces it to likeness, which is the least interesting thing about a painting. I know I should be grateful people look at all. Some days I am. Yesterday I was not.