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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Still fuming about this from Saturday. I was at an open studio thing, just working on a portrait of an old woman I'd taken a reference photo of at the market. Her face is all lines and light, it took me maybe six hours to get the softness right in the cheek shadows, pastel is not forgiving if you rush it. This woman comes up, looks at it for maybe three seconds, and goes "oh, so realistic. It looks just like a photo. So where's the art in that then?" I just said "well, the photo is right there" and pointed at my phone. She didn't even look. Just walked off. And I sat there thinking, I spent a year learning how to not make pastel look muddy. I know exactly where every highlight on that face came from. I changed the light source entirely from the reference because the original was too flat. But sure. No art. Just copying, right? I didn't say any of that to her. I just smiled and went back to work. But I keep replaying it. Why do people think realism is just... cheating? Like there's no decision-making involved? Anyway. Just needed to put it somewhere. 😅

Had a woman in the studio last week. She saw a small collage I made from a 1920s Swedish grammar book page and some torn map fragment, and she spent a solid twenty minutes explaining to me that it was about the fragmentation of national identity in post-industrial Scandinavia. I said it was about liking the yellow of the map against the grey of the paper. She looked at me like I'd said something stupid. Maybe I had. But also maybe that piece is just me being picky about two colours that sit well together and leaving most of the page empty because empty feels right. Not everything is a statement. Some things are just a decision about where to stop cutting.

Someone dropped off a first edition at the studio for a repair quote. A real first edition, 1920s, beautiful cloth. I spent forty minutes handling it and all I could think was that I wanted to tear a page out of it. Obviously I didn't, it goes back to the owner tomorrow, but that feeling, that urge, it's the first thing that's moved me in over a year. I've been stuck since last autumn. Every piece I start feels like a decision I can't make. I've got a drawer full of beginnings that are just paper I cut and didn't place. But looking at that book, something shifted. Knowing I couldn't touch it made me want to. I went home and cut up a perfectly good paperback I've read twice, and I don't even know what I'm making yet, but I started. Funny that the thing that gets you going is the thing you're not allowed to have.

i have a drawer in my studio, just a cheap ikea thing, that's full of plates that didn't work. bitten too deep, not deep enough, a drypoint that caught something i didn't mean but also didn't hate enough to keep. i can't throw them out. they're not good, most of them, but they're the only record i have of the thinking that didn't land. i was talking to a painter friend in berlin last week and she said she scrapes everything over, her whole practice is covering. that's the opposite of what i do. i keep the evidence. maybe it's the printmaker in me, this need for the object to survive even when it fails. or maybe i'm just sentimental about my own bad decisions. anyway i pulled one out today from three years ago. a copper plate with a portrait of a woman who doesn't exist. the face is completely fine but the hand is this grotesque claw because i misjudged the acid. i remember being so furious. now i kind of like the claw. it's the most alive part of the image. i don't know if this is a confession or a habit worth defending. but i wonder, what do you keep that you probably shouldn't?